How much memory in your computer?

I have 2.8GHz P4, 160G HD and one gig memory but a 500+MB file still

take a long time to load and to generate thumbnail in PS. Long wait

for every adjustment. How much memory do you recommend?

2 gb

Simple - never enough...

"No one will ever need more than 640 K of memory" :Bill Gates.

 

Seriously, as much as you can afford/squeeze in. How long is a long time? My system takes about 2 minutes and I figure that is OK for 512 MB.

 

Cheers

If the hard disk churns during an adjustment, then the computer is paging out to disk due to insufficient memory. If not, then more memory won't help much.

 

If you wish to improve load times, get a second disk drive and a cheap IDE RAID controller to do RAID-0 such that the file is striped across both disk drives. Your file will load up to twice as fast.

 

To answer your question, I only have 512MB in my home computer however I do not process 500MB files. However a computer I use at work has 32GB of RAM ;) (its a 64-bit Sun 8-way multiprocessor)

If you do add more RAM, make sure the new ram stick/s you add are identical make and MB size to the ones already seated in your ram slots - this is an expensive a lesson I learned the hard way.

I think the conventional rule for decent performance in Photoshop is: your memory should be 3 times the size of the largest image you want to manipulate. Seems to be true.

2Gb, but you need fast drives as well. I have a pair of 10000rpm drives in a Raid 0 array. They work well but you can do better with 15000rpm scsi drives and scsi raid controller, big bucks though.

 

JJ

Photoshop 7/Edit/preferences/Memory and Image Cache-set % of system memory that photoshop can use if you haven't done so.(other versions simular) Creating "scratch disks" may help some functions.

 

My memory maxed at 768mb.

 

Charles

When you are bringing a large file into Photoshop off the hard disk; the transfer rate of the HDA is usually the bottleneck. This is NOT the spec of the IDE, SCSI or SATA interface. This is the internal; often not documented transfer rate the drive has in reading data. Server chaps and hard core sites test drives for their transfer rates versus track position. Some of us worked in the disc drive industry; and use benchmarks; and test alot of drives. For small chunks of data; the cache memory in the HDA will give absurdly high false BS numbers. With a larger chunk; dozens of megabytes the internal transfer rate is the bottleneck. Most HDA's sold today are a UDMA 133 spec. A new 80Gig Maxtor 7200rpm UDMA 133 drive will usually strip data about 55,000 KiloBytes/sec at the ID; and maybe 28,000 at the ID; with a 133 UDMA controller. Atn older same 133 class; same 7200 rpm Maxtor 20gig here will only strip data about 25k to 15 k at the OD and ID. Here the box says 133UDMA; but the transfer rate is half; because the heads and read-write chain are slower. Sometimes the windows settup doesnt have the correct DMA drivers for oddball disk controllers; and everything works; but in a dumb; slow; crippled read/write speed. <BR><BR>With yoiur settup; you doint have enough ram for the file you are working with. Get 2 gigs for a 500 meg file. Scratch disks are still slow as dirt; when compared to even ram from 10 years ago. <BR><BR>with our win2000 and XP boxes; 2gig is all the ram PS will really use. With our older win98se boxes; 512 megs is all PS really ever uses.<BR><BR>

At one time; these old PS boxes were state of the art. 75Mhz Pentium with 80 megs of ram; 90Mhz with 128 megs of ram; 200mhz PPro with 512meg ram; and USB! in 1996! One old server has a dual 200Mhz PPRO with 1gig of ram. At one place I worked we paid 10 grand for a beta 486 CPU; brefore public release. A later 486 was filled with 128megs of ram; BUT 64 megs is all it would cache properly; so the ram was dropped to 64 megs. Some Pentiums were like this too. 16Megs was about 600 bucks; a buddy once spent 1 grand for 16 megs; just for photoshop. <BR><BR>Several of our P4's have 2 gigs of ram; to fool with 300 to 700meg files. On ours; sevral will hold 3 gigs; but adding ANY above 2 gigs does nothing in reducing batch and retouching times. You might as well glue 100 dollar bills on the computer; instead of the useless ram above 2 gigs. <BR><BR>

Basically you want the memory to be 4 or 5 times the files size you are working on. This has not changed since photoshop first came out. Be carefull; layers add to the effective file size. History files add to the bog factor.

<i> How much memory in your computer? </i><p>

 

84 GB. Yes, that is RAM, not disk. And 18 processors. Unfortunately I don't have Photoshop, so this machine gets used for other stuff :-)

I have 2.5 Gig in a G5. Makes a really big difference with Photoshop.

 

jmp

512Mb, and a 300Mb image is slow going in Photoshop CS. Next year I will be doing a wholesale upgrade of the computer - 64 bit processor and a gig of RAM (hopefully a 19 inch LCD monitor).

I have Win98SE, 1 GB RAM, and Athlon XP 2600+ processor on a 4 year old motherboard; main hard disk is a reasonably new Western Digital UDMA133 7200 rpm, 120 GB (and I'm down to about 25 GB free on the largest partition) with FAT32; it's defragmented weekly. I can load a 330 MB uncompressed TIFF file into GIMP or PS5LE in around 30 seconds, and updates take up to a minute. I've been told my system can't use more than 512 MB RAM, but I saw a definite performance improvement in some applications when I upgraded the RAM from 512 to 1 GB, and Windows correctly reports the free RAM and total RAM.

 

If you haven't done it recently, it's very much worthwhile to defragment your hard disk -- Microsoft claims NTFS doesn't need that, but they still provide a defrag utility with XP, and it still can improve performance. Best of all, unlike adding RAM, defragging is free...

