Try lowering memory usage to 75% or lower. The 4 gigs of scratch is chicken scratch (minuscule) for PS CS. Scratch up triple that. You can make this work.
I just tried it with 4 – 100GB images to see what would happen. It works fine on a P4-3GHz with 1GB RAM, usage set to 75%. I assume you’ve designated other disks and/or partitions for Photoshop’s 2nd, 3d, and 4th scratch disks so that would probably not be the issue. I’ll be interested to hear if it works with your RAM set to 75% as there are numerous users (myself included) who are having difficulty using more than 1GB RAM with PS without reducing RAM usage to about 45%. My solution was to simply run with 1GB RAM until the cause has been determined by Adobe.
Russell
Update: I could not repeat the test a second time w/90% RAM without getting a ‘not enough RAM’ error. I had to set the RAM to 75% to repeat the test without errors. Hmm.. wonder what it means that one minute I can do something with PS using 90% RAM and 5 minutes later it no longer works..
The whole operation took 2.5 minutes which is more than the 1-2 minute guess that I posted earlier.
Russell
Chris Cox and others have stated very clearly that setting RAM usage about 75% in Photoshop will make it unstable. You and everyone else that tries to go above that seems to keep forgetting that Windows needs memory too.
Robert
Chris Cox and others have stated very clearly that setting RAM usage about 75% in Photoshop will make it unstable. You and everyone else that tries to go above that seems to keep forgetting that Windows needs memory too.
I assume you meant "above 75%" rather than "about 75%".
Yes things can get unstable for some folks who go much higher than 75%. But there are still many folks who successfully run with higher amounts. Some have even questioned what 100% really means. Is it "all RAM" regardless of the OS? Or is is all the RAM the OS will relinquish to an app? Why would PS even load and my system not grind to a halt if 100% really meant 100%? If you’re not running any other apps then 85% can work just fine for many. I run CS at 75% because it runs fine at that setting..but so does setting it at 85%.
What I’d REALLY like to know is why there are suggestions that people using 2GB RAM set their usage to a paltry 45% to get it to work with operations that I can complete successfully with a setting of 100% with 1/2 as much RAM (just to see what would happen)? I now have 1GB RAM sitting on a shelf that I can’t use unless I set PS usage to 45% and PS still runs poorly. Seems to me there’s something seriously wrong going on.
Russell
I just tried this out with 4 90Mb files and the process uses about 4.3G of scratch disk so one could speculate that the problem is due to running out of scratch space if it were not for fact that it doesn’t work on the smaller files.
Russell, if your machine completed that in 2.5 minutes, then you are not suffering poor performance. I didn’t time it on mine (Athlon2800 with 1G of RAM) but it must have been twice that time. I am certainly not having performance problems in general with CS – it is as fast or faster than PS6 for most stuff. If you check out memory usage in Task Manager, you will see that the PS settings relate to the amount of available RAM after everything else takes its share. I am running at 85% without any problems. I vaguely recall an explanation relating to PS needing extra memory outside of its normal allocation for external plug-ins (and perhaps other processes within the program?) which can cause problems of the allocation is set too high in PS.
I look forward to Adobe figuring out what the problem is with higher amounts of RAM on some PCs. I was going to go for a board capable of handling 2G of dual channel RAM but from what I read it is risky at the moment.
Russell, if your machine completed that in 2.5 minutes, then you are not suffering poor performance.
I have no performance issues whatsoever with 1GB RAM installed. It’s when I add a 2nd pair of 512mb Dual-channel DDR that Photoshop performs sluggishly and I get out-of-memory messages when performing simple tasks like saving files as progressive JPEGs. Will be trying out 2x 1GB pieces of RAM in the next 2 weeks to determine if there’s an issue with using 4x 512s. I use an 18gb Atlas 15k SCSI drive on a 320160 controller for PS’s scratch disk so I’m sure that helps (all other drives are IDE). Otherwise it’s a P4 -3.0 on an Intel D875PBZ mobo with a ‘plain-Jane’ 40GB 7200IDE disk partitioned 10/30. Windows XP-Pro.
