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doc4x5

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 15, 2008
51
12
the great Pacific northwest
I have an early 2008 Mac Pro with two 2.8 Quad Core Xeons and 14GB of RAM running Mountain Lion 10.8.5. My hard drives have plenty of room on them. I use a scratch disk on a drive separate from the drive on which PS is located. When working on my photography, I have only Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5.3 running.

As I continue to use Photoshop, add layers with masks, save and re-save the image, the computer slows with endless spinning beachballs until it's just about unusable. In activity monitor, the free memory declines, and if I reboot, I'm back to fine... for a while. If I quit PS and LR, I'm back to 7-8GB of free RAM, but that's a waste of time as well. In the past I had used the app "free memory," and when this happened, I'd stop, ask it to free up some memory and then go on. It was also time wasted, but it seemed better than a reboot. A friend suggested that the app was not really helpful so I trashed it. I'd love to get a new Mac Pro, but financially that's not in the cards for a while. I'm not too keen on spending a lot of money upgrading the current machine with more RAM and/or an SSD.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there something wrong with how my machine allocates memory? I've never had a virus or spyware to my knowledge. It's a Mac for heaven's sake. I don't frequent weird websites or open attachments from people I don't know.

Any thoughts would be helpful.

Thanks.

Eric
 
Buy used ram on eBay with return option, new is staggeringly expensive and uneconomical to upgrade.

With 32gb in my 3,1 running PS CS6 I've only been able to slow it up by using raw from my friends D3X and adding ludicrous layers, far more than I ever would do in reality. The raw from my old D90 it just runs with aplomb with bridge and quark also open!

Mavericks does manage memory better than ML but I would stick some used 4gb FB-DIMM's in first before upgrading OSX.
 
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