Performance and Hard Disk Swapping

[keithconover]

Some InDesign tasks that require moving a lot of pages and graphics can take a long time. Many minutes to an hour or more.

I have a desktop Windows 10 Pro PC with:

• Xeon W-2155 @3.3 GHz (13.75MB Cache, 10-Cores, 20-Threads, 48 lanes, 140W, Benchmark 24983)
• 128GB Kingston ECC DDR4 2666
• Gigabyte GeForce GT 1030 2GB Fanless
• Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 3 x4 SSD (3500/3300 MBps R/W)

Given those performance issues, I just doubled the RAM to 256 GB.

Nonetheless, some tasks, such as changing a heading style to move 200 pages with text and graphics, still takes forever (in Internet time, that is): half an hour or longer.

Looking in Task Manager as this so-far half-hour task is whirring, shows the following:

• 9% total CPU usage, of which about 5% is attributable to InDesign (5% of total, not 5% of 9%)
• 6% of total RAM usage, of which about 2 GB is InDesign's.
• about 1% of the SSD disk usage, almost all of which is InDesign's, at 0.6-0.8 MB/s.

This system does have a fast SSD "hard drive," but wouldn't InDesign get my task done in minutes instead of hours if it could use more RAM and avoid swapping to disk, even if it's a fast SSD?

Still seeing an hourglass at 45 minutes. Sigh.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Windows 11, a 64-bit system. Weird that my InDesign seems to stop eating memory at a bit less than 2 GB.

By @keithconover

How much free RAM your system is reporting in the Task Manager?

And my system is just "iddling"...

[keithconover]

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@keithconover 

But what do you have as per my 1st screenshot?

Because it looks like the 2nd duplicated twice?

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

How much RAM is seen by the system?

And if you've 14% used out of 128GB - then it would be like 18GB used ... but even from your 2nd screenshot - it doesn't show that much to be used - by the 9x foreground apps?

[Park Street Printers]

I wish I could afford to max out the RAM on my 2020ish Threadripper Pro system at home... I don't want to use a scratch disk anymore, and I don't like having a pagefile for the system, but the cost of that much RAM would buy me a decent used car! I've never had to deal with drive thrashing, however, no matter how large the files have gotten, so I guess I'm okay for now.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@Park Street Printers

WOW, at least £2k for a single 256GB stick... Then x8...

But I don't think InDesign would be ever able to use so much? 

[Park Street Printers]

Probably not, but it would be nice to be able to load all my various programs into memory. Some serious video editing and 3d content creation might benefit from that much RAM, but I'm not a pro at those things. I've got 256GB right now, and the system seems quite happy. I've always thought of your 16 32GB sticks with envy. If I upgrade to a 5995wx, which I might, then I could reasonably see investing in 8 64GB sticks. But with the way things are going, I might be stuck as-is. Besides, I'm already two CPU generations out of date, and when the 9000 series comes out, I'll be thinking of what's next, with DDR6.

I miss my old dual Opteron 290 system. It served me well until late November 2018 when I encountered a hardware error. It had 16GB of 400MHz DDR, and 8 U320 15k rpm SCSI drives in two RAID10s, as well as three SATAIII ssds and a 1TB NVME. With the GTX285 and GTX770 4GB gpus, it was still fine for anything Adobe at the time. Now, of course, it couldn't run anything, since it was maxed out at Windows 7 Pro x64 and didn't have AVX. Still, it lasted almost 13 years, 11 of them liquid-cooled.

I never experienced drive thrash on it, either. (My 2010 hp at work was terrible for drive thrash, though. SATA hdds are garbage.)

Sorry for my rambling.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Generally, 32-128 GBs should be fine for running most jobs with Adobe publishing apps (ID, AI, PS, AP). If you are doing some serious 8K video editing or 3D rendering, you may want more.