Russell
Am not sure if it already has been mentioned, but what I read in the last couple of posts is a known issue when adding more memory to a system. So please forgive me if you already were aware of this.
When a system has been set up, it is suited to certain specs as of that moment. This includes also the size of your page file. As I read, one system had 1GB of ram. Its pagefile most probably is something around 1.5 to 2 GB. When adding RAM, if you do not adjust the page file size, the performance will drastically go down and "out of memory" errors will appear. If you add an additional GB of RAM, reset your pagefile to max 4GB, and you will see you system will fly.
For your information, I had this twice in the last couple of years, yes, I know, it happened more then once, kept on forgetting it…
Try it and let us know if it helps.
Cheers
Where in the world did you read this nonsense? A reference would be interesting. Your interpretation of setting the pagefile size in Windows XP is, at best, drastically outdated.
MarkS
The "nonsense" was from personal experience as I indicated. On all my XP machines the pagefile was set manually with a fixed amount, no min or max. When I added memory, after adjusting the system the performance issues and errors disappeared. That is the way it worked for me.
Just trying to help here.
Cheers
On all my XP machines the pagefile was set manually with a fixed amount, no min or max.
This is what I do as well. I check the recommended value in the Virtual Memory dialogue box and set the min/max to that value. It’s usually 1.5x the installed RAM and is currently set to 1533MB. With 2GB Ram I had it set to twice this amount. I’m convinced this is a problem with Photoshop’s proprietary memory management and not an OS or hardware problem.
Russell
To follow up on my prior post about this issue: I used Elements photomerge on another computer with only 512 MB memory and no scratch disk and the same four 100 MB files merged quickly and easily.
So there does seem to be an issue with PS8 and too much memory. Whodathunk PS could have too much memory? I am going to search this forum for this issue, experiment with reducing PSs available memory and look at page file size while waiting for PS 8.1.
Russell,
Keep up the pressure – there is apparently a very definite problem with 2Gigs dual channel RAM and Photoshop, despite protestations from those at Adobe. There are far too many of us with wildly disparate systems (though all Intel based, I note) suffering this same problem.
Sorry, Adobe, every other program I have works fine – it’s just Photoshop that seems to completely fall over with the 2Gig dual channel thing. And as Photoshop loudly claims to support 2Gigs of RAM, I find it totally unacceptable that us owners of and investors in such systems are being instructed to wind back allocations or remove RAM to make the thing work properly.
Surely it is up to the writers of the software to release a product that fulfils their claims, not up to the customers to modify their hardware to fit requirements other than those claimed by the software manufacturers in the first place.
I don’t know quite what it is with the IT industry, but they seem to get away with blue-bloody murder in these situations – any other industry perpetrating such deficient goods would be hauled up in front of courts and forced to pay bucketloads in compensation.
Fred.
Thanks for the rant, Fred. Misery loves company 🙂
I can’t believe that Adobe is not aware of something wrong is going on here. Problem is that everyone’s off enjoying a probably well-deserved holiday (CS still does do a LOT of great stuff) and it won’t be until next week that anyone gets to poke at this issue in earnest.
It still helps to keep the issue on the top of the pile. Unfortunately this forum format scrolls info off so quickly that the same issues get raised over and over again. It would be useful to have topic threads that consolidated these problems in one place rather than having 5-10 threads all discussing the same thing.
Russell
Chris Cox and others have stated very clearly that setting RAM usage about 75% in Photoshop will make it unstable.
On 2Gig boxes I’ve found anything up to 85% is OK (Mac OS X, Windows 2K and XP) and for 1Gig boxes (again Mac OS X, Win 2K and XP) it is around 70%. With 1.5 Gig you’ll be somewhere around 75%.
My values were determined through watching the paging rate and timing the progress of images up to around 400MB flat 16bit tiffs when run through a fairly demanding Action. This action reflects a real world workflow (for me) involving: open, resize, gaussian blur, copy layers, masks, curves adjustment layers, convert to profile, unsharp mask, and save as.