Photoshop CS/8 can only address 4 GB of RAM but that said if you want to max photoshop

performance and are using large files you will want at least 2 GB of RAM above the 4 for

PS. You won't be able to accomplish this with any machine but the high end pentium

machines that have full 64 bit addressing capability and slots for 8 GB or with the Mac G5

dual 2 or 2.5 Ghz machines that have slots for 8 GB of memory.

 

I use a dual 2 Ghz G5 currently equipped with 3.5 GB of RAM that I will eventually upgrade

to 8. This machine replaced a dual 8 Ghz G4 equipped with 2 Gb of RAM. The differences

in handling 500MZB and larger files is appreciable. Some operations are still not instant

but they take managable seconds instead of minutes.

 

One final thing. For Photoshop to operate most efficiently you need to dedicate a physical

disc EXCLUSIVELY as a scratch disc. I have an external 20 GB Firewire disc that serves this

purpose.

Certainly at least twice the largest file you'll load, plus enough to keep other things in fast RAM. Don't Photoshop and Windows have settings to minimize the amount of "virtual memory" they use or even to eliminate it altogether where possible? I know the Macs used to be able to do that with both within the OS and in the individual applications, and I recall having seen a control panel somewhere in XP to control that (most of us just use "auto" however). That's where I'd start to fix your problem, plus add the maximum amount of memory you can afford (or fit in the computer)

All Windows OS's are limited to 4 GB of RAM unles you have a special version of their Server software. We found this out when we got a Dell serever with 6 GB RAM and Windows would only report 4 gb. The Windows upgrade to see all 6 GB was very expensive so I did not buy it.

Even if Windows could use that much RAM, every single process could only use 2 GB RAM, as long as your software is a 32 bit application.

So Photoshop for Windows could not use your 4 GB or more RAM until Adobe come up with a 64 bit version.

 

The only benefit you get from, say, 3 or 4 GB is, that you can then assign the full 2 GB to Photoshop, and still have RAM for cache, other applications, Windows itself etc., so you avoid swapping.

So I gather that 4 GB is the optimum amount along with some jiggering of the OS and individual aps to ensure that PhotoShop gets and uses its full 2 gigs. Actually, this isn't much different than the old Macs except that the new ones are wicked fast and can actually access a lot more RAM when available. According to Apple their newest G5 towers are up to 95% faster with Photoshop than a Wintel P4 machine (see http://www.apple.com/powermac/) and I believe it:

 

64-bit Breakthrough

 

64-bit processors enable the Power Mac G5 to break through the 4GB barrier and support up to 8GB of 400MHz, 128-bit DDR SDRAM ? four times more than a typical PC. More main memory and fast 6.4 GBps throughput means you can write large projects to memory 40 times faster than to a hard disk.

 

OF course, either side would blow the sox of my old 9600 and G3 boxes even if I upgraded them to the fastest G4 chips available. I do agree that a top notch SCSI (or FibreChannel) RAID card would speed up the disk I/O on either variety but with SCSI and especially FibreChannel you'd be paying top dollar to do it. An IDE Raid 1+0 card might help but it's no match for true RAID on 15K drive arrays.

 

So until I can afford a new loaded G5 (or G6?), I guess I'll avoid the REALLY BIG FILES!

Macs have always been the desktop computer of choice when you wanted a lot of RAM for Photoshop. Remember Quadra 950? However, it appears to me, that Photoshop heavily accesses the disk after every editing step, even when there is more than sufficient RAM. When I assign 1 GB to Photoshop in my 2 GB machine, it still is slow using only 120 MB files, because it seems to write to its temp file frequently. No OS swapping is involved. It appears that at some point you have enough RAM, and more does not help, because Photoshop writes to the disk anyway. So you are limited by the disk throughput. From my personal experience, I would suggest using a striped disk for the Photoshop temp file, and separate disks for OS and your source files. That means 4 or more hard disks in your computer are adequate for Photoshop. Most of the time, you can fit that into your medium or big tower with no problems. I would suggest a dedicated partition on the stripe set for your Photoshop temp directory.

Part of the problem is that I believe I misspoke and that PS, on both the Mac and PC is still

32 bit only so can only use 2m Gigs of RAM.

The Mac comment is abit funny. Here we have aan older box with 512Megs of rqam; and with 512megs cacheable; using the 430NX Neptune Intel chipset; of 1994. The board will support dual CPU's; and is a Pentium;, and has PCI 2.0 It started with NT 3.1; then went to 3.51; then NT4; then win 2000. NT4 plain will juggle 2 CPU's; server would do 4. With 3.5; I think one loaded a HAL file to use two CPU's. (Mac guys can fill in in the missing NT info :)). Windows 2000 gave us USB in the NT relm; broke 8Gig in HDA's with patches. When memory dropped radically below 60 & 40 buck per megabyte; we started to fill up the memory; and finally got to 512megs; with a dual Pentium 100Mhz box. In this old era; the HDA and IDE controller were a real slug. This was before the UDMA era; even the first 33 spec. This box is now on its 3rd controller; and the HDA's have been upgrade from 3800; to 4200; then 5400; then 7200 rpm. The lan card was at first a BNC 10X; then a 10X RI45/BNC; then a 10/100 RJ45. For along time I had both 10X BNC on ancient boxes; and 100x RJ45 on modern systems. One of the main reasons I have used PC's is that I buy and use alot of memory; and run a huge range of PC's in ages. Our old dual CPU pentium came with the dud CPU's with math error; Intel replaced them both with two faster ones; a matched pair of the same spec.

Michael,

 

Your Mac cannot address any more RAM for PS8 than a PC can. PS8 can ONLY use 2GB no matter what OS you're using. So your reasoning for Macs being the platform of choice is based on uninformed opinion rather than fact.....something I find common among Mac users who still try to tell us all that PS on a Mac is "easier to use" than a PC when it's the same software!