PC Experts, Help needed with slow CS2 on a high end PC

[villaverde, justin]

<p>I need some serious help. I just built a new computer (P4D 930, 2gb of

677mhx ddr2, on an Intel 975x board, with 4 drives in 2 RAID 1 arrays). I

expected it to be dramatically faster, and it is in most cases, but not with

Photoshop CS2.</p>

<p>The problem is that CS2 uses the scratch disc for nearly all files with more

then one layer or any flat file 100mb or larger. My last computer with only 1gb

of ram would only use the scratch disc when I worked with huge panos.</p>

<p>As an example, today I was working with files that the doc: size was 100-300

mb at Photoshop would use the scratch disc for nearly every adjustment (crop,

resize, unsharp mask, levels, curves) making nearly all the tasks take forever.

I assumed that 2gb of RAM was enough, but should I add 2 more or is there a

setting that I can tweak to solve this problem. I read that Win XP 32bit will

only allow any individual program to use 2gb of RAM though.</p>

<p>Here’s my Photoshop memory settings: Cache Levels: 6, Memory usage:

Avail 1759MB, Max 60% = 1055MB.</p>

<p>In Task Manager, with background programs running, my computer idles between

350 and 400mb of RAM usage.</p>

<p>Any advice would be greatly appreciated, since this problem really

doesn’t make much sense to me. Or if you need more info please let me

know.</p>

<p>Thanks in advance,<br>

Justin</p>

[john falkenstine]

Adobe has some information on this specific problem relating to the scratch disk and the slowness. Overall my upgrade to CS2 has also brought along some issues, which I feel reflect poorly on the software quality control at Adobe. But the additional tools and features are impressive.

[scott_eaton]

Increase Photoshop's RAM utilization to 85-90%. That tends to kick it in the ass in some respect in terms of getting it to use more system RAM vs it's scratch disk.

 

Otherwise, I'm betting your previous machine was using PS7 or an older version of Photoshop without all the performance bugs of CS2. I have no idea what CS2's problem is, except I'm certain Adobe will fix the issues with CS3 so we are forced to upgrade to get back to the performance of older versions.

[villaverde, justin]

Just a quick update, the old PC was also running CS2, but did not have these performance issues. I'll try to up the memory allocation tomorrow.

 

Thanks,

Justin

[kelly_flanigan1]

With the "calender box" here I tend to use PS 5.5 for calenders with gobs of text, since it has all the stuff I need for this specific task. One calender has about 100 layers and is about 150 meg. The computer is a 3 year old P4 with 2.5Ghz, with 2 gigs of 400Mhz ddr, and has win2000, 7200rpm 80gig maxtor. The photoshop memory slider is usually at 80%. This box has PS 3, 4, 5.5, 7, CS and CS2. There is a bog with CS2 compared to ps5.5

[mark_l3]

do a search for "3gb switch" and see if this helps...

[bill_t__new_mexico_]

Under Edit->Preferences->Plug-in & Scratch Discs, make sure that at least your 1st scratch disc is NOT the startup disc. Preferably, your scratch discs should be located on a different physical disc drive than your program files and data files. On IDE systems which have 2 disc channels each supporting 2 discs, it helps a lot if program and data files are on a disc connected to a different channel than the channel with the scratch disc drive.

 

It's probably not a good idea to give CS2 more than 75% of your system ram, since this seriously cramps the operating system which can cause bottlenecks of its own.

[alan_chan4]

Back then the RAM was shared with dual CPUs setup. For instance, 2GB with 2 CPU means each CPU got 1GB only. I am not sure if today's Dual Core works the same way. But setting the Scratch Disk other than the boot disk is vital for PS performance, and with 1G+ RAM, memory usage set to 80% will help too.

[scott_eaton]

Dual cores run pretty much the same as dual processors.<P>

 

I also disagree with the <b>urban myth</b> that Photoshop requires it's own physical scratch disk, which is advice Adobe has been pimping since the days of 200meg hard drives. Note that Adobe also claims you need a video card with greater than 128meg of memory to help fix the performance problems with CS2, which we all know is a line of bunk.