Obviously image size will have an impact on the memory value chosen. If you work with smaller images then the memory allocation to Photoshop can be higher. Remember also that you can’t avoid hitting the scratch disk so stop worrying about it. Hitting the Windows/Mac swap file (referred to as Paging below) is what you’re really trying to avoid/minimise. The explanation by Russell Williams (Adobe Photoshop Eng Manager) and found at various Photoshop related locations around the web now follows. Below the dotted line is Russells words
…………………………………………………… …………………….
Here’s the scoop on the memory slider:
Photoshop measures RAM and then subtracts a very rough estimate of how much the OS needs and how much is needed to hold Photoshop’s program instructions, and calls that 100%. Photoshop can never use more than 2GB. If you’re mostly working only in Photoshop, numbers from 90-95% are probably fine. By "working only in Photoshop", I mean not having other applications doing actual computation in the background. Just having other apps launched and inactive doesn’t matter much. If you have lots of RAM (1GB or more) numbers in the 95% range are fine. If you have more than 2GB RAM, tell Photoshop to use 100%.
Setting the slider too low will cause Photoshop to leave memory unused that it could be using. The symptom of that is that the efficiency number (in the info box at the bottom of the document number) starts dropping. If the efficiency number is less than 95% or so, Photoshop is moving image data to and from the disk during normal operations, and should try increasing the memory slider.
Setting the slider too high used to cause Windows 95/98/ME to be unstable, but that’s generally not an issue with Win2K, WinXP, or MacOS X.
Setting it too high — not leaving enough memory for the OS and other active applications, will cause Photoshop’s memory to be paged out by the OS. That hurts performance a lot — even more than Photoshop moving stuff to the scratch file.
One way to see if the percentage number is too high is to look at the OS performance monitor and check the paging rate (*) during typical operation in Photoshop. If you see many pagins and pageouts (more than a couple per second), the OS’s VM system is moving stuff in and out from disk, so you need to reduce Photoshop’s memory slider.
If you can’t find a point that gives you a 95+% efficiency and a very low paging rate, you need to add RAM. Remember you have to restart Photoshop after moving the memory slider for changes to take effect.
(*) To check the paging rate on OS X, open a terminal window and enter "top". That’s the Unix performance monitor. At the bottom of the first clump of info is a line that will look like:
VM: 3.47G + 3.62M 47818(0) pageins, 107895(0) pageouts
The numbers in parentheses before pageins and pageouts are the number of disk read and write operations over the last five seconds (the display will update every 5 seconds).
On Windows, run Administrative Tools->Performance, and add a performance counter (right click on the graph area and pick, "add counters…"). The counter you want is in the Memory "performance object" and is called Pages/sec.
We’re working with the OS vendors to remove the need for the memory slider in
Hmmm. Maybe you are running out of resources???
There are a dozen or two dozen misc stupid programs that can load up and run in the background. This eats up your resources and causes Photoshop to crash – no matter how much ram.
I have a Dell 3.2 running 2 gig of ram and dual 120 gig hard drives running in a mirrored array.
I am also running Photoshop CS at 90% – and have been since day one – with never a crash. I also do the no-no of running the scratch on the same partition – as I choose to have only one.
So here is what I just did. Loaded up five 70 meg files. Dropped them into layers, played, merged, etc. No problem. Then I converted one to 524 meg file. No problem. Then I dumped the other four and ran unsharp mask on the 524. No problem and ram quick. OK. Let’s push the system a little. Converted it to 735 megs and ran Plastic Wrap. Now this was a little slow (the reason for choosing Plastic Wrap) but – no problem.
Summary: I don’t think it is a CS problem. I suspect it is a computer setup problem. I wish I was smart enough to figure it out for you. Sorry. You might check your resources when you sre doing all this to see if they are getting low. Also, is your scratch allocation large enough?
Steve,
Just for fun could you do a little test for me:
Create a simple 65MB RGB file (example: 40" x 25" @150ppi). Save it as a JPEG – Quality: 8, Format Options: Progressive, Scans : 3.
Does this work just fine on your system?
Thanks.
Russell
Yes – the memory alllocation is something that we ran out of time to retest, and it turns out we didn’t leave quite enough headroom.
Setting the percentage between 50% and 75% should be safe. But above 75% can sometimes make plugins run out of space.
Lordy, lordy, lordy, Chris.
