OK Dan, I am sure you have *something* here. But I don't know about your "100%" correct" remark. My PS 5 shows no trouble with VM on, perhaps because I have 500 MB of real?
Probably. 500 MB RAM is a Good Start. If you only manipulate small files, you'll probably never feel any of the problems.
Try some complex manipulations of something that's even 1/4 low-end publishing quality, 800 dpi, 50 to 100 MB TIFF file or larger. Add layers, run effects, etc.
I still would like a pointer to references by PS that clearly acknowledge trouble with VM on when there is plenty of RAM. I had a quick look at Adobe and did not see what I would have expected to see if it was "100% correct". Nor in my help files on PS 5.
Well, you'll just have to do more than a "quick look". The information is there and has been beaten to death in the forums and usenet for years. Frankly, tho, why bother? If you don't feel the thrash currently, it's moot to you. If you do eventually feel it, then you now know what it is now...
One obvious trouble with VM where real is scarce is the slowness of system and PS program resources having to be read back and forth from HDs. But this is not "thrashing" about. It is just slowness.
If you feel that then you're on the very edge of the problem.
A single write-then-read cycle, that lasts a few seconds, is a page swap. Any more than that, you're Thrashing. Your HD is capable of transferring many megabytes per second. hum. I started to say "No application really needs more than a few dozen megabytes to run in the near term (next thousand quanta) - that's maybe 1 to 5 seconds of disk i/o max! More than 5 seconds? You're thrashing." But obviously there are cases, expecially Photoshop, where that's not completely true. And the faster your processor the faster the app can finish with the alloted memory. Well, everything is Relative. You know what I mean. :)
In most cases, thrashing has an end to it. Oops you use too much memory. The applications fight each other for time and RAM. You thrash a bit, then it settles down. In Photoshop, the thrashing builds. It gets worse and worse, longer and longer, as you use it. Eventually, you spend more time twiddling your thumbs listening to the HD than you do working...
- Dan.
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