Abnormal program termination in PS CS when printing

Following up on this issue after further research into previous threads on the issue,it appears that Patrick Donegan has done a brilliant job of determining exactly what the issue is:

I found that by REDUCING the amount of memory that Photoshop uses,

I can print larger files. Apparently, the OS or the print driver chokes when printing large files when Photoshop has reserved more than 70% of the *physical RAM* available.
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&a mp;selm=2ccece30.19%40webx.la2eafNXanI
<<<

Excellent work, Patrick! Thank you for this info. It does the trick for me as well. I had my memory slider set way up to like 1800 MB (on a 2GB machine). So, my previous trial-and-error workaround (lower image resolution) should be disregarded in favor of lowering Photoshop’s reserved memory amount (at least for printing).

As far as the issue of correcting the underlying software problems leading to the abnormal program termination, I do want to reiterate the obvious, that Adobe needs to get involved and do something. Semi-official responses like the following one Patrick got are really frustrating to me as a user, because they’re wrong, technically lazy, and disrespectful to the user:

how many times do I have to say: the memory limit slider has NOTHING to do with the Macintosh and is very much necessary on all modern OSes. It cannot be left to the OS because the OS can’t deal with that much memory, nor does it know anything about images or how they are going to be processed — leaving it to the OS would cause problems for other applications, slow things to a crawl, and never let you edit anything that might ever require more than 2 Gig of total storage (RAM and disk).

Your core problem with printing can only be fixed by the company that caused the problem – and that company has to be Epson (from basic logic we’ve already covered). Microsoft and Adobe can’t do anything about it. We have discussed the issue with Epson, but they have not responded with any fixes. There is nothing more that we can do.

And your manual documents the memory setting preference – there isn’t much more we can say without documenting each and every problem we encounter with third party software and every release of the OSes.

( http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&a mp;selm=2ccece30.25%40webx.la2eafNXanI)
<<<<<<<<<<<<

Let’s break down some of these statements carefully:

1. "the memory limit slider…is very much necessary on all modern OSes. It cannot be left to the OS because the OS can’t deal with that much memory…"

Questions to think about:
Why say "all modern OSes"? Is this a relevant issue? Are Linux, QNX, etc supposed to be included in that list? This seems like gratuitous hand-waving to me. What’s the specific technical point in generalizing to all OSes?

Why say "the OS can’t deal with that much memory", when this is clearly not true. In Windows XP, for example, a machine can have 4GB of physical RAM, plus many GBs more of paging file space. Cf http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=237740. Also, other applications (e.g. Ultra-Edit 32) handle incredibly huge files (file size much greater than physical RAM, as they advertise) without needing a memory slider or any other memory control.

My point is, someone provided evidence (which I can personally corroborate) that the PS memory slider is a critical factor in the "abnormal program termination" print errors. Is it really constructive to deflect attention away from the cause-and-effect facts (lowering memory slider limit stops program from crashing) and go into a vague, blind defense of Adobe’s design choice to provide the memory slider?

2. "Your core problem with printing can only be fixed by the company that caused the problem – and that company has to be Epson (from basic logic we’ve already covered). Microsoft and Adobe can’t do anything about it."

Really? While it’s certainly true that the "core problem" is indeed the printer driver, it’s also true that the "core problem" in the driver *results* in a program crash for Photoshop. Not everyone of course takes pride in their work, but one might reasonably expect Adobe to take program crashes a little more seriously.

"There is nothing more that we can do". Really? Has anyone actually taken a hard, close look at the technical details of the problem? I thought that software architects at places like Adobe get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, precisely because they *are* able to design solutions to problems like this one. At the very least, PS should be able to gracefully handle the printer error without crashing.

3. "there isn’t much more we can say without documenting each and every problem we encounter with third party software and every release of the OSes."

Have you looked around lately? Many software companies do in fact do just that. It’s called "documentation". Isn’t Epson one of the larger printer companies? Wouldn’t you tend to think that a problem inherent in a broad range of printer drivers, supplied by a world leader in printers, and that consistently causes the main program in question (Photoshop) to crash, unless a memory limit slider is set appropriately in the Photoshop program… would be worthy of documentation?

Sign me,

Another frustrated end-user

Brad Stiritz wrote:

Following up on this issue after further research into previous threads on the issue,it appears that Patrick Donegan has done a brilliant job of determining exactly what the issue is:

I found that by REDUCING the amount of memory that Photoshop uses,

I can print larger files. Apparently, the OS or the print driver chokes when printing large files when Photoshop has reserved more

than

70% of the *physical RAM* available.

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&a mp;selm=2ccece30.19%40webx.la2eafNXanI

<<<

Excellent work, Patrick! Thank you for this info. It does the trick for me as well. I had my memory slider set way up to like 1800 MB (on a 2GB machine). So, my previous trial-and-error workaround (lower image resolution) should be disregarded in favor of lowering Photoshop’s reserved memory amount (at least for printing).

I have also been having the problem since adding memory to my computer, now at 1.5 GB. I appreciate the legwork done by you and others in this group. However, I have another solution that is working for me. I changed the spooler settings so that print jobs don’t start until the program finishes dumping the data to the spooler. This may prevent the print driver from loading before Photoshop finishes communicating with the operating system. I can now run at 90% memory in Photoshop and print large images with ease. The printer just doesn’t start immediately, but that’s no problem.