Having been assured by your good self that my RAM problems were 99% likely to be hardware, this answer is now given. In the meantime I have changed my Mobo twice and RAM 3 times, and am now looking a right twit in the eyes of the hardware supplier, as (of course) the problems still exist. Not to mention the out-of-pocket expenses I have incurred because of all this swapping.
I fail to see why Adobe (for at least the second time now) has felt so pressured by its own internal deadlines that it has seen fit to sell product that clearly was not ready for release.
Could you please give us an approximate time on the .01 update that will fix all this?
FWIW, my system only seems to lose the "out of RAM" notices at below 45% allocation (P4 3.0C, Asus P4P800 Deluxe Mobo, 2GB Kingston CL-2 RAM in 4x 512MB dual channel matched pairs). It is really annoying, frustrating and time-consuming to watch CS hit the wall so early and start writing to virtual way before it should be necessary. Thank heavens that at least my scratch is to a SATA RAID 0 setup and not just a plain ol’ IDE HD.
Can’t wait to see how the thing works when CS gets fixed.
Fred.
That is a brave admission Chris. Applaud your honesty. Corporate deadlines take precedence over quality testing even in Adobe. I suppose it was obvious that things were a bit hurried with the Arrange-Tile horizontal "oversight" which nobody except a panorama freak would want to use and which is irritating more than anything. I can sympathise with Fred having gone to all that hassle.
More like: we didn’t know it was a problem, didn’t think it could be a problem (sometimes OS details take you by suprise) so we didn’t think about testing it until it was too late. Normally, setting Photoshop’s memory allocation percentage lower will fix the problem — but not always. We need to spend some more time on the PhotoMerge code and examining the way it’s many parts handle memory. But that isn’t likely to happen in a dot release – that’s major, long term work.
Can we get machine specs and a copy of the photos you’re trying to merge so we can test the problem here?
(in other words: after a quick set of tests, we can’t find the problem)
Email for snail mail details if you need to send a CD or DVD.
Actually, after my initial (and somewhat understandable) indignancy at this admission, I too would like to thank Chris for posting that reply. At least I now have a much clearer idea of where I stand (not that I’m liking it much!).
Mick, the problem runs deeper than just "panorama freaks" as you put it. I first encountered problems with the new machine using 7.0.1 and applying a Noise>Diffuse Glow filter under settings that worked fine on my old P111 1.0, 1.5Gig SDRAM box (75% allocated). I updated to CS because I thought that would be the cure, but things were as bad.
Unfortunately for me, I have also turned my business towards the production of digital panoramas, so I am really caught here.
The most annoying thing is the unpredictability of the out of RAM (or sometimes "out of storage") stops – the diffuse glow thing was OK at 65% RAM allocation, I have a custom action sequence that won’t run over 40%, Pano Tools regularly folds up if over 45% (and "storage" is certainly OK – 30 Gig SATA RAID 0 scratch, 260 Gig additional free HD space over 4 physical drives, plus the previously mentioned 2 Gig dual channel PC3200 DDR RAM).
To avoid wasting time with repeating "stopped" sequences, I now have CS set to 40% allocation. I am unwilling to actually pull RAM as the 2 Gigs certainly helps many other programs I run to absolutely fly – it is a real pity that PS has this problem, for I would dearly love to see it fly, too, and vindicate all the $$$ I spent on this new computer.
Fred.
Fred, the reference to panorama freaks was completely incidental. I was just thinking about who might find horizontal tiling useful (you know the old tiling "oversight bug" I presume). I had forgotten the initial subject of this thread in fact. I also thought Chris was referring to memory allocation in PSCS in general and not just in Photo Merge.
I truly sympathise with your predicament as I had a mega hassle with my new computer recently and changed just about everything in trying to find the problem. I literally carried my computer about 20 times in and out of the dealer’s place before I got it working properly. It turned out in the end to be a bad processor, probably due to the dealer putting in an inadequate cooling system in the first place. I was very close to changing to a dual channel DDR 2 Gig system very similar to yours but I’m glad I didn’t as there does seem to be some unresolved problem with PSCS (and older versions according to what you say?) and some of these systems. I’ll manage with my 1 Gig system for now. I wish you the best.
