Photoshop using large amount of Virtual Memory.

[markturnip]

Hey, Sorry If I've posted in the wrong topic, but I hope someone can give me some advice.

I've been using photoshop for years, and never really handled files any bigger than about 200mb. But lately I've been handling file as big as 1.3gb, my computers been really slow at handling them, I just assumed that was normal because of the shear size. I have a mid 2007 iMac 2.4g with 2gb ram. (Leopard, CS3)

So I decided I'd look in the activity monitor to see how much CPU was being used when I cropped my massive image, and it was as little as 12%? But I saw that the Virtual Memory was up to about 2.5gb, and ram - 1.5gb.

It's dreadfully slow at cropping these images, and using the automate function in photoshop to merge panorama's.

So would upgrading the ram to 4gb make a large difference? Or is there another reason why 2.5gb of Virtual memory is being used?

Any suggestions would be fantastic!

Thanks!

Mark

 

[Cromulent]

Hey, Sorry If I've posted in the wrong topic, but I hope someone can give me some advice.

I've been using photoshop for years, and never really handled files any bigger than about 200mb. But lately I've been handling file as big as 1.3gb, my computers been really slow at handling them, I just assumed that was normal because of the shear size. I have a mid 2007 iMac 2.4g with 2gb ram. (Leopard, CS3)

So I decided I'd look in the activity monitor to see how much CPU was being used when I cropped my massive image, and it was as little as 12%? But I saw that the Virtual Memory was up to about 2.5gb, and ram - 1.5gb.

It's dreadfully slow at cropping these images, and using the automate function in photoshop to merge panorama's.

So would upgrading the ram to 4gb make a large difference? Or is there another reason why 2.5gb of Virtual memory is being used?

Any suggestions would be fantastic!

Thanks!

Mark

First things first. Ignore the virtual memory reading in Activity Monitor, it is meaningless. Look at the page ins and page outs in the Memory tab at the bottom of the Activity Monitor window. If you have a lot of page outs then upgrade your RAM.

From the sounds of it though you definately need 4GBs of RAM at the very least.