Reduction in available RAM

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
November 13, 2021
2 replies
4507 views

I have WIN 10 updated yesterday and PS Desktop v. 23.01 and have the same problem outlined in a previous discussion: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/reduction-in-available-ram/m-p/9891342#M173564

My installed RAM is 16327 and PS shows available RAM as 12037 only. Not sure how long it has been like this but have noted some laggyiness in PS for a few weeks now and I used to have my RAM set higher when I could take advantage of the full 16GB

Under the previous discussion this was accepted by Adobe as a bug. My quetion: Has this now been resolved or is there a workround please?

Windows

This topic has been closed for replies.

ImZeOne

Participant

Hi folks,

Same problem for me. Brand new computer with 64GB of DDR4 and GeForce GTX 1630 4GB graphic card on Windows 10 for photoshop only (I use UNIX for my job on anothe computer). I cleaned up the whole system from the bunch of useless features and consequently I use the minimal amount of RAM to run the system.

Photoshop shows only 51GB available of the 64GB and suggests to use a max of 80% of it. Of course I checked the system info and the 64GB are OK and appear in the Photoshop system info.

If read many answers from different threads about this issue and I'm still confused. I can imagine that the way Photoshop gets and shows memory infos has changed, but I can't understand that the memory I bought to boost Photoshop is cut by a third, especially if I consider that I did'nt have this issue with my previous computer (i5-760 with the same photoshop CC and Windows system, but with 16GB RAM for PS and Win10).

Any progress made to solve this riddle, or at least a convincing explanation ?

D Fosse

Community Expert

Same answer as above. It's the RAM amount available for Photoshop use. Some of it is system reserved.

In any case this is mostly a non-issue. You don't want Photoshop memory usage too high - that will negatively impact your system as a whole and may lead to bigger problems. With 64 GB installed you'll be fine in any situation, no need to worry.

The importance of RAM is overrated. There is no such thing as "enough RAM" anyway - if you're working with big files Photoshop's working memory vastly exceeds any RAM you may have installed, no matter how much you have. This is why Photoshop uses a scratch disk, and RAM is mostly a cache to the scratch disk's main memory.

This was important in the old days with very slow spinning hard drives. but with today's ultra-fast NVMe drives, the scratch disk isn't the bottleneck it once was.

The critical component is the scratch disk. That's where you should focus attention if you're not happy with PS speed of operation.

ImZeOne

Participant

Hi D. Fosse,

First thank you for your quick answer.

I know how easy a single photograph and some computing can overflow RAM capacity and I'm aware of read/write transfer speed in modern drives, that's not the point. I changed my computer (12 years old, I don't have GAS) because I could'nt extend memory and this was my problem for sure.

I just need to understand how things work, especially when the informations I get from Photoshop are not clear anymore.

I'm a intrigued because the exact same operating system was fully operational with less than 4GB with the exact same version of CC and it seems to need way more room to work now. Maybe the "problem" comes from Windows 10 and not Photoshop or both, but I have troubles with "move along, there is nothing to see here" 😉

Have a nice day.

Ged_Traynor

Community Expert

Hi

That thread your referring to was related to a different issue and was addressed in a following update.

Photoshop uses the available RAM, I have 64GB of RAM and 52GB is available to Photoshop, the operating system and other apps use RAM as well.

As you can see from my task manager 52GB of RAM is available which is what Photoshop sees, so what your seeing is correct.

S

StefanKlein

Known Participant

Ged, what you´re seeing in your system is probably coincidence.

On my WIN 10 Pro system with 32GB RAM, PS always shows about 25 GB available RAM, no matter, how many processes and other programs are running. Even it the taskmanager shows only 16GB "available RAM", PS still shows the same 25GB.

Besides that, PS always showed about 28GB instead of 25GB available RAM in older versions. So someone from Adobe has to explain that difference.