Help me optimize my memory

Forgive my ignorance, but I don't believe that the current OS really allows you allocate memory to applications. The last time I remember doing this was in the mid 90s with System 7 under the Get Info screen when my internal memory was at a premium.

In my recent experience, the Mac just assigns as much or as little memory to each app on the fly. I have never had any issues, although I have not been using anything as graphically intense as you.

 

Let the OS handle it. We haven't had to do that for years and I'm not sure you can even do it now.

 

The above people don't know what they are talking about OP.

Adobe suggests you leave ~2GB of RAM to other apps and the rest to AE. They say each process (you can have up to 8 on your machine with MP enabled) should have from 2-4GB of RAM allocated to it in order to function correctly.

So leaving 2GB to the OS and other apps and at least 2GB per process you need at least 18GB to not slow anything down while enabling MP in After Effects and this is the bare minimum Adobe recommends.

Example, I freelanced at an agency and they were claiming their machines became unresponsive to anything when rendering in AE. They had 8-core machines (16 processes) and had multiprocessing enabled with 6GB of RAM. This essentially choked everything. I turned MP off for them and they were shocked how much faster they went on only a single core with 6GB of ram.

Read through these 3 articles. There are times MP enabling will help and when it won't.

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS9F936D13-E76A-41e4-BF8F-577132AB4723a.html#WS3bf812c123007fb8-2004fe7b1270c34465d-8000

http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2009/12/performance-tip-dont-starve-yo.html

http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2010/10/please-try-recommended-memory-settings-for-after-effects-cs5-and-give-feedback.html

 

Fair enough, I stand corrected. That being said, I don't process anything at that level as a amateur photographer. For me the apps run just fine on standard settings without having them eat resources. I guess if I was using at a commercial level but that will never happen.

And you are correct OP, I totally forgot that you can tweak the settings in Adobe products.

Seems to me like gameface gave you some great links. I'm not sure at what level you plan to use the software, but if you are at the beginning level, I would use it out of the box first and start to tweak slowly from there. You will eventually find good settings.

 

I totally agree! Without knowing what you are doing you can really muck up not only the performance of AE but also your other processes while AE is rendering. Out of the box works for most people unless you are doing complex animations, have a power house machine and tons of ram.

I usually just render over night... But rendering is billable hours so you can always make more money having a slower machine if not on a tight deadline