Topic: Photoshop machine starting to grind (Read 7437 times)

doggles · « **on:** July 05, 2006, 07:38:46 am »

Hi folks,

My parter works with large photoshop files (200Mb - 800Mb range) and we are having increasing troubles keeping the machine running at a sensible speed, it just spends forever thrashing about on the disk etc. especially when printing.

We are looking to spend a bit of money on getting a machine that can cope with having a few 200Mb files open, and spooling them to the printer without so much waiting around and are keen for any advice we can get our hands on.

We want to stick with a PC if possible and keep the price sensible. Currently have 3 standard 7,200rpm disks and 3Gb of RAM, Windows XP and Photoshop 7.0

The main areas of concern seem to be:

Plain and simply not enough RAM, but even if I had more Photoshop wouldn't use it.

So I fugure we need much faster scratch disk space - would a small but brutally fast 15,000rpm hard disk with a big cacahe serve as a good dedicated photoshop scratch disk?

Do I need to have the windows swapfile, windows print spooler file and photoshop scratch disk on on separate disks? Should I have three uber-fast but small disks, one for each?

Is RAID worth bothering with - I've seen comments saying it doesn't help speed much, but I'm guessing we may get more mileage if we are constantly openning 200+Mb files.

Should the photoshop scratch disk be a RAID pair of some kind?

Basically ANY advice would be appreciated, as my partners precious time (10 month old baby to cope with too) is being eaten up by waiting for things....

Do any of you have the ultimate photoshop setup?

Ian

Geoff Wittig · « **Reply #1 on:** July 05, 2006, 09:41:22 am »

As near as I can tell, as soon as Photoshop starts swapping large chunks of data to disk, your system is going to slow to a crawl regardless of how fast your disks are. I routinely print panoramics up to 800 mb file size with a two year old WinXP machine with only 1.5 gig of RAM, and the performance is generally tolerable until I hit the print button; then I just go get some coffee.
The less extraneous data your machine has to juggle, the less likely it will have to resort to disk thrashing. One rule of thumb is that Photoshop needs RAM equivalent to 4-5 times the size of your image file to avoid using disk space as "virtual memory". You can eek out a bit more room by closing Bridge, minimizing the number of active fonts your system has loaded, and closing all unecessary applications (i.e. solitaire!). Dropping from 16 bit down to 8 bit mode once major editing is done and flattening layered files will also help.

doggles · « **Reply #2 on:** July 05, 2006, 09:53:34 am »

Thanks for the thoughts - we too find that the print spooling phase is the problem, which is annoying as streaming a big chunk of memory to disk really shouldn't be that intensive a process - I think I need to do some checks with the spool file on different disks to see what difference it makes.

Someone suggested using a high-speed multi-gigabyte USB stick as a swap-file drive - not sure if they were joking or not!

Tim Gray · « **Reply #3 on:** July 05, 2006, 11:01:02 am »

Some debate previously as to whether a couple of Sata Raptors or SCSI's in Raid 0 would help. No strong concensus but the general thought was that while it would speed things up, it wouldn't be by an order of magnitude.

Phuong · « **Reply #4 on:** July 05, 2006, 11:02:56 am »

what Geoff said is true. im running PS on a dual xeon machine which has 2GB of ram and a Fuji SCSI as a scratch disk (SCSI disks are like 5x faster than normal disks) but as soon as the ram is filled, the machine just starts to crawl..

one more thing though, on Windows 32bit, PS can't use more than 2GB of Ram.

Jack Flesher · « **Reply #5 on:** July 05, 2006, 11:28:40 am »

Quote

one more thing though, on Windows 32bit, PS can't use more than 2GB of Ram.
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It can use up to 3 Gig if you add the 3 Gig switch to your Win XP32 boot.ini file.

However, more to the point, I have not noticed any earth-shattering improvement in CS performance by doing so.

~~~

You do want the OS page file on a separate disk from CS scratch -- and best to give CS its own dedicated scratch drive. Some of us even give CS two scratch drives...

Fred Ragland · « **Reply #6 on:** July 05, 2006, 12:25:27 pm »

If you are running Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 you can set the 3 GB switch in the boot.ini.file which allows Photoshop to use up to 3 GB of RAM. Search the Microsoft support page for 3GB for info.

Go to adobe.com/support and use search to find ways to "Improve Performance" in Photoshop. For example, CS2 allows you to increase tile size which worked for me.

PhotoshopNews.com will help you. Use the search window to find "Photoshop CS2 Performance Articles" Just below this reference, you'll also find an article on memory allocation.

All of this won't apply to PS7 but some of it will.

Good luck!

doggles · « **Reply #7 on:** July 05, 2006, 12:38:22 pm »

Quote

It can use up to 3 Gig if you add the 3 Gig switch to your Win XP32 boot.ini file.

However, more to the point, I have not noticed any earth-shattering improvement in CS performance by doing so.

~~~

You do want the OS page file on a separate disk from CS scratch -- and best to give CS its own dedicated scratch drive. Some of us even give CS two scratch drives...
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=69833\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Hi,

Why would you use two scratch disks just for PS - surely the second would only get used when the first was full? Or can it be clever and do parallel reads/writes to both drives? (I'm guessing not).

Do you bother with a separate print spooling disk?

Tim Gray · « **Reply #8 on:** July 05, 2006, 01:11:40 pm »

Quote

Hi,

Why would you use two scratch disks just for PS - surely the second would only get used when the first was full? Or can it be clever and do parallel reads/writes to both drives? (I'm guessing not).

Do you bother with a separate print spooling disk?
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=69840\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Raid 0 does the "parallel reads/writes to both drives" - one "chunk" to drive A and the second to drive B - note that this does not give you backup - half of the data is one one drive and the other half on the other.

Jonathan Wienke · « **Reply #9 on:** July 06, 2006, 01:58:04 pm »

Don't try to print really large files from Photoshop--it is poorly optimized for the task and you'll have performance problems and even out-of-memory problems that will crash Photoshop or result in partial prints. QImage is cheap and is a much better tool for the job.

I discovered this when printing some 24x72 inch 200PPI stitched panoramas with an Epson 7600.

Jack Flesher · « **Reply #10 on:** July 06, 2006, 04:14:12 pm »

Re using 2 scratch disks on CS: 1) Sequential; If you have very large files, you may fill the primary scratch performing file operations and need to spill over to a second. This never happened to me until I started working on 600 Meg Beterlight files and had CS crash on me because I actually ran out of scratch space. 2) Parallel; as Tim said, putting two scratch disks in a RAID 0 will look like a single drive to your OS but will double the scratching performance as the read/writes are split and the I/O load is halved for each drive.

Print spooling: No need for a dedicated drive here or on paging -- just make sure OS paging resides on a separate physical disk than the CS scratch so they don't fight each other for I/O resources.

Re large prints: Funny thing Jonathan -- I added the 3G switch and all of a sudden CS prints really large files just fine! It appears the printing issue in CS is how CS spools the data to the printer and for whatever reason, having more memory available alleviates this issue. (But agree that Q-Image is well worth the investment )

ericstaud · « **Reply #11 on:** July 07, 2006, 01:23:58 am »

I don't remember where I read this, but on a Mac I believe that RAM above and beyond the 3GB used by photoshop is used by the system, printer driver, AND is used as the initial scratch disk. So having 6 or 8GB of RAM may not be overkill.

-Eric

doggles · « **Reply #12 on:** July 07, 2006, 04:43:51 am »

Anyone for a quick poll?

Given the following large chunks of data:

A ) Windows + applications (i.e. Photoshop)
B ) Data files (i.e. my 200/800Mb PSDs)
C ) Phtoshop Scratch Space
D ) Windows Virtual Memory Space
E ) Print Spool Space

What would your vote be for the best (practical and affordable) setup?

Jack Flesher · « **Reply #13 on:** July 07, 2006, 12:16:28 pm »

Quote

What would your vote be for the best (practical and affordable) setup?
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Emphasis on afordable, then just go with 7200 RPM SATA drives. Cheap per-Gig , available and easy to configure on the system and still very good performers.

Where money is not critical and you want blazing performance, then consider 15K SCSI or 10K SATAs, a big one for OS and programs so there is a lot of free space for paging (and print spooling) and a reasonably large (72 Gig or more) dedicated to CS scratch -- or really sweet is two of these in a RAID 0 configuration for scratch. Then store all of your data files (including images) on a third array, normal SATAs are fine unless you want the shortest possible read times. Of course you also want to fill your machine with RAM.

Jonathan Wienke · « **Reply #14 on:** July 08, 2006, 06:28:08 am »

Quote

Re large prints: Funny thing Jonathan -- I added the 3G switch and all of a sudden CS prints really large files just fine! It appears the printing issue in CS is how CS spools the data to the printer and for whatever reason, having more memory available alleviates this issue. (But agree that Q-Image is well worth the investment )
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=69947\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

While the /3GB switch definitely increases the file size you can successfully print in PS, I still ran into problems printing some really large files (the aforementioned stitched panos). But QImage never failed to print a file, no matter how large, as long as I had room on my hard drive for the spooler temp files it creates.

Regarding drive selection, I recommend using the SATA or IDE Western Digital drives in a RAID5 configuration with at least 4 drives in the array for file storage, and for high-speed scratch/temp/OS, I second Jack's recommendations.

jecxz · « **Reply #15 on:** July 08, 2006, 10:02:56 am »

I find 15,000RPM SCSI drives are extremely fast. I use them as my scratch too. Otherwise, get 10,000RPM SATA drives. Fast drives really make a difference.

doggles · « **Reply #16 on:** July 08, 2006, 03:43:38 pm »

Well, you inspired me to try Qimage.

After the initial shock of the user interface (it could give VueScan a run for its old-skool money) it does indeed seem to be pretty quick.

My only trouble seems to be getting the prints out at the correct size.
All of our prints are laid out at 600dpi at the exact size needed to match our pre-cut mounts, yet no matter how I try to print it (ORIGINAL size, 600dpi, crop to fit) they come out too large by a couple of percent.

Has anyone here successfully printed a PSD at it's original size through VueScan?

Ian Moody

Jonathan Wienke · « **Reply #17 on:** July 09, 2006, 10:22:03 am »

Instead of specifying "original size", specify the intended print size. There's also an option in the settings that increases the print size slightly beyond spec; it has something to do with borderless printing IIRC. Turn that off and your problem should disappear. Otherwise, just set up a print template for 4.9x6.9 for a 5x7 or whatever. It's a hassle, but you'll only have to do it once. Printers don't always print the exact size they're supposed to, either.

Author Topic: Photoshop machine starting to grind (Read 7437 times)