Photoshop using too much memory since last update

The same thing is happening to me and it's impossible to use photoshop

what's the solution to this? I just upgraded my editing PC last year. I literally just opened Photoshop and it's already lagging so badly for tiny healing patch or removing, I keep getting the green loading bar which is ridiculous. It was working fine just a few weeks ago.

Please post Help > System Info from Photoshop.

Here's the background, because many users don't know this:

Photoshop needs much more memory than any RAM you may have installed, no matter how much you have. So all this temporary working data are written to disk, aka the scratch disk.

The most current data are held in RAM. In other words - RAM functions as a cache for the scratch disk's main memory. This has an important implication: the %-allocation you have set in Preferences will fill up almost instantly.

Furthermore, it is not released until you quit Photoshop. If you've had files open, the memory that has been used will still be held by Photoshop even after you close the files. The reason for this is that constantly requesting memory from the OS is slow, and would kill things like batch processing. So it's recycled and reused.

There's one complication that wasn't there some years ago: Photoshop now calls on the GPU to do a lot of the heavy work, and the GPU consumes a lot of memory of its own. That's not a problem on a discrete GPU with its own onboard VRAM, but it can be on systems with an integrated GPU that uses shared system memory. A lot of perceived "memory leaks" stem from this.