More Photoshop CS slowdown - I am clueless as to why

[Sean Dempsey]

Photoshop and system optimization

I am curious if anyone here knows how to really optimize the performance of photoshop CS. I am not getting very good performance, but I don’t know what is wrong. I am a pretty savvy user, so I can set settings and understand whatever I need to, I am just ignorant right now of what photoshop needs to really run at it’s best.

My system and setup is such:
-2.8 p4 hyperthreading
-2 gigs 400mhz pc3200 ram
-serial ATA C: drive, 80 gig
-serial ATA D: drive, 80 gig
-120 gig IDE partitioned, S: (10 gig scratch disk) and T: (110 gig storage)
-128meg Geforce 4 ti…

That is the basic setup of my performance parts. Everything is defragged and the computer runs fine.

My windows settings are:
-Processor Scheduling set to Programs
-Memory Usage set to System Cache
-one page file, set to the C: drive, 2000-3000 MB

My photoshop settings are:
-First Scratch is set to the S: drive (10 gig partition)
-Second scratch is set to the D: drive
-Cache Levels are at 8
-Available RAM is 86% = 1528mb

That is the basic setup.

Here is my problem – photoshop runs pretty clunky For instance, I just opened up a 2.17 meg image, first image of the day to be opened. Immediately my scratch indicator in the status bar reads “Scr: 1.91G/1.44G” and the actual file on the S: drive is 1.93 gigabytes. Also, the photoshop efficiency is at 24%. This is all without having done ANYTHING in photoshop so far. I opened the program, opened a 2 meg file, and those are the results I get.

It typically just gets worse from there. I’ll get major slowdowns, my efficiency will drop to 4 or 3%, the Scratch indicator will sometimes read “Scr: 2.31G/1.44G” or worse. Sometimes photoshop locks up for about 20 seconds or more, the title bars all go white like it’s not responding, and then comes back.

So I am at a loss. I have the hard drives, ram, and CPU for photoshop CS to run fast, right? I don’t see what it isn’t, unless I have something totally set to reduce performance in my swap file or scratches or something.

If you have any idea or info, please let me know. I am eager to get this worked out.

Thanks

[Sean Dempsey]

I do that, but it doesn't make alot of difference.

I got a file from Adobe's website that makes the refresh display tiles smaller, seeing if that changes anything.

[Peter_AUS]

Have a look at your drives for tmp file, these can slow things down.

When was the last time you defraged your system as well.

Make sure your scratch disk isn't pointing to the same drive your Photoshop CS is on, from your config I see it shouldn't be, but just check.

Increase your pagefile on the scratch disk to double the size it is.

Inherently large drives with large partitions take longer sometimes to access things, as they have to spin up if not used for a while, and find the indicator for the file, then find the file. I know this is ms time, but everything adds up.

I take it you are using Windows XP, maybe there are a lot of overheads running, make sure you have your resources optermised for applications and not behind the scenes priority.

I run CS on Windows 2000, 512meg ram, ide drives, nothing special and it works perfectly well.

The other thing that can slow things down, is excessive fonts on the system as well, as well as extra plugins too.

But the above things might just get it chugging along a bit quicker.