Poor RAM management in Photoshop CS4 - need help!

[Overfocused]

I have done numerous hours of research over the years only to give up and come back to this subject later on. I will try again!

I must ask: is there ANY way to get Photoshop CS4 to automatically flush used RAM after closing image files? I'm tired and annoyed of CS4 eating more and more RAM without freeing anything after an image has been closed. An image shouldn't still eat up memory when it isn't even open anymore. It seems to be terrible RAM management of the program itself and how Adobe has forgotten to write that little snippit of code to clear the RAM after an image has been closed.

I know this is not because of:

Cache levels

Setting too large of a saved history state; purging history cache or any kind of cache still never frees RAM

A lack of updates; I have been up to date with CS4 very punctually as they were released

The computer I am on; this poor RAM management has been around since CS2 and it's the same on the last 4 computers I have used

Does CS5 still do this too?

[Hudechrome]

I'm surprised about win7 needing extra "love", unless you mean the BIOS upgrade. I don't recall the BIOS upgrades highlighting ram size performance as a reason for a revision, but my board already had a newer version than the default production version first employed.

[Guest]

Mine didn't have the bios revision for Windows 7. At the time I had Vista was installed. I wanted to put the Windows 7 beta on it but noticed the Asus forums said i needed a Bios up date so I waited a week and the Bios update was posted. I could have taken 2 sticks of RAM out but.... na.

Yes, by extra love I meant some boards need a bios update for some reason or another. Sorry.

I looked too and noticed your other post made it on page 3 while I was typing away on my other response.

[Overfocused]

Processor	Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor2 P8400 (2.26GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 3MB L2 Cache)1
Operating System	Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium (64-bit) with SP13
Memory	4096MB 1066MHz DDR3 Dual Channel Memory (2-2048MB modules)4
Hard Drive	320GB 7200RPM SATA hard drive5
Chassis	Chassis with NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800M GTS Graphics with 1GB of GDDR3 Discrete Video Memory and Intel® PM45 Chipset4

Here's my system now (reused the graph haha)

Processor	Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor2 T9900 (3.06GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 6MB L2 Cache)
Operating System	Genuine Windows 7® Professional (64-bit)
Memory	8092MB 1066MHz DDR3 Dual Channel Memory (2-4096MB modules)
Hard Drive	2-320GB (600GB Stripe 0) 7200RPM SATA hard drives
Chassis	Chassis with NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800M GTS Graphics with 1GB of GDDR3 Discrete Video Memory and Intel® PM45 Chipset4

This laptop slucked up the Vista drivers like water natively without any hiccups at all, other than the SD card reader. Now its all fine though, W7 adjusted itself over time and ran smoothly until they developed actual 7x64 drivers in 2010 which I upgraded to. As for W7 needing extra love, that's far from my experience. I've barely had a computer to have to worry about managing since I installed it. It manages itself extremely well.

[Hudechrome]

I don't know what is going on then, with your system.

Here's an interesting observation. Before retiring last night, I rebooted and noted the values in the Resource monitor, especially the standby value. It was around 400MB. This morning , with nothing open on my machine, I checked again and Standby grew to 1200MB. This seems to be the normal value when running general programs, being about 15% of total, but the question is; how did it get there? Monitoring over a time frame of a few minutes (10), at inital bootup showed that number and the distribution to the others to be stable. There were no OS updates because the machine did not auto reboot. It would have paused at the sign in page. Security Essentials updated last night at 7:44, long before the final reboot.

[Hudechrome]

Hmm, are you saying you ran an upgraded to Win7 using the Vista drivers at first? Were you using the Win7 RC and not the production version?

[Overfocused]

Hmm, are you saying you ran an upgraded to Win7 using the Vista drivers
at first?

Yes. The laptop came with Vista 64 home, I wiped it, put in a second HDD, set up a stripe 0 RAID, and installed 7x64 Pro clean. I used the Gateway Vista x64 drivers that came with the laptop for the 7x64 installation.

Were you using the Win7 RC and not the production version?

No, it was the final production version, not RC.

[Noel Carboni]

By the way, in further answer to the original issue posted by Overfocused in this thread:

I made a point not to close Photoshop CS5 all day yesterday.  I edited a LOT of images, some of them quite large.  I used 3rd party plug-ins as well as many of Photoshop's "gee whiz" features, including Content Aware Fill, Liquify, etc.

