PhotoShop slowing down 2011 MBP.. Alot

[Shambles]

On my MacBook Pro (standard 13" model), PhotoShop runs extremely slow, to the point of it causing music playing through iTunes to lag and beachballs every 10 seconds.

I only have iTunes and Chrome open when running it.

It's taking up to a minute just to open a document (around 600 Mb+ usually) and considerably longer when saving.

I run Utorrent every night, could that be the cause of this slowness? (When I close Utorrent and restart the Mac the slowness persists).

What can I do to speed up my Mac again? Cheers

 

[alust2013]

Check Activity Monitor for your memory usage. You may be using all of it and it's spilling into page outs. That will slow down the computer quite a bit. If that's the issue, upgrade to 8GB

 

[Shambles]

Erm heres the system memory tab.. Is RAM the problem?

 

[dagamer34]

Could possibly be disk fragmentation (and despite what you hear, any filesystem can get fragmentation when it has heavy I/O going on like uTorrent).

If anything, I'd torrent on a separate drive or a separate computer. How much free space do you have?

 

[Shambles]

I move the downloaded files onto a external harddrive when there finished downloading. So it would be better to download directly onto the external hd?

 

[alust2013]

Yeah, anything over maybe a couple hundred megs of Page outs will cause slowdowns, you could definitely use a RAM upgrade with 1.24 GB.

 

[dagamer34]

Does everything run smoothly when Photoshop isn't running? It may be you don't have enough RAM if you are dealing with 600MB size documents.

 

[Shambles]

Yeah but I just use Chrome and iTunes really so you'd expect them to. Cinema 4D doesn't run that great but I assume that's down to the integrated graphics mostly.