Performance of operations in large PSD

[matias.kiviniemi]

Has anyone noticed rapid deterioration of performance in reading text layer content (i.e. accessing 'artLayer.textItem.contents')? I mean it's a generic thing that as PSD grows, operations on that become slower, but text layer content seems to go down really badly. In a almost empty PSD operation takes ~20ms, but in a medium/large PSD (100mb / 80 layers) it takes 2700ms! It's not totally obvious why slows down so much as other document operations (e.g. find right layer in doc) don't slow so much.

So not expecting solution, but would like to hear if you have any performance tips/tricks/best practices to share

[c.pfaffenbichler]

Could you post the Script?

[matias.kiviniemi]

Started cleaning the relevant code and noticed I had the the layer selection (loop through layerSet.artLayers) in the measurement and turns our that was the culprit and not the artLayer.textItem.contents! Makes more sense (i.e. more layers means slower), but is worrysome as it's really pervasive and hard to get rid of. Also it's a bit alarming that it seems to be based on doc size, not group size. This was group with 6 layers, no children and looping through them like below takes 2700ms

for (var i=0; i < group.artLayers.length; i++) {
     var layer = group.artLayers
     // do stuff with layer

Now dug deeper and turns out there are lots of things to improve

• using artLayer.getByName() is much faster and takes only 90ms. Can't use it for everything, but definitely worth optimization to differentiate the cases!
• strangely using group.layers and adding "if layer.typename == "ArtLayer" only takes 1300ms so worthy optimization
• storing artLayers.length in local variable speeds it further to 900ms so worth doing
• storing group.artLayers as local variable had no major change
• iterating as "for (var layer in group.artLayers) {}" does not seem to work
• No difference between 32/64bit CC 2012 in Windows
• CC2014 seems a bit slower (~20%)
• Mac seems a bit faster (~20%) than Windows

I do a lot of finding layers with certain prefix/regex which looks like a big performance hole. Never thought this would be so big and was wondering if you could do this in AM code?

[c.pfaffenbichler]

storing artLayers.length in local variable speeds it further to 900ms so worth doing

Recently Tom Ruark remarked on that.

Re: Get all groups and layers with "ActionReference()"

[c.pfaffenbichler]

I do a lot of finding layers with certain prefix/regex which looks like a big performance hole. Never thought this would be so big and was wondering if you could do this in AM code?

AM code often is faster than DOM code, check out the code Mike offered at

Script to search layer names | Adobe Community

[matias.kiviniemi]

Thanks on both links! Need to do some more profiling what the actual bottlenecks are and look into optimizing those.

[c.pfaffenbichler]

Maybe you could start a new thread if any particularly interesting issue turns up.