Brushes Slowing PS Question

[GlennsArt]

I'm starting to amass quite a few brushes, including many of my own and some of which are quite large. This is fine - they are all working great. I have heard (and suspect I've experienced) that having a lot of brushes (several hundred at least) can slow Photoshop down. So I have a question related to that please, so I can optimize my performance:

Q:  Is just having lots of brushes loaded in the brush panel the problem (i.e. causing PS to slow down) or does the slowdown only occur when actually using a particular brush? In other words, is the slowdown more with actual brushing, or does a large stable of brushes slow the whole program down?

What I'm doing currently is offloading brushes I'm not using (I have them grouped so that I need load only the relevent ones to what I'm currently doing) and that, along with other measures, is working wonders and I'm very pleased with the performance. However, there is a lot of loading and unloading of brushes throughout a painting that in itself is a bit time consuming and disruptive, so I'm trying to figure out some sort of compromise here. Knowing if a lot of brushes loaded slows all of Photoshop, or just the actual brushing with certain brushes, will help me tremendously on reorganizing my brush setup.

Many thanks 🙂 .

[Bob_Hallam]

There is a good solution out there called Brush Box that will solve this issue very well.  It's commonly used by companies and individuals that do digital painting.  That will solve the problems your running into. 

https://derrickbarth.gumroad.com/l/brushbox

[GlennsArt]

Thank you for this Bob. I've seen this used in some of Kyle's videos. I will definitely look into this. However, I'm not  sure this answers my question specifically. My problem isn't in finding brushes, but how many brushes can be loaded at a time and if that slows PS down, or if only larger brushes slows the program down, and if it slows the entire program down or only just the brushing action. Perhaps that is explained in the User Guide for the plug-in? I'll check it out, but this is more a performance thing than an organizational one.

Thanks for your input Bob. Much appreciated.