[bill_fouche]

Two other things that have not been mentioned will help: Change "cache" levels from 6 to 4. Reduce history states PS must keep up with down to 20 or so.

[scott_eaton]

<I>2GB with 2 CPU means each CPU got 1GB only.</i><P>I guess that means the quad CPU NT 4 and Windows 2000 servers I used to run had only 512 available for each procesor {smirk}.

[villaverde, justin]

I set the Memory Usage to 75% and it seems to run better. It still hits the scratch disc on some of my larger panos though. I'll try to change the history and cache levels and see if that has any affect.

 

One new question, being that this is my first dual core system, am I correct in assuming that if I add 2 more gb of RAM for a total of 4gb that each core will see 2gb of RAM and since Photoshop CS2 uses dual processors it sound like that would almost completely solve my issue because that would give me a huge amount of memory headroom. Does that sound correct? Or will Photoshop still only be allowed to have 2gb total?

 

Thanks for all these great responses,

Justin

[howard_owen]

I think maybe you need to examine how CS2 and XP handle memory. First off, you are going to "hit the scratch disk" as soon as you open Photoshop (PS creates a ~160MB scratch file with NO open images on a machine with 4GB of RAM). You will immediately begin data transfers to the scratch disk if you open even a tiny sized file. For example, opening a 158KB jpg adds about 9MB to the previously mentioned scratch file's size.

 

This data transfer continues unabated while you work since the scratch is actually caching the data in stored in RAM. This is all quite transparent and efficient as long as the image can be kept in RAM. When the size of the image data cache exceeds the amount of allocated RAM, CS2 starts swapping big chunks of data from RAM to scratch to make room for the excess data and things slow way down. Upping the RAM allocation to 70% or higher may or may not provide benefit to the user. The more RAM you allow CS2 to use, the less you have for the OS and many 3rd party plugins and filters to use. At some point, you may find CS2 writing to scratch while the OS attempts retrieve parts of itself or other programs from the Windows pagefile. Things slow waaaay down at this point.

 

For machines with 2GB of RAM or less, the default memory setting is 55%. You can increase the memory in 5% increments (restart PS after each increase) and observe the OS free memory in the Performance Monitor as you work in PS. If the free memory drops to 15MB or so, you are in danger of seeing things shift into snail mode and you need to decrease the memory you've given to Photoshop. You can also observe the efficiency indicator in CS2 to see when you're really out of headroom memory-wise. Anything below 100% means your image no longer fits in RAM.

 

How XP allocates memory among two or more processors or cores is neither hear nor there. All apps will benefit from more RAM. CS2 can make use of 3GB of RAM on a 32-bit system if the 3GB switch is invoked in the boot.ini file, and the payoff is real. However the 3GB switch is not without its dangers since it does NOT work on all computers {some crash, some won't boot--not even in safe mode). Make sure you have a recovery strategy if you try to use it.

 

Required reading:

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/332271.html

 

http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/03/reap_what_you_m.html

 

http://photoshopnews.com/2005/04/04/photoshop-cs2-how-much-ram-fact

 

http://www.outbackphoto.com/tforum/viewtopic.php?TopicID=1395

 

Good luck.

[villaverde, justin]

Howard,

 

Thanks for those articles. The PhotoshopNews one sold me on adding another 4gb, since memory is pretty cheap. Other setting changes have really made an impact on CS2's speed. I'm sure it will take more optimizing when I add the additional RAM, but at the moment my settings look like:

 

Memory Usage: 75%, Cache Level: 6 (I do use a lot of layers), Scratch disc on my non-OS array, History: 30.

 

There is still some slow down on 300-500mb panos, but I can deal with that.

 

Thanks everyone, Justin

[kelly_flanigan1]

Dual processor support in Photoshop came with about version 4. Some of us used NT4 with the dual/multi core service pack. This thread is the first I have ever heard of one porcessor only using 1/2 the ram, heck urban lengends have to start somewhere.:) With NT one can set the "affinity" so only one CPU is for Photoshop, the other is for say web browsing. The ram seen to photoshop stays the same on all of the dual CPU boxes I run.