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Veltliner · Oct 11, 2010, 02:37 AM

The longer I work, the slower my iMac gets.

Restarting speeds up things again.

I supposed that has to do with the operating software.

Could it be that Bridge is taking more and more of my RAM, and then I'm freeing it again when I restart?

P · Oct 11, 2010, 04:26 AM

Originally Posted by Veltliner

Could it be that Bridge is taking more and more of my RAM, and then I'm freeing it again when I restart?

That seems likely. Can you check what Activity Monitor says and how large the VM files get?

Big Mac · Oct 11, 2010, 07:52 AM

What "Bridge"?

You shouldn't be seeing that behavior on a modern OS. I haven't seen that behavior since the debut of OS X and XP.

Atheist · Oct 11, 2010, 08:23 AM

How much free space do you have on your boot drive?

P · Oct 11, 2010, 08:55 AM

Originally Posted by Big Mac

What "Bridge"?

You shouldn't be seeing that behavior on a modern OS. I haven't seen that behavior since the debut of OS X and XP.

There is a Bridge application that is part of Adobe CS - and yes, this can happen if an application is leaking memory. The VM system is forced to constantly find more memory for the bad app, meaning that it's paging out lots of pages. Every so often, it will page out a page that an app needs again, causing a future page fault and slowing down the OS.

Veltliner · Oct 11, 2010, 11:39 PM

Originally Posted by P

That seems likely. Can you check what Activity Monitor says and how large the VM files get?

I will check this tonight.

I'm still on Bridge CS3, which is very buggy. I'm going out soon and get Photoshop CS5 extended and hope Bridge CS5 is much better.

Veltliner · Oct 11, 2010, 11:41 PM

Originally Posted by Atheist

How much free space do you have on your boot drive?

50 Gb out of 250 Gb.

But I think it has to do with Photoshop/Bridge. Sometimes things get so slow it takes two seconds for a healing brush retouch to show up. Then sometimes, after a while, it gets faster again.

reader50 · Oct 12, 2010, 02:17 AM

Originally Posted by Veltliner

50 Gb out of 250 Gb.

80% full. That's the boundary where fragmentation and slowdowns may start. I wouldn't expect them to happen at 80%, but it is time to plan for a bigger drive.

ghporter · Oct 12, 2010, 06:51 AM

Step 1: offload as much data as you can from your hard drive. Move large files, like music and movies, onto either an external drive or DVD, to get to somewhere closer to 150 G, and you'll probably see a lot of improvement in speed. Step 2 is to look into upgrading the computer's internal drive. The way drive prices are today, I'd go with upgrading to the very largest drive supported by your machine

Which reminds me that it's time to go through and weed out a bunch of incidental and unused files on my iMac...

Veltliner · Oct 12, 2010, 11:01 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

Step 1: offload as much data as you can from your hard drive. Move large files, like music and movies, onto either an external drive or DVD, to get to somewhere closer to 150 G, and you'll probably see a lot of improvement in speed. Step 2 is to look into upgrading the computer's internal drive. The way drive prices are today, I'd go with upgrading to the very largest drive supported by your machine

Which reminds me that it's time to go through and weed out a bunch of incidental and unused files on my iMac...

I was thinking about that, but the estimate to do the drive exchange was $130 (plus the price of the drive).

I'll do a big clean-up next weekend.

AKcrab · Oct 12, 2010, 11:33 PM

Originally Posted by Veltliner

I was thinking about that, but the estimate to do the drive exchange was $130 (plus the price of the drive).

That is too high. The swap should take less than an hour.

Can you try another shop?

Salty · Oct 14, 2010, 01:32 AM

It's frustrating that Apple doesn't make the internal drives on the iMac as easy to access as they are in the MacBook and MacBook Pros.

P · Oct 14, 2010, 06:45 AM

The accessibility of the HD in both iMacs and laptops varies widely between models. The white iSight models are probably the hardest to get in to.

JKT · Oct 15, 2010, 04:46 AM

How much RAM do you have and how much is being routinely used? Either use the Activity Monitor dock icon to monitor this, or a specialist app like Memory Monitor? It sounds to me as though you are probably using all your RAM and getting excessive paging after prolonged use. If you can install more RAM in your Mac that would be the first thing to upgrade, imo, not the hard drive.

OreoCookie · Oct 15, 2010, 05:57 AM

I would also reckon you have too little RAM given the fact that you have 80 % free space on your harddrive left.

P · Oct 15, 2010, 06:37 AM

The root cause is still a memory leak somewhere, otherwise the computer would be constantly slow or constantly fast.

OreoCookie · Oct 16, 2010, 08:15 AM

Well, Safari gobbles up quite a bit of memory over time and pushes out a lot of other things to swap. I've had to deal with it constantly when I was on only 2 GB RAM. Then it takes a while for things to get loaded back into physical RAM.

Salty · Oct 16, 2010, 01:42 PM

Weird my MacBook maxes out at two gigs of RAM and still feels pretty zippy all things considered.

Veltliner · Oct 17, 2010, 12:36 AM

Originally Posted by AKcrab

That is too high. The swap should take less than an hour.

Can you try another shop?

I have another one nearby and will give it a try.

Veltliner · Oct 17, 2010, 12:40 AM

Originally Posted by JKT

How much RAM do you have and how much is being routinely used? Either use the Activity Monitor dock icon to monitor this, or a specialist app like Memory Monitor? It sounds to me as though you are probably using all your RAM and getting excessive paging after prolonged use. If you can install more RAM in your Mac that would be the first thing to upgrade, imo, not the hard drive.

It's maxed out at 3 Gb.

In Photoshop I have set up RAM usage to a recommended amount (I think it's about 80% of the RAM).

My key suspect is Bridge CS3. I'm currently checking if I can't use those Credit Card points to get myself the upgrade to CS5.

There is a feature in Bridge CS3, rendering high quality previews, and it's very slow and bogs down the whole system whenever I finish an image. I have a suspicion that this is the element that kills my performance.

Veltliner · Oct 17, 2010, 12:44 AM

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

I would also reckon you have too little RAM given the fact that you have 80 % free space on your harddrive left.

This is a misunderstanding. 80% of the hard drive space is taken.

The way things are a Mac Pro will have to wait, and I'll invest a bit into my current Mac to make it go better.

Too bad about the 3 Gb max RAM, but a bigger hard drive could be an option. 250 Gb is pathetic. One large shoot produces about 18 Gb of images, and even though I delete 70% of each shoot, it's a huge amount of data. Add to these RAW files about 8 to 10 Gb of TIFF files...

I decided to move all RAW files off the main hard drive, and also the layered TIFF files. For older shoots I will move all TIFFs off the main drive, and only keep full resolution JPEGs in quality 12 for reference.

All this should work in a way that I can use my Mac for another year.

OreoCookie · Oct 17, 2010, 07:21 AM

Originally Posted by Veltliner

This is a misunderstanding. 80% of the hard drive space is taken.

Actually, it's a typo. I understood that you don't have too much capacity left, but since it's more than 10 GB, I don't think that's the problem.

If you want to know whether you have enough RAM or not, open Activity Monitor and keep an eye on the page-outs (= OS X moves data from the physical RAM to the swap file on your harddrive). That's the only number which will tell you whether you have too little RAM or not. OS X will try to occupy as much RAM as it can, so very little free RAM is not an indication you need more.

Especially if you use Aperture or Lightroom, 3 GB is nowhere near enough. When I moved from my 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 2 GB RAM to a 2.4 GHz Core i5 with 8 GB RAM, I suddenly noticed how much fun Aperture can be

(Don't fool yourself thinking Lightroom is magically faster: if you shoot 100 RAWs weighing about 10 MB a piece (for simplicity), you need 1 GB just to keep the RAW files in memory. (Although I have just come back from a vacation and ~550 pictures to sort through. And modern cameras have RAW files that are quite a bit larger than 10 MB.) Aperture also renders those RAW files live which means it takes up even more memory.