Photoshop Memory |
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Why Photoshop rarely forgets your birthday... |
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| When Photoshop first starts, it allocates a percentage of the system RAM as Photoshop
memory. This can be altered by selecting 'Edit - Preferences - Memory & Image Cache’ from the
menu, and changing the maximum percentage used. While Photoshop is open, other programs may use this memory only if Photoshop does not currently require it. Photoshop effectively becomes the ‘priority user’ of this memory. After Photoshop is closed the memory is released again. Allocating too high a proportion of the RAM to Photoshop can actually reduce performance. If the operating system and Photoshop are together trying to access more RAM than exists on the machine, they will both resort to using virtual memory stored on the hard disk. This causes ‘page swapping’ to occur. Page swapping involves copying data from RAM to the hard disk (and back) in sections called pages, and can dramatically decrease the performance of both the operating system and Photoshop. 50% is the default percentage or RAM allocated as Photoshop memory, and this should