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Photoshop seems to have a major memory issue with the new 2021 release

Community Beginner ,
Dec 04, 2020 Dec 04, 2020

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Hello!

 

Just reporting an issue. Photoshop is filling my hard drive with upwards of 20-30 GB of data when in use throughout the day. Closing and re-opening it fixes the problem, but I have never had a temporary data problem like this before with PS, at least not this bad. Not sure what is up, but that doesn't seem good. 

 

Running Windows 10 v10.0.17134

 

Adobe Photoshop 2021 v22.0.0

 

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Community Expert ,
Dec 04, 2020 Dec 04, 2020

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It sounds perfectly normal. It's called scratch disk and is used by Photoshop as temporary storage whilst carrying out operations that cannot be done in system RAM. With large files I see mine using more than 100GB. It is not new to this version, scratch disk has always been used by Photoshop.

 

Dave

 

 

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Community Beginner ,
Dec 04, 2020 Dec 04, 2020

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It must not be clearing scratch data, so this is atypical to my experience, and I've been using Photoshop professionally for over 5 years, and as a general user for over a decade. I am familiar with scratch disks filling up, but the data clears when documents are closed. It seems like I have to kill the whole program now to get the same result. 

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Community Expert ,
Dec 04, 2020 Dec 04, 2020

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It's recommended to not use your HD that the OS and Application are located on.

Either build a partition or use an external as the scratch disk.

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Community Beginner ,
Dec 04, 2020 Dec 04, 2020

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Appreciate the suggestion but it doesn't really solve the bug or my situation unfortunately. To be brief: I am stuck with what I have because it's a work machine. This specific thing is not a big enough problem where I can't do my job at least, just killing photoshop entirely fixes it. I realize I should have explained it in more detail, because it is an atypical temp-data issue, and reading back, I didn't do a very good job of describing it. But at risk of being pedantic, what is happening is not normal Photoshop behavior. Essentially, the program can be open, with 0 documents open in it, and still take up as much space as if I'd opened up a large bulk of files. I have never had this happen before, and I have run up against my scratch disks plenty of times in the past to know that closing documents in PS (without closing PS itself) should also clear their associated temp data (and it always has), but now I have to close the program itself to achieve the same result. It's holding onto data for some reason. I tend to edit a lot of images in a day, so after a while it fills up. It's not clearing data unless I fully close photoshop, whereas in every other iteration of photoshop, simply closing the documents inside of photoshop was enough to achieve clearing temp data. I have changed nothing about how I edit with the program either, all my processes have stayed the same, as well as the approximate availability of HD space that I do have. This seems unique to this version, and specifically, to the last update of it. (I also checked Adobe CC today before posting and everything said "up to date"). Maybe I'll revert to the previous version, at least for now.  

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Community Expert ,
Dec 05, 2020 Dec 05, 2020

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This all sounds perfectly normal to me. The number of history states you have set in Preferences will directly affect the size of the scratch file. Each history state adds the full memory content for that state.

 

Photoshop reserves the scratch disk space it expects to need - it is not allocated as you go. That would be far too slow and cumbersome and cause far more complaints.

 

Photoshop's memory management is optimized for speed, not space. As a professional-grade application, it makes no allowances (and no excuses) for users with limited resources. It's your responsibility to make sure Photoshop has the resources it needs.

 

Raster image editing, whatever software does it, requires huge amounts of memory. That's just the nature of the game. There is no such thing as "enough RAM", and disk space gets eaten up fast. 500GB or more is not uncommon if you work with large files.

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Community Beginner ,
Dec 05, 2020 Dec 05, 2020

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If it's perfectly normal it should have been happening before, I clearly should not have come here though, thanks for the "help" 

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Community Expert ,
Dec 07, 2020 Dec 07, 2020

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@mikes7995616 This is a user to user forum. We are giving you suggested solutions and information based on the feedback you gave us. The more details you can give the more targeted the responses.

 

How big is your available HD space before and after launching PS?

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New Here ,
Dec 06, 2021 Dec 06, 2021

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The key is that I never had to frequently restart this professional-grade, speed-optimized, unforgiving, take no prisoner, no-memory-is-enough-memory of an application before.  Could it be that the Adobe ethic articulated in the prior sentence has allowed a memory leak to slip through? Is the amount of memory used compared from release to release for standardized test cases? Is all the memory released when image files are closed? I suspect not.

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Community Expert ,
Dec 06, 2021 Dec 06, 2021

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There's no memory leak, this is how Photoshop always worked. Memory will not be released by closing a file, it gets reused/recycled. This is by design.

 

Photoshop has bugs like any other software, but this isn't one of them.

 

Do you get any error messages? What's the memory allocation in preferences? How much scratch disk space?

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Community Expert ,
Dec 07, 2020 Dec 07, 2020

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I'm wondering if your IT done anything with permissions or OS update on the work computer that would prevent Photoshop from full read/write access to the temp file location?

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Community Beginner ,
Aug 10, 2021 Aug 10, 2021

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After the latest update I am also now getting this memory error message constantly. It is nearly impossible to get anything done.  This definitely is a new occurrence as I have been working with this program for years and have never experienced it. I'm on Windows 10 with 16GB of Ram and a seperate scratch disk with 500gb. I've tried all the suggested workarounds to no avail.  Frustrating. 

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Community Expert ,
Dec 07, 2021 Dec 07, 2021

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Hi all, I'm wondering also if the very big number of huge brushes and other presets one can load by default has not a bearing on the memory needs of Photoshop.

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