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Photoshop CS6 issues on 27 inch iMac

Archerious

Archerious

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 12, 2010
374
39
Texas
As the title says, my iMac is having lagging issues in Photoshop CS6. It takes almost 5 minutes to render one layer (even text layers take this long). My iMac 2012 model has 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 675MX, and my RAM shows free 33.6MB, inactive 3.33GB, wired 1.28GB, Active 3.35GB, and used 7.96GB. It there not enough RAM? My MBP has 8GB RAM and its a late 2011 model and I've never had issues, same goes for my PC. This is strange. I mean my iMac isn't lagging in Safari, or my mail. Hmm....need some help please! Thank you!
 
Vampire5003 said:
As the title says, my iMac is having lagging issues in Photoshop CS6. It takes almost 5 minutes to render one layer (even text layers take this long). My iMac 2012 model has 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 675MX, and my RAM shows free 33.6MB, inactive 3.33GB, wired 1.28GB, Active 3.35GB, and used 7.96GB. It there not enough RAM? My MBP has 8GB RAM and its a late 2011 model and I've never had issues, same goes for my PC. This is strange. I mean my iMac isn't lagging in Safari, or my mail. Hmm....need some help please! Thank you!
Click to expand...

Have you tried restarting PS or the iMac?
How big is the file you're working with?

I have the same iMac but with 680Mx, Fusion and 32Gb of RAM. I've used PS today (still running in the back ground) and I'm only using about 1/3 of my RAM, so about 10Gb. So you might need more RAM.
 
Vampire5003 said:
As the title says, my iMac is having lagging issues in Photoshop CS6. It takes almost 5 minutes to render one layer (even text layers take this long). My iMac 2012 model has 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 675MX, and my RAM shows free 33.6MB, inactive 3.33GB, wired 1.28GB, Active 3.35GB, and used 7.96GB. It there not enough RAM? My MBP has 8GB RAM and its a late 2011 model and I've never had issues, same goes for my PC. This is strange. I mean my iMac isn't lagging in Safari, or my mail. Hmm....need some help please! Thank you!
Click to expand...

Try running your machine with just Photoshop open if you aren't already. 8GB of RAM is the minimum needed to run Photoshop well, regardless of whatever Adobe's spec's say.

Just out of curiosity, can you try a shut down and restart to see if it still occurs with nothing running then. Allow enough time for the system to completely restart before opening Photoshop.
 
I've recently experienced some sluggish performance as well in CS6. My iMac is is almost the same as yours and I am willing to bet you have a lot of Page Outs in your Activity Monitor. I was using Photoshop for a good hour the other day messing with huge 7000x4000 image files when it was starting to slow down and my Page Outs were sitting around 5gb when I was done! :eek:

I think the solution is more RAM - 8gb does not seem to cut it.
 
Lancer said:
Have you tried restarting PS or the iMac?
How big is the file you're working with?

I have the same iMac but with 680Mx, Fusion and 32Gb of RAM. I've used PS today (still running in the back ground) and I'm only using about 1/3 of my RAM, so about 10Gb. So you might need more RAM.
Click to expand...

I was going to ask about file size as well, I'd also be curious if there's performance issues with other applications.

At a glance it sounds like an issue other than the hardware, for general use that machine should be capable of running Photoshop reasonably competently (though more RAM never hurts).
 
I agree and with the 27" its easy to add more RAM.

The only performance issues I've had with my new iMac is FireFox, my iMac is running 24/7, with a weekly restart but periodically I need to quit FireFox and start it again.

Not had any noticeable issues with PS6 yet, but I have 32Gb of RAM to play with.
 
I listened to all of you, and I went out to Fry's and got Patriot 16GB DDR3 1600MHZ Kit (2X 8GB sticks) and installed in the empty slots on my iMac. I am attaching a screenshot, because my photoshop is using 14GB RAM and its still sluggish! What am I doing wrong or do I have the worst luck? Like I have 24GB total RAM, but I'm getting bad performance. I had photoshop on my old PC, it had a GTX 680 and 16GB RAM but it was never sluggish. Does the Mac version of Photoshop CS6 use more RAM? I am confused. Oh and I work on Web Design work mostly, with documents from 950X1050, and sometimes 1200X2000. Usually 72 PPI, and background black or white. Another issue is I can't see my text that I attend to make layers in and add. It works on my MBP, and it worked in my MBA (previously owned) but not my iMac. Perhaps I should reinstall Photoshop? Could it be the HDD bring the performance down? Hmm....

Thanks,

T

PS: Please keep the replies coming!
 

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What percentage of ram usage have you got Photoshop set to use? It should be around 70%. Maybe supply a screen shot of your performance page in Photoshop preferences. Are there any plug ins that maybe active in the background?
 
Check your scratch disk. If its full or close to being full you will need to do something about it. Even with a bucket load of RAM occasionally PS will still need to use the scratch disk.

I have the 27" with SSD and 16GB RAM. The scratch disk is the SSD and Photoshop is immensely fast.

Check this out.

Also having more than 10 (I think) windows of a certain size open in PS will kill the OpenGL rendering of any windows you open after the 10th so rendering will be slower.
 
Last edited:
If you have a decent external drive, try setting this as the primary scratch disk instead of the internal HD.
With 16GB of RAM you shouldn't have these issues unless your main HD is almost full and you're editing 500MB files.
 
Scratch disk is a good call, that could certainly slow down operations in Photoshop to a crawl as could a full hard drive in general.

The information you've given us is a bit limited though, how is performance is other areas. Do you notice things slowing down all around or is it just in Photoshop?
 
fig said:
Scratch disk is a good call, that could certainly slow down operations in Photoshop to a crawl as could a full hard drive in general.

The information you've given us is a bit limited though, how is performance is other areas. Do you notice things slowing down all around or is it just in Photoshop?
Click to expand...

Just photoshop, and I have 24GB RAM total, but photoshop is using around 14-17GBs of RAM by itself. My HDD has about 860GB free. It is a 1TB HDD. I don't have a SSD. Is that the problem?
 
SSD will help general speeds on day to day stuff but wouldn't make that significant a difference in Photoshop, it's certainly not the bottleneck you're experiencing.

You have enough hard drive space so that wouldn't seem to be the issue, only thing I can think to check would be under Preferences -> Performance and make sure you've got enough RAM assigned to Photoshop and that your scratch disk is the correct disk (the link a few posts back might be helpful too).

If all that checks out I'd look at reinstalling Photoshop, nothing on your machine itself would seem to indicate a problem otherwise.
 
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