Have you tried increasing the size of your paging file? This might help, but Adobe seems to be bad about using paging file space, so it might not -- I've got my paging file on a fast SDD, so paging should happen quickly -- What does Photoshop do? It refuses to allow paging and instead opens up a tmp dir on a slow disk. GRRR.... Fortunately most programs aren't even aware of virtual memory vs. phys memory, let alone go out of their way to break a useful OS feature. Of course Adobe might claim they will always use more memory than than what you have (at least w/the images I work on, that's usually true), but instead of forcing things to tmp, they could lower Photoshop's "page priority from it's current" 'highest' priority (default), to lowest(1). That would ensure not only that what they would likely have written to tmp gets paged out first, BUT, ALSO, the many parts of photoshop that you are not using -- (are you really using the medical DiCom stuff while focusing on 3D, for example?, or do I need the 3D sturff in memory when I am only doing 2D stuff? Allowing the OS to take care of least-accessed program segments is almost always more efficient than trying to do it yourself -- unless you dynamically profile each user's usage on a given document and have a provely better algorithm -- which no vendor has bothered to do yet, AFAIK. Anyway, even though photoshop deliberately breaks the normal OS paging mechanism for itself (albeit to be a 'polite program that doesn't force others out of memory), there are costs to not being able to adjust that (like it just plain outright not using virtual memory (meaning though a system might have a 40GB address space on Windows, on a sys with 12GB of memory, Photoshop will only use 8.4GB (~70% of physical 12G). In that scenario, Photoshop would waste 32GB of fast paging area while going to a slower drive not selected for 'fast paging usage'. Worse, when disk space gets tight (<7% free space, Photoshop all but hangs as either it refuses to try to use all of disk OR the OS has too much time trying to find free spaces of the size Photoshop asks for). Ironically, this is sometimes caused by some earlier Photoshop crash leaving a large tmp file somewhere that doesn't get cleaned until I run a disk-cleanup It's unfortunate that Photoshop disables it's usage of of virtual memory due to software limitations -- as in my above example it would be the difference between it using 8GB vs. 32GB -- (~70 % of phys or virtual to a fast SSD). Suggestion to try to solve your prob. I wouldn't run this way all the time (well, maybe not), but it might allow you to save.(I should try this and see if it helps w/perf as well!)... 1) make sure you have a good sized swap file -- otherwise it's pointless (on your fastest HD, in the fastest part if possible) (usually at beginning of disk -- usually something you setup at system setup time). A new HD or SSD willl work too. But speed is less necessary than space. Speed is convenient, it's the space that will make/break the issue. 2) Get process-hacker (http://sourceforge.net/projects/processhacker/), -- using it, after you start photoshop, right click on it's process in the main process page, and under Misc, you can set it's page priority to 1 -- that way, when memory gets 'tight', you are telling the OS to page out photoshop's pages to the page file first. 3) set Adobe's allowed memory usage to 100% -- oddly, Adobe seems to think 100% on a 48GB SYSTEM = 44GB, so they may be shooting the workability of this solution in the foot (i.e. if it doesn't use enough memory for Windows to start paging it to the page file, there's no point). Note -- EVEN if Photoshop for some reason has more code to disable use of all your system's virtual address space (the default is to use it, but due to adobe limiting it's memory usage, it doesn't), it is possible that OTHER programs will get paged out while you are working on this file -- i.e. Photoshop may get more memory to use and at the least, it should improve perf in photoshop (at the expense of background programs...but if you need to save a file...well...like I said, you may not run with 100% photoshop memory usage all the time... However, even @ 100% usage, On my system, they would still only be using 46% of my systems virtual memory. So that 100% figure is pretty misleading -- especially if your paging file is on a memory-based drive (SSD) that can easily be 5-10X faster than desktop drives. Good look -- sorry for long post -- but involved topic and wanted to try to be complete!
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