Inspiring

Answered

PS 26.1: memory leaks and terrible performance

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
December 8, 2024
4 replies
2368 views

Recently updated to PS 26.1.

The app grabs 6GB system RAM upon my opening of a single 8K image and continues to allocation big chunks (15GB, 33GB, etc.) while the app gets slower and slower as a result.

1) did anyone at Adobe test performance impacts before forcing the upgrade on us?

2) Is this poor performance considered a bug or a feature?

3) I'm not using any of the new fancy features of the update. I'm simply hand editing images.

4) Going into Preferences>Performance and capping the app's memory usage to a reasonable amount (~10GB) seems to help the peformance and stop the leak.

Windows

Correct answer Hawkeye69

I've now capped it at 10GB, which seems to have fixed the problem. The
default allowance in preferences was much higher (30GB+). PS had actually
allocated 34GB before I killed it. At that point, the app was unusably slow.

J

Jacob Co.

Community Manager

This does not sound like an unexpected leak, but the system is using the memory is needs based on your file and retaining it. The VM system will allocate necessary RAM and stay that way until a restart. The amount will vary dramatically based on the file. I've asked about whether this behavior should change, but this is historical design so there may be other performance consequences for adjusting it.

If you have a specific file you can share, our dev team can look at it to see if any unexpected behavior is occuring. I'm mostly interested in how it seems to get slower as a result of the memory usage.

Note that reducing the cap on memory will indeed make it use less, but that is not always ideal. This forces it to page out memory to disk, which is typically much slower than RAM. This may cause performance hitches on certain operations, when it has to reload the information from disk into RAM. If RAM is available, it is preferable to give it to Ps. If performance is truly better when reducing RAM, then that makes me wonder.

R

richard_0411

Participant

I get how frustrating memory leaks and performance issues can be. Clearing Photoshop’s cache or adjusting performance settings might help. You can also check out this article for tips: [link removed]

If the issue persists, reaching out to Adobe support could be a good idea. Hope this helps!

Hawkeye69Author

Inspiring

Did this PS issue ever get fixed? I'm still running v25.12 to avoid the memory leak problem and missing out on all the cool new features of v26.xx.

D Fosse

Community Expert

We've seen quite a lot of these cases where the problem turned out to be either a corrupt install or corrupt preferences. A totally clean install with clean preferences fixed it.

Preferences are significant. It contains a lot more than your own user settings. It's the sum total of the application configuration, including lots of hidden parameters and dependencies. That's why corrupt preferences can cause unpredictable and inexplicable behavior. Preferences are prone to corruption because they are rewritten on every application exit.

One basic precaution I always advise is to not migrate preferences, despite the obvious temptation of seamless updates. Small errors accumulate and get bigger.

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

How much RAM is being allocated to Photoshop? See Preferences > Performance.

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

Hawkeye69AuthorCorrect answer

Inspiring

I've now capped it at 10GB, which seems to have fixed the problem. The
default allowance in preferences was much higher (30GB+). PS had actually
allocated 34GB before I killed it. At that point, the app was unusably slow.

D Fosse

Community Expert

It sounds like you're running out of scratch disk space. The 16 GB chunks are scratch files.

Photoshop cannot rely on RAM. The total memory requirements are much bigger than that, so temporary working data are written to disk - aka the scratch disk. The scratch disk is Photoshop's main memory, with RAM as a fast access cache. The scratch disk is much more critical than the amount of RAM.

All this could be cleared up if you post Help > System Info.

D Fosse

Community Expert

Those numbers sound perfectly normal and expected. That's not the problem. Something else is going on.

Can you post the full Help > System Info from Photoshop?

Hawkeye69Author

Inspiring

You're saying the 34GB of RAM being allocated by the app and the massive
latency (every action taken in PS takes several seconds to complete) is a
feature with 26.1?

The prior versions were far more nimble, and as a user, I prefer those.

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