Following a recent posting on Prodig bemoaning the slowing down I was seeing when using CS on Windows XP over a working day, I was mailed by Adam Jerugim, who, as you can see below is the guy responsible for the performance testing of Photoshop at Adobe!
What follows is our short thread over the past day. Forgive the whole narrative but I thought it might be of use to other Prodiggers struggling with speed issues in CS under Windows. Try this, early iindications are that it really works. Thank you Adobe, for taking the trouble to address the concerns of this very small fish! Jonathan Coleman Chester UK Subject: Re: FW: Definately something wrong with memory management in CS usingWindows!! Jonathan, I'm the guy that's doing the bulk of performance testing for Photoshop, so I'd like to see if we can figure out a way to improve your systems's performance. First of all you should try moving the memory slider down incrementally, to see if that improves performance (85% might still be too high). Also, I saw the following post to the user-to-user forums, and was wondering if you've played with your virtual memory settings: http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/[EMAIL PROTECTED]@.2ccfd051/10 Jeff Anduza - 07:35pm Feb 17, 2004 Pacific (# 10 of 11) I found the solution: The problem was with virtual memory, specifically the paging file was fragmented. This was not an issue with applications other than Photoshop. (The OS would really write the page file when Photoshop was minimized). This was fixed by changing the paging file's location from my main drive to my scratch drive, and then back to the main drive. In addition I changed the size of the page file from 1.5 times RAM to 2 times RAM (3GB to 4GB). The entire system improved, dramatically, but I never would have noticed without Photoshop running. Hope this helps. Microsoft had this article available: http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/expertzone/columns/mcfedries/03june16.asp Feel free to contact me directly with any other questions or comments. -Adam Adam Jerugim Photoshop QE Product Lead Adobe Systems, Inc. (408) 536-2296 Reply sent 2300 19th Feb 2004 Adam, GREAT RESULT! Leaving my PS memory allocation at 85%, I manipulated the virtual memory settings as suggested above - firstly moving the virtual memory to the scratch disk and setting it at 3072Mb (2xRAM) with the maximum at 4096Mb. Next time I started CS, though, I was warned that this is not a good thing because the virtual memory and the designated Photoshop scratch disk were on the same physical drive.. Result - I moved the virtual memory back to the C drive but at the same 3072Mb setting - twice the Windows XP default it had been set at before. After an intensive day working with Photoshop and manipulating some big files, CS is running like a rocket and a lot faster than it was yesterday. Hard drive activity seems much less, even when RAM is significantly exceeded. Thank you very much for this help,. Regards, Jonathan Coleman Chester UK =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
