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PaulDigney
Participant
February 3, 2017
Question

Scratch Disk Usage -Why?

  • February 3, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1373 views

Photoshop CC

windows 10

i 6700K  64 GB Ram

Photoshop set to use up to 44 GB

When opening a number of PSDs photoshop behaves well up to about 30 PSDs and uses around 30GB of memory.   Somewhere near that point it goes mad beating the scratch disk to death.   It slows down to a near stop, messes the overall performance of the system up.  After some minutes it is finished using the scratch disk so intensely and things work fine.  It is using about 15 gb of memory at this point.


I'm thinking about making the scratch disk an unused, old 128GB SSD I have or putting software in to create a RAM disk and let PS mess with that but I'd like to know why it needs it when there is lots of memory available.


Thanks,

Paul

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    2 replies

    Trevor.Dennis
    Community Expert
    Trevor.DennisCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 3, 2017

    I so wish Chris Cox was still with Adobe and posting to this forum.  He'd have told us exactly what is happening with Paul's monster setup.  I have long suspected that Photoshop simply doesn't think in terms of making best use of 64Gb RAM, or even 32Gb, but arbitrarily assigns large temp files on the scratch drive, and then moves huge chunks of data  to and from the scratch drive(s).  As fast as an SSD is, 50Gb is still going to take several seconds.

    Paul, I'd be wary of that old 128Gb SSD.  I tried the same trick with the first SSD I ever had, but it was so much slower than a decent modern SSD, I changed my strategy.    I suspect that a system with 6700K and 64Gb will have at least one M.2 drive.  We have seen extraordinary read/write speeds with the latest M.2 drives.  In the region of 3.5Gb/s, so if you have such a drive and it has space, I'd try that.  With that sort of bandwidth, there is no reason why program files and temp files could not exist on the same drive.

    We could also make good use of our Noel in this thread.  He changed strategy a few years back, with six Samsung 256Gb PRO in a raid0, and used it for _everything_.

    Paul, as you have Windows 10, try watching the Resource Monitor (from the Task Manager Performance tab) and see if it is maxing out disk activity.

    JJMack
    Community Expert
    JJMackCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 3, 2017

    When you have a performance problem I will second Trevor suggestion to open the task manager and observe what is going one with your machine resources.

    JJMack
    JJMack
    Community Expert
    JJMackCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 3, 2017

    Photoshop can be a very resource hungry application.  Creating a RAM disk is not a good idea it Photoshop wants to use more ram its being use for scratch space. The SSD is the better choice for Photoshop scratch space.  Photoshop also does not return allocated resources till tou close down Photoshop.  Edit Purge items always seem to be grayed out these days. If I open a large Canvas and use filter surface blur it may allocate all my system ram 35GB of the 40GB I have.

    JJMack
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