I purposefully started Photoshop when there was little else running, and I watched it go all the way up to using 7 GB of RAM.  Then I started some virtual machines, which used 4 GB of RAM and I watched Photoshop release some RAM to allow those VMs to get what they needed.

Based on these observations, I have come to the following thoughts:

• RAM management in Photoshop CS5 is performing exactly as per Chris Cox's description, and it's being much more a polite child in the playground than you might think at first glance.

• There is no inherent problem with running Photoshop CS5 for a long time on a lot of images.

I can also say that this seems different from when I used to use Photoshop CS4.  Why could this be?

• Back when I ran CS4 all the time, OpenGL drivers weren't nearly as mature.  In fact, I can definitely say that at some time disabling some of the Advanced features in the OpenGL settings did help stabilize CS4 for me.

• Did Adobe fix some bugs between CS4 and CS5?  Almost certainly.

• Could Adobe have made adjustments to their memory management logic between CS4 and CS5?  I can't say.  All I can say is that Photoshop CS5 x64, on my Windows 7 x64 system, with a default setting of "use 95% of RAM (6850 MB)" does NOT exhibit the symptoms you describe (degradation of operation over time).

I thought perhaps this could help you make the decision to move up to CS5...

-Noel

[Overfocused]

I thought perhaps this could help you make the decision to move up to CS5...

I do believe CS5 has a much smoother operation than CS4 in the endurance dept. as well as the GPU utilization dept. When I enable OpenGL, PS gets trippy like it's on something.

Eventually I will buy CS5, but at the moment I can't warrant the $180 upgrade. I just bought a new IPS monitor! (much better than upgrading PS, lol)

[Noel Carboni]

Overfocused wrote:

When I enable OpenGL, PS gets trippy like it's on something.

That may say that your video drivers are not properly implementing OpenGL.  A new video card might be in order if you have the latest drivers.  Personally I'm most fond of ATI and I'd probably look at a Radeon HD 5670 if I were getting a new card right now.

-Noel

[Overfocused]

A new video card might be in order if you have the latest drivers

I've always had the latest drivers. This is a non upgradable 9800GTS m. I considered using desktop drivers but I'd rather not try that since it works just fine in high resolution gaming

[Noel Carboni]

Oops, I forgot you're using a laptop.  Can the video interface be changed out in that machine?

I doubt the desktop drivers would install anyway.

Did you try the Basic or Advanced OpenGL modes in Photoshop?  It might get less "trippy".

-Noel

[Overfocused]

I think I tried a bit of everything and then decided to just turn it off... it's been a long time since

[Overfocused]

I'm going to re-enable everything and give it a go. The last time I had GPU acceleration was at least a year ago and many driver updates for the GPU have been released. Maybe even before the last CS4 patch as well, not sure.

[Noel Carboni]

Definitely disable Vertical Sync.  That setting has been known to cause problems, and is usually not an issue with LCD displays.

-Noel

[Chris Cox]

and is usually not an issue with LCD displays.

While LCDs technically do not have a vertical sync, both OSes and GL drivers impose some "vertical refresh" timing for compatibility and buffer flushing.

[Noel Carboni]

Interesting.  I've tried changing that setting in Photoshop on a number of different systems and could never see a difference.   However, I've seen it reported that enabling the vertical sync setting has caused problems.  I remember seeing something in one of the recent ATI driver updates about them correcting something in that area...

Can you suggest something to watch for to note if the setting would be better to have enabled or disabled?  Or is it just a matter of try it one way and if it fails in some obvious manner try it the other way?

-Noel

[Chris Cox]

Or is it just a matter of try it one way and if it fails in some obvious manner try it the other way?

In Photoshop, I think that's the case.

In games, using vertical sync can limit your framerate to 60 fps, while the card and display may be capable of 100 fps -- and I want the extra frames so I can apply the railgun/huntsman to my opponent's head. 🙂

[Hudechrome]

Well, still being on a crt I enable Vertical sync. Don't seem to generate any problems. I can't imagine not enabling it.

The Tektronix studio monitors not only enables V sync, you had a choice of front porch or back porch synching. Probably not much of a concern for this kind of work.

[Noel Carboni]

Hudechrome wrote:

Well, still being on a crt I enable Vertical sync. Don't seem to generate any problems. I can't imagine not enabling it.

