How to keep the memory load down...

[Marc the Upstart]

What methods does everyone use to keep the amount of memory that photoshop uses when painting in larger size files?

My computer is fairly new (I got it back in August 07) and runs everything else *including* the new Age of Conan (which is awesome by the way)game at the highest quality without a hitch. But, for some reason when painting anything bigger than 8x10 300 dpi my computers memory starts having labor pains :P. I checked how much it was using the other day and it said 980,000k?! Maybe I just don't know enough about computers but that sounds insane to me.

So just to reiterate, what does everyone do to keep the load down on their computers?

[sagramor]

I know of two things right off the top of my head.

1. Open up your task manager> processes> right click on photoshop> set priority to high.

2. You can go to Properties of My Computer> Advanced> Performance> Settings> Advanced> Virtual Memory and increase your paging file size. However this is dangerous. You need to do some reading on Google before attempting this.

Also, if your using Firefox, close that shit, 2.x is a memory hog as we all know.

[GriNGo]

The easiest solution is sometimes the best: try getting more RAM for your computer. i'm guessing you have 1 gig: it just isn't enough - 3 gigs or more is best. I upgraded from 1 gig to 3 gigs (on a 4 year old computer: pentium4 3 ghz), and the difference in performance and stability is just staggering. I can open Illustrator, Indesign & Photoshop (all CS3 apps, and the ones that are not photoshop can be even more hard on your computer) at the same time with winamp, firefox 3, messenger, outlook and sometimes more apps, with no trouble at all (after a while, with this many apps it will get kind of slow, but then i just close an app and everything is better): with this kind of memory you won't even have to worry about paging file, closing apps, etc.

if this is an option, well, you can try doing the following when you work in PS:

- lower the DPI res. (to 240 or something).
- don't use too much layers.
- set another hard drive to be your scratch disk (you can find this in the preferences section of PS).

[Adam Rich]

A single application cannot address more than 2GB of RAM. If you are using a 1GB of RAM and only Photoshop, get another stick. Will cost you twenty bucks. 2GB will still do perfectly fine for multitasking unless you do it like a bitch, in which investing in a 2GB module may be an intelligent decision.

And yeah, I just made a 50x50 inch document at 300 DPI and had with 54 layers & in the middle of using a cloud filter I got to about 1000k memory usage. Which brings me to my next question; what are you overall computer specs? CPU/RAM/HDD

[Marc the Upstart]

I have an AMD athlon 64 fx-62 dual coare 2.80 ghz
and 2 gig of ram.

Beyond that I'm not too sure, I usually have my friend who knows computers custom build my system for me (its usually cheaper that way).

But thanks for the tips so far, I didn't know about the priority thing in the task manager, that did help somewhat. But yeah, my friend did agree you Gringo, that I probably just need more memory. I initially thought that, but was skeptical for some reason. Thanks guys. :)

[Adam Rich]

It's always cheaper. Always.

And you actually don't need more RAM. What type of processes are you running in the background? You definitely should not be lagging with those specifications at such a low size.

If you don't believe me, I have a paid job at my high school doing photo manipulations and optimization and such for the yearbook. The computer they make me work on is an old Dell with a P4 and 700MB of RAM. The files I work with are ~35x45 at 300DPI, and yes it does experience lag time, but it's actually not that terrible.

[Marc the Upstart]

Actually it seems the priorities thing has pretty much taken care of the problem, It runs very smooth with that... Another problem I am having, and this is infinitely more frustrating, is that my tablet will randomly stop working, and I'll have to reinstall the drivers and restart my computer. It's completely random, it could go a couple hours or a few weeks. I have a feeling it might have something to do with Vista, because I didn't have this problem running it on XP.