Photoshop Slowdown

[ChuckZ]

I've been processing shots from a trip to Death Valley during the past couple days and Photoshop (CS4 ver11.0.1) began running slower and slower to the point now where it takes several minutes to run a command, even a zoom.  When I look at Windows Task Manager, I see that the CPU usage spikes up to near 100% when I perform a Photoshop command and stays at that level while I'm waiting for the command to complete.  I made sure there is plenty of harddrive space, did a defrag, a register clean, deleted cookies, etc but nothing seems to help.  I did virus scans from two difference services and nothing turned up.  Photoshop was working fine up until recently and I can't think of anything I've changed to the computer recently.  The last things I did were to upgrade Lightroom from 2.2 to 2.5 and install ColorEyes Display Pro a couple weeks ago and Photoshop worked fine after I did that.

I'm running Photoshop together with Lightroom on a Dell 4700 with a 2.8Ghz Pentium4 and 4GB of RAM.  My Photoshop settings in Preferences/Performance are  "Let Photoshop Use" 1166MB of memory, History States:12, Cache Levels: 4 Scratch Disk: C:  

I'd appreciate any ideas on how I might be able to fix this problem.  Thanks, Chuck

[Paul Sumi]

What's your scratch drive set up?   Should be a different physical disk, not just a different volume, from the program or data disks.

Paul

[Mark D Segal]

Was that trip to Death Valley part of the Phase One Medium Format "experience"? If so the files you are processing would be starting life at about 300 MB each? Your computer is the standard 32-bit O/S platform, therefore accessing a maximum of 3GB RAM eventhough you may well have 4 GB installed? And how much do you have allocated to Photoshop (setting in Prefs should be no more than 55% to let all else which needs to run with it do their things)?  I'm experiencing the same deal. Bottom line: processing massive files needs lots of RAM, which means a 64-bit O/S if in Windows. And yes, PaulS is correct about keeping the scratch disk on a separate internal hard-drive.

[ChuckZ]

Was that trip to Death Valley part of the Phase One Medium Format "experience"? If so the files you are processing would be starting life at about 300 MB each? Your computer is the standard 32-bit O/S platform, therefore accessing a maximum of 3GB RAM eventhough you may well have 4 GB installed? And how much do you have allocated to Photoshop (setting in Prefs should be no more than 55% to let all else which needs to run with it do their things)?  I'm experiencing the same deal. Bottom line: processing massive files needs lots of RAM, which means a 64-bit O/S if in Windows. And yes, PaulS is correct about keeping the scratch disk on a separate internal hard-drive.

The files I am trying to process average about 12MB (raw files from my D300)  I've had no problems with files from my D300 until now, and I did ok with files that size when I had less RAM installed than I do now.  It is a frustrating situation because nothing is different about my files or the computer that I know about, yet this huge slow down has occured.  I tried doing some adjustments with some jpg files and the speed seemed ok.  Maybe something is wrong with my RAM?

[Paul Sumi]

I just re-read your original post and saw your scratch disk is the C drive.  You really should put the scratch on a different hard drive for best performance.

Also, how much free space is on your C drive?  If it's filled up, this will also affect performance.

Paul

[Mark D Segal]

Paul's right. 12MB files should just zip through. Also try emptying your temp folder - system clutter can degrade performance. Did you download or install anything between the time you had good performance and the time you noticed degraded performance? Apart from viruses, there are various kins of adware which could be running on your computer and slowing it down. Try running Lavasoft Adaware and see whether it turns-up anything of the kind; some A-V applications aren't too adept at identifying this kind of stuff. Trend-Micro Anti-virus is pretty good at it also. You can conduct RAM tests - may be worth downloading an app for doing that - I forget the details, but once found a useful RAM testing app on the internet from a computer site. Did you test zooming with any other applications, to see whether the problem is specific to Photoshop? Perhaps there could be an issue with your graphics card - hard to say.

[Mark D Segal]

Another thing you may wish to check is whether you have Open GL enabled in Photoshop. If you do, try disabling it and see whether it improves zooming and other functions.

[Justan]

Also check out the computer’s event logs to see if they show any warnings or errors.

If you have any network connections (drives or printers), check to verify they are accessible and working properly. A faulting network connection, even one to a printer, can suck the life from a computer’s performance.

Typically faulting RAM will cause the computer to BSD and not behave slowly.

If the computer offers diagnostic tests, give 'em a run

[stamper]

Look at this.

http://www.maxi-pedia.com/3GB+switch+Windows+boot.ini+3+GB

It made a difference for me but beware, read carefully before implementing it.

[elizabeth]

I was having similar issues and I found this article which really helped speed up the performance with a lot of different things in Photoshop CS4.

http://www.arcurs.com/optimizing-photoshop...tal-photography

Elizabeth Stacy
Foto Care
New York, NY

[jerryrock]

The first step to troubleshooting Photoshop is to reset the preferences since most Photoshop problems occur from corrupted preferences.

 Hold down the three modifier keys Ctrl-Alt-Shift in Windows (Command-Option-Shift in the Mac) while starting up Photoshop, click yes in the box that appears asking you if you want to delete your preferences and Photoshop will create a new set of default preferences.

[ddk]

I started seeing a slow down since yesterday too, with PS/CS4 crashing if I have more than one window open. I didn't change anything in the computer nor did I install any new software and everything has been very smooth and fast since the introduction of CS4 up until yesterday. I'm on a MacPro!

[ChuckZ]

Thanks to the suggestions here, I am back to processing my shots.  The things I did included transferring all but my current work files from the hard drive to the external drive so that I ended up with 13GB free on the hard drive, deleted all .tmp files, performed malware scans with McAfee and Trend Micro (nothing found), tested the RAM with Memtest program (no errors found), turned off Open GL drawing in preferences, and set Let Photoshop Use: 1297MB (80%) in preferences.  After I did these things, Photoshop stop getting bogged down.  Eventually I'll get a more powerful computer and I'll be sure to include a dedicated hard drive for the scratch disk.  Meanwhile I'm happy to be productive again and continue processing my Death Valley shots.

[Mark D Segal]

Glad you are back in business - and that dunes shot is spectacular. You probably had to hike quite a distance to avoid all the footprints in the sand.

[ChuckZ]

Actually there were several distracting foot prints in the sand.  I was attempting to clone them out when Photoshop started bogging down.  There are some nice "virgin" dunes that are not as big as the ones in this photo, but still make for nice photo ops in the northern portion of the dune field.  You can get to those without too much trouble by parking about 1/2 mile north of the dunes parking lot then hike about 1/2mi along the north edge of the dune field. (I'll post some tips in the Landscape Photography Locations forum)

[Mark D Segal]

That would be helpful for future reference - thanks. We were thinking of doing exactly that, but ended-up in the parking lot and had to walk quite a distance before sunrise.