Allocating Ram

[jasona62957248]

Hi I have been searching relentlessly for answers to allocate more ram to AI alone. I run AI CC 2017 on Mac Pro 3ghz 8 core, 64gb ddr3 1866, and dual d700 grahpics cards. I have plenty of power and resources to set a TON of ram to AI alone but I cant not figure it out of the life of me. I am a Senior Production Artist I run AI 80% of the time with InDesign and Photoshop running as well. I have lots of programs going but I havent even scratched the surface of my ram. I know that just because i have 8 cores and 64 gb does not mean I can utilize every last drop. I just want to put as much ram as possible to AI. Please someone give me a clear answer on this.

[Larry G. Schneider]

As far as I know, there is no way to assign more RAM to AI. It will take what it needs.

[Conrad C · Accepted solution]

Practically all modern operating systems (macOS, Windows 10...) allocate RAM dynamically, shifting usage around in real time between actual RAM, compressed RAM, and virtual RAM as needed. This means the old controls found in Mac OS 9 and earlier for manually "allocating" RAM haven't existed in years.

Also, there are cases where a specific application doesn't seem to have a lot of RAM directly set aside for it in Activity Monitor, but if the Cached Files amount is high, that could indicate that the application is indirectly using a lot of memory that way.

You might find some Adobe programs like Photoshop do have a RAM setting in the preferences. Since modern OSs don't really let you allocate more RAM to any application, that setting only limits the amount of RAM the OS can allocate to the application.

Illustrator doesn't have a control like that, so like any other application, it will ask the OS for more RAM when it needs to, and the OS will hand it over any time it's available (that is, when there aren't other processes that need it more). If you have a lot of free RAM available while running Illustrator, it's because Illustrator doesn't think it needs to ask the system for more.