[headbirth]

Hello,

When I open a file say 17MB or more in PS, other apps and the system just slow to a crawl or come to a stop until PS has finished opening the file. I occasionally see this with other apps that are opening or saving.

Is this a problem with the OS? or something else?

[tooki]

With that little bit of info, I can't make a diagnosis.

But if you open Activity Monitor, you can watch what resources a program is taking.

How much RAM do you have? Photoshop needs lots, and if it can't have them, it has to use scratch disk (Photoshop does this on its own, it does not use the OS's virtual memory). This slows things down, since the OS has a lot of data to write when opening a large PS file, since it creates scratch files about 5x the size of the original.

tooki

[headbirth]

ahhh ... I totally forgot about the scratch disk.

I have photoshop set to 55% and have the factory build of 512MB of RAM at the moment.

Should PS be set lower?

[Judge_Fire]

Also make sure you have plenty of empty space on your disk.

If Photoshop hogs it all for the swap file, things definitely slow down. More importantly, there's a danger of other apps corrupting their preferences if writing them fails.

A safe method is having a dedicated disk (partition) for apps that use scratch/swap to write to (and setting the apps to do just that.)

J

[larkost]

You should buy more memory, otherwise you are going to cripple either the OS or Photoshop.

[headbirth]

There's almost 30GB free on my drive. I don't see how PS can run out of space. I've avoided partitioning the drive on my new PB, but maybe I'll consider it or upgrade my PS to the new CS version.

[headbirth]

any recommedations on memory? I heard Crucial is good.