Optimal Settings for PSCS2 and Bridge

JL
Posted By
Judith_Lipmanson
Jun 4, 2005
Views
231
Replies
2
Status
Closed
Following the advice for CS, I’ve put a Paging File on both of my hard drives, C and D. Drive C is used only for programs and system files, Drive D contains only data files, including all images. Both drives are serial ATAs, with C being a 10,000 RPM 35GB, and D being a 7200 RPM 110GB. Plenty of room on both, so I set a 2048mb PF on C and a 3069mb PF on D. For Bridge, I have local cache files. I am on Win XPPro SP2 with a 2.1GHz Pentium 4 and 2GB memory.

I recently noticed, in looking at a graphical representation of each of these drives, that only Drive D has the Paging File set up. There is none on Drive C. While PSCS2 was running and I was working, I opened the Task Manager Performance screen and watched CPU and PF utilization. Much to my surprise I found the PF on Drive D barely used, and CPU utilization 100% used every time I did anything in CS2 or Bridge. Nothing else was running at that time.

Obviously, CS2 is CPU intensive and should benefit from a dual chip if the SW takes advantage of it. Does it? And it seems that my ample memory takes up most of the burden and doesn’t rely on the PF.

Second, I question whether in my case having a PF on both drives provides any benefit with PSCS2, being that my data drive is the slower one. Wouldn’t things work better with one paging file on my faster Drive C?

What are the recommended optimization settings for CS2?

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JJ
John Joslin
Jun 4, 2005
Are you mixing up Paging File and Scratch Disk?

Windows uses a Paging file, usually co-located with the OS on Drive C. The recommended setting is max = min = 2x physical RAM.

Photoshop uses one or more Scratch Disks which are nominated in the Preferences. Ideally the primary scratch should be on a different physical drive from the OS and its Paging File.

The sizes of the temporary files created on the Scratch Disks when PS is running are set by the application and not by the user.

The way the memory is managed by PS has changed recently and there are a lot of posts here in the forum describing this. A max usage of not greater than 55% available RAM seems to be the optimum for most users.
JL
Judith_Lipmanson
Jun 4, 2005
John:

Obviously I am mixed up about the definition of Paging and Scratch. I thought they are one and the same — used for swapping out from memory to disk when memory is not sufficient for the processing.

Also, I have my memory usage for PS set to 75%, where it was for PSCS. It worked fine that way. I’ll set it back to 55%.

Will do a search for those posts. Thanks.

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