Inspiring

Answered

Why does PS take so long to load files?

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
December 27, 2019
9 replies
4383 views

Recently, I was opening a PSB document that was just shy of 7GB on disk. This takes a very long time--minutes, in fact--to open. I have a very powerful DIY desktop and I wondered what the bottleneck was so I pulled up performance monitor to check it out and learned that my system was basically idle. I had expected to see that my Samsung 960PRO SSD was maxed out or at least being heavily used but in fact it was at 0% usage. CPU use was in the single digits. RAM was around 20%. GPU was idle. So what gives? Why does it take so long when there's clearly no bottleneck in my system? Poor coding? I didn't investigate in a lot of detail but it seemed like the loading process was only using a single thread out of a possible 24 and that very little.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer davescm

Hi

Have you tried checking "Disable Compression of PSD and PSB files, in Preferences>File Handling then resaving the file.

The file sizes on disk may be bigger but loading can be quicker as there is no need to decompress the file as it is loaded.

Dave

D Fosse

Community Expert

Indeed. Welcome to the wonderful world of no compression 🙂

dev_willisAuthor

Inspiring

Wow! Huge difference. It went from 1:35 to open down to 20s. The filesize went from 6.8GB to 12.7GB but whatever lol

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

How long does it take to copy the file? It's going to take a substantial time just to read 7 GB of data. There will always be a bottleneck, and I'd have been surprised if it was CPU or GPU.

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

Also... is the file on your scratch disk, and is it a real (not SSD) disk?

dev_willisAuthor

Inspiring

If by a "real" disk you mean a spinning platter then no, I don't use any of those. Photoshop itself is on my main drive, a 500GB Samsung 960PRO, the scratch disk is a second 500GB 960PRO, and the file itself is on a 1TB 960EVO. I can copy the file from one drive to another in 8s.

davescm

Community Expert

Yes, I have compression permanently disabled here also.

Dave

jane-e

Community Expert

As of this minute, I also have it permanently disabled. Thanks, Dave and Dag!

~ Jane

D Fosse

Community Expert

Dave is right. The compression/decompression takes an incredible amount of time. Expect it to drop dramatically when turning off compression.

I have it permanently disabled for this reason. The price, slightly larger files, doesn't matter to me. With an archive already pushing 10 terabytes I'm way beyond worrying about file sizes. Bring it on 😉

dev_willisAuthor

Inspiring

Same. We do video work as well so the storage required for photos, even large ones, is insignificant. Looking forward to seeing this speed increase!

dev_willisAuthor

Inspiring

@davescm I didn't know about that option. I'll give it a try. Thanks!

To be clear, I don't think PS is behaving unusually on my computer. It's still faster on this desktop than on other computers I've used and once the file loads everything's pretty snappy. I'm just curious what the bottleneck is that causes it take so long to load while the system it's loading on is more or less idle. Is it doing all that decompression in a single thread?

davescm

Correct answer

Community Expert

Hi

Have you tried checking "Disable Compression of PSD and PSB files, in Preferences>File Handling then resaving the file.

The file sizes on disk may be bigger but loading can be quicker as there is no need to decompress the file as it is loaded.

Dave