Help W7 and CS5, Ram usage stuck......

[Kirk Gittings]

maybe a stupid question but.......a question that really bugs me on a 8 gig, 64 bit, W7, CS5, LR3 setup.

After working on layered files for awhile in PS CS5 my ram usage builds up to about 80% and stays there and my machine slows down. Even if I close out all the Adobe programs the ram usage stays stuck at around 80%. I have to reboot the machine to get it to back down. This is with 70% PS usage set. Why doesn't the ram usage drop when I close out PS&LR?

[Kirk Gittings]

Anyone? No thoughts?

[Kirk Gittings]

bump.

[DeanChriss]

I don't know what's happening with your system but I spent a few minutes looking into this on a Win 7 64 bit system with 16GB RAM. I see that memory usage increases according to how big and how many layers the file has when I open a file. If I add layers, etc., the memory usage increases as you'd expect. When I close the file, but leave Photoshop CS5 open, the memory according to task manager stays allocated (shows no decrease in amount used). If I close Photoshop CS5 the memory usage decreases to what it was before I first opened Photoshop. If I understand your post correctly your system appears to not be releasing this memory even when you close Photoshop.  I wonder if you try what I described here, without letting the system get to a point where it's slowing down, if it works similarly. It may be that there's a bunch of scratch disk being used and memory has gotten tight, and it's just taking a very long time to release memory and remove scratch files.

[Kirk Gittings]

Thanks. I have a huge disk dedicated soley to PS scratch.

Interesting-a preliminary finding-I reset the cache level to 2 rather than 4
and now ram usage sticks at 50% and the computer does not seem to slow down-it falls back to normal now when I close out PS.

[John.Murray]

Kirt:  How are you measuring memory usage?  A 100% efficient computer would always use 100% of it's available memory, utilizing 100% CPU....  Unfortunately things are always sub-optimal.

Mark Russinovich, now a senior architect at Microsoft, has published a great series describing how memory and processes are allocated in current versions of windows, its very readable - i'd highly recommend it.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/07/21/3092070.aspx


As opposed to looking at just memory use, try running windows Resource Monitor, leave it running before, during and after a typical photoshop session.  Let us know your results.....  

If you are experiencing a bona-fide memory leak try firing up Process Explorer:

http://live.sysinternals.com/procexp.exe

[jerryrock]

Unlike the 32 bit version, If you are experiencing out of memory errors with 64 bit Photoshop CS5, Adobe reccomends increasing the memory slider as high as 100% if you are not running any other programs.

To free up memory while running Photoshop CS5,you can use the edit/purge command where you will have a choice of undo, history panel, clipboard or all.

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404439.html

[Kirk Gittings]

Kirt:  How are you measuring memory usage?  A 100% efficient computer would always use 100% of it's available memory, utilizing 100% CPU....  Unfortunately things are always sub-optimal.

Mark Russinovich, now a senior architect at Microsoft, has published a great series describing how memory and processes are allocated in current versions of windows, its very readable - i'd highly recommend it.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/07/21/3092070.aspx


As opposed to looking at just memory use, try running windows Resource Monitor, leave it running before, during and after a typical photoshop session.  Let us know your results.....  

If you are experiencing a bona-fide memory leak try firing up Process Explorer:

http://live.sysinternals.com/procexp.exe

Thanks all. I was measuring ram usage with two different gadgets on my deck top-both of which were in agreement. I have gone through all my performance settings. Occasionally I lose all my settings in PS reset to default for no apparent reason (corrupt preferences file?}. This was the case this time too. So the scratch got moved to my system drive rather than the dedicated scratch drive.

I will now do some work and try the Windows resource monitor. I will report back. Thanks again.

[John.Murray]

Kirk: 

Occasionally I lose all my settings in PS reset to default for no apparent reason (corrupt preferences file?}. This was the case this time too. So the scratch got moved to my system drive rather than the dedicated scratch drive.

That's not good....  Boot your computer off of the Windows Installation DVD, select Repair and run the memory diagnostic.....