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siobhano68240631
Inspiring
November 21, 2018
Answered

SCRATCH DISK PROBLEM: PS lags & Mac HD scratch disk nearly full even though I have 250GB free space on Mac HD!

  • November 21, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 1125 views

Hi,

I have been having major performance issues with the latest  v20.0.1. It started since I updated to latest PS and also Mojave at the same time, not sure if that is the cause or not.

I have a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017), 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3,

Radeon Pro 560 4096 MB

Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 MB (graphics)

I use my Mac HD flash drive as my scratch disk, 500GB, with 190GB available. 

I had been using my usual large files, of around 600MB, previously with no issues. Then I noticed major lags.

I have spend hours, and 3 separate sessions with adobe staff trying to fix the problem-everything has been tried-changing the performance settings several times , resetting PS, then I cleared 70GB of space on HD.

Even after that, the amount of free space on scratch disk only went from 15GB to 18GB of free space. (see below)

I have just spend 3 hours on chat with adobe rep, and after all that, they told me that it was just because I was using a large file (really??? 600MB is a too big?) and it is rendering. They could not explain to me why I was able to use 1GB PSD files, or PSD files with 3000 layers in the past (and this was on an older mac!). That annoyed me, because i felt like they were just saying, no there's no problem here, your file is just too large...well I work on large files, like Im sure a lot of people do, and have been fine before.

One interesting thing is that it can't seem to cope with large pixel layers anymore, again if that is the problem, then why was it fine before. I use transform, esp warp, and smart objects (but also render them after, so no smart objects left in file)-and it lags horribly. This is soo bad for a good machine and the latest photoshop

I haven't been able to work in 4 days and I still don't really understand what is going on.

Is 16GB ram too low for 600MB + files? Should I get an external SSD as a scratch disk with much more than 200GB?

Ive looked everywhere for a solution, any help would be so so appreciated

Thank you

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer siobhano68240631

The solution I found was to use PSCC2018 again, no more scratch disk problems or lag.

PS2019 was the worst experience for me personally

3 replies

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Scott_imagic
Participating Frequently
May 13, 2022

Any chance you have an action or doing by hand large image copies to the system clipboard, since you are working with large files? We have found that this continues to hold and even stacks up (meaning if you do two copies, it holds both copies on the scratch disk, not one replacing the other). Photoshop will not release this data from the scratch disk unless you fully close the application down. We have found that the >edit, >purge function doesn't even release this data.

 

I am on a PC, so I run resmon.exe to view my memory usage in real time, so I would use the mac version. Open it up and watch how exponentially fast the scratch disk gets used up if you Ctrl-A, and Ctrl-V mulitple times. 

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siobhano68240631AuthorCorrect answer
Inspiring
December 13, 2018

The solution I found was to use PSCC2018 again, no more scratch disk problems or lag.

PS2019 was the worst experience for me personally

gener7
Community Expert
gener7Community Expert
Community Expert
November 21, 2018

An external scratch drive might help: Scratch Disks: How do I set one up? What do they do? Should I use one? - Latest Apple Mac Pro News & Tips

1 TB drives are inexpensive these days and USB 3/C is speedy.

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