OSX, Photoshop, Excessive Pageouts

[speekez]

I have a 2x 2.66 Dual Core Intel Xeon mac with 5GB of RAM. Running latest OSX. Lately, have been noticing slowdowns and, when using the Terminal, have been seeing a lot of Pageouts.

For the screengrabs below, I had a fresh restart, and opened 5 layered Photoshop files in Photoshop each at about 100MB in size (dragged from Finder, not using Bridge -- Bridge was not open). As they opened, the Pageouts remained at zero. Right after they all finished opening, I saw the pageouts steadily climb to the number in the screengrab. I wasn't doing any other activity... and the number just kept climbing, and then stopped.

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=13SIrCYj6pckPmlFBsnxe6yOL2VRT0

Also is a screengrab of my Photoshop performance settings. Is this common behavior? Suggestions on some remedies to try? Thanks.

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1RkddaYyrEVnGaPMyuxF4JhBG3YgI1

Any thoughts or anything suspect?

 

[benpatient]

go ahead and set the RAM usage to 3072.

why does your primary scratch disc only have 8gb free?

That could be an issue...not one that would cause page-outs, but one that would cause you to notice them.

my mac pro has 10 gb and only 4gb in use right now, and my swap file is 4gb according to activity viewer. I'm on 22 days of uptime. Page outs are less than 20% of page ins.

My photoshop virtual memory is just under 3gb right now.

 

[speekez]

go ahead and set the RAM usage to 3072.

why does your primary scratch disc only have 8gb free?

That could be an issue...not one that would cause page-outs, but one that would cause you to notice them.

my mac pro has 10 gb and only 4gb in use right now, and my swap file is 4gb according to activity viewer. I'm on 22 days of uptime. Page outs are less than 20% of page ins.

My photoshop virtual memory is just under 3gb right now.

Hmm. Photoshop rarely bites into the scratch disk. Maybe a gig at most. Having a huge scratch disk isn't really necesary these days when using lots of RAM. Photoshop is the only program making use of the scratch disk. Or, feel free to let me know otherwise. I've also given Photoshop access to another disk with 600GB should it need it