My understanding of this setting is to prevent display updates mid-scan, so you don't see tearing (disjointed subject material) in things that are moving.

What moves much in Photoshop?  As Chris points out, it's not a video game.  And with flicker being all the better managed in LCD displays, it seems to be even less an issue.

On the other hand, if you DO set up your OpenGL system to limit the times at which it can do operations like swap bitmaps into the display (i.e., Vertical Sync enabled), then you may reduce display and application performance.  Something has to stall to do this!

If I ever did perceive a difference, I might side with you, Lawrence, and leave it enabled.  As it is, I just don't.  I would love to know if anyone sees a difference with Vertical Sync enabled in Photoshop or not.

-Noel

[Hudechrome]

I cannot notice a difference either, but I guess old habits die hard, especially those learned through the school of hard knocks! Even for trained engineers (especially? )

One observation I have noted that did not change by enabling V sync is that, if an image has been stationary for a bit of time, and you move it to a different location on the screen, there appears for a moment, two images, one at the original location behind the image that is being dragged, which exists for no longer than a second. Continue dragging  and it does not generate this "feature", so long as the mouse button is held down.

I'll run some observations. Are you suggesting hesitations as the result of enabling V sync?. Anything else?

[Noel Carboni]

Keeping in mind that the way animation works on a computer (i.e., moving things) is that your display is continually and completely recalculated over and over again as new "frames".

If the rendering subsystem has to wait until a certain time in the display scan to put the information out, then at some point the software could get stalled in this recalculation, only to have it resume just after the next scan cycle.  This is potentially time lost, with processors going idle briefly.  Maybe it's an imperceptibly small fraction of a second and maybe you see it as a slight hesitation or reduction in smoothness in what you're doing.  Maybe with Photoshop it's simply too small to notice.

And it's not simple...  Video interfaces often use multiple buffering, so that some additional work can continue on an unseen buffer while the current one waits to be displayed.  Maybe with a given implementation it's just a buffer sitting ready until the vertical sync comes around.  So while the CPU might be stalled, perhaps more (video?) RAM is being tied up.

Not forcing the OpenGL system to wait for Vertical Sync allows processing to continue and buffers to be freed.  Perhaps more work gets done and things seem to run more smoothly...  Maybe imperceptibly more on a modern system.  Maybe with all the buffering in a particular implementation it makes no perceptible difference.

I would normally say that the best thing would be to leave the setting on default, because that's probably been tested more, but I've read reports from others saying their systems just run better with Vertical Sync unchecked, and it's not hard to see that that simple setting could make a big difference in how things get sequenced under the covers.  Like I (and Chris) said:  It's kind of a "try it on both settings and choose whichever one works better on your system" thing.

-Noel

[Hudechrome]

There isn't a specific default setting on that menu, so what is default?

To sync or not to sync That is the question!

(with appropriate apologies to the Bard!)

I've turned it off so we'll see...probably nothing!

[Noel Carboni]

Out of the box Vertical Sync came up checked on the systems I tested on.

Choice of the default OpenGL settings in Photoshop MAY be gauged on the computer environment in which Photoshop is installed or first run, I don't know for sure.

My own OpenGL software does that, and it makes sense for a variety of reasons.

Remember how complex I said OpenGL is?  Imagine every implementation having slightly different capabilities and you start to understand why I said that.  Now, to complicate matters further, with the newer versions there is a new scheme where implementations can actually start dropping support for older OpenGL functions.  I imagine this is so OpenGL implementations don't necessarily have to get ever larger and more complex as time goes on.

-Noel

[Hudechrome]

And that's just Open GL1 It really gets messy with HDTV and their codecs:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/video-transcoding-amd-app-nvidia-cuda-intel-quicksync,2839.html

This is part two of a look at the various encoding decoding schemes, and their tradeoffs. I started reading this when Sandy Bridge was announced released, with it's Quick Sync. (nVidia Cuda doesn't look good).

Oh now it seems that Ivy Bridge may be on display sooner than later. 22nM! What will that do for video, and impact our work?

[Noel Carboni]

I love the way Intel has (and has published) plans that go out for years.  In the "this fiscal year" oriented economy, it's good to know there are those thinking about strategy, not just tactics.

-Noel