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Please help, photoshop cs5 is only using 1 of my 8 cores!

student_trap

student_trap

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Is this what is meant to happen, I thought that it had multicore support? It is so frustrating when using photomerge to see in activity monitor that one core is maxed and the other 7 idle!

Also, for some reason my it has started to say that my mac doesn't have enough memory to complete tasks (I have 8gb), shouldn't it just use scratch when it runs out of ram?

Please help guys as I am going nuts
 
Photoshop > Preferences > Performance.

Have a check in there to up the RAM to the highest it recommends (don't go over though, it won't do you any favours).

Also check the "big and wide" box. Don't know why it's going on one core though, uses both of mine (never to 200% though, normally maxes at 120%).
 
I've hit the ram wall with 10GB so it's gonna happen. Kinda lame but I think it's the 64bit part kicking in. Not sure why it doesn't jump to scratch though.

And I wouldn't expect it to be multi core, either. PS never really needs that much CPU. It'd be nice for sure but it's more a GPU/HDD/RAM program.
 
That max Photoshop can use is 2. Not sure, but I think its the same for After Effects. Still weird that its only using one...
 
strausd said:
That max Photoshop can use is 2. Not sure, but I think its the same for After Effects. Still weird that its only using one...
Click to expand...

Time to update, Straus.

I'm also using an SSD as scratch disk.

GTX480 is doing it's part as well.

See Photoshop Fly !!!


student_trap said:
Also, for some reason my it has started to say that my mac doesn't have enough memory to complete tasks (I have 8gb), shouldn't it just use scratch when it runs out of ram?
Click to expand...

Are you sure it isn't the "not Enough Vram" warning when the GPU runs out of RAm and it turns off OpenGl acceleration?

A 256 Meg GPU does so pretty quickly.
 

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thanks for the replies everyone.

I have already been through the preferences and can't seem to make any changes that correct either problem.

in more detail, the problems are as follows:

1. Photoshop will only use one core, which is VERY annoying when working with large processor heavy tools. I can literally see the computer choking as it refuses to use more than a single core and is starving for more cycles, which it should have access to

2. When using large files (particularly panoramic photo-merges), the activity monitor shows my ram slowly chugging down towards zero, and when it reaches zero, I get a warning that I am out of ram and the current process halts.

Now when using CS3 (I only started using CS5 about a week ago) this is the point that the computer would then start to use a hard drive for more memory (obviously processes would slow at this point!), but with CS5, it spells the end of any particular command.

So far I have tried almost everything, and in the end reinstalled photoshop. But still nothing has remedied the situation, and it is very concerning for me (and my work!). I have also tried setting five different hard drives as scratch drives, again to no avail.


Has anyone had any similar experiences? Any solutions?

Could this potentially be some problem with differences in .plist files between my boot and files drives? I am guessing that my next step would be a complete system reinstall?
 

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student_trap said:
2. When using large files (particularly panoramic photo-merges), the activity monitor shows my ram slowly chugging down towards zero, and when it reaches zero, I get a warning that I am out of ram and the current process halts.
Click to expand...

I get this too, don't watch for when it's counting downwards, at that point it's already cancelled the operation (it just waits until it finishes to tell you this), watch for the highest point it gets to, you might need to alter the RAM allocation meter.
 
Schtumple said:
I get this too, don't watch for when it's counting downwards, at that point it's already cancelled the operation (it just waits until it finishes to tell you this), watch for the highest point it gets to, you might need to alter the RAM allocation meter.
Click to expand...

Ok well it started with 4.2GB free RAM and displayed the message at 1.38GB free RAM, and changing the slider in preferences doesn't make any difference. To make matters worse, the whole thing seems even slower now🙁 can't even use the quick selection tool without it choking.

Any chance that this is a hardware issue?
 
I doubt it's hardware issue, it's probably just a cr*ppy coding on Adobes part, PS CS4 was incredibly buggy for me, where as CS3 was fine, CS5 now has the same issue you've got, it just refuses to use the hard drive to aid with RAM.
 
The Rominator said:
I'm also using an SSD as scratch disk.
Click to expand...
SSD's aren't really suited to a high write environment though, particularly MLC based disks. You'd actually be better off getting 2 - 3x mechanical drives, and creating a striped set as scratch space. It's cheap, and capable of fast reads and writes.
 
nanofrog said:
SSD's aren't really suited to a high write environment though, particularly MLC based disks. You'd actually be better off getting 2 - 3x mechanical drives, and creating a striped set as scratch space. It's cheap, and capable of fast reads and writes.
Click to expand...

I suppose. My Photoshop use is primarily single images for print work to be used on film sets. Not a "power user", rarely have more than 3 images open at once.

To OP:

Maybe it's time to buy more RAM?
 
The Rominator said:
I suppose. My Photoshop use is primarily single images for print work to be used on film sets. Not a "power user", rarely have more than 3 images open at once.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure how large your images are, or whether or not you keep them on the SSD.

But you could take the SSD and make a striped set of the pair for the OS/applications disk, and use mechanical for scratch (assuming you've the disks lying around/repurpose existing disks in use).

Just a thought, as I'm a bit unclear as to what would be a better solution for your usage, given what you already have on hand.
 
student_trap said:
Is this what is meant to happen, I thought that it had multicore support? It is so frustrating when using photomerge to see in activity monitor that one core is maxed and the other 7 idle!

Also, for some reason my it has started to say that my mac doesn't have enough memory to complete tasks (I have 8gb), shouldn't it just use scratch when it runs out of ram?

Please help guys as I am going nuts
Click to expand...

Try some of these benches to see how well you HW stacks up:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/04/photoshop_cs5_64-bit_benchmarks.html
 
Try Radial blur, see what happens to your task manager.

Also check out John's article here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2006/12/whats_the_story_with_photoshop_multi_core.html (read the "Brief Primer" link too in the article).

Basically, photoshop can't use more than two cores for most everything unless you do radial blur. It is just the math and how the engine was created.

Somethings, like text/typing, cannot be broken down into multiple cores (talks about that in the Primer).

I have been talking to an Adobe developer, you will find these 'out of memory' errors quite abundant with CS5 in the forums on Adobe.

For me, it concerns Content Aware and ACR when batching more than 150 photos. ACR did not run out of memory in CS4 but does in CS5 (I batched the same RAW photos).

They are gonna need to fix the memory errors.
 
Probably not what you are looking for, but I just disabled openGL and noticed a HUGE difference in performance. I work with a Wacom Intuos 4 so using it for drawing motions is pretty important. Photoshop used to always crash once I started using a lot of drawing motions. Not only would it crash, but before that, every motion was EXTREMELY slow! After I disabled openGL, no more crashes, no more slow motions, and everything is just much faster!
 
The ammount of cores that Photoshop uses depends on the filter, action or tool that you use. Some can only use one core, some can use multiple cores. Gaussian Blur, for example, uses all the 8 cores in my machine, on the other hand, Lens Blur can only use one and is therefore painfully slow. So I guess it depends on how the filter is programmed, and, as it was mentioned before, the kind of task at hand (some tasks can't be broken into more than one processor)

Daschund
 
strausd said:
Probably not what you are looking for, but I just disabled openGL and noticed a HUGE difference in performance. I work with a Wacom Intuos 4 so using it for drawing motions is pretty important. Photoshop used to always crash once I started using a lot of drawing motions. Not only would it crash, but before that, every motion was EXTREMELY slow! After I disabled openGL, no more crashes, no more slow motions, and everything is just much faster!
Click to expand...

Which GPU do you have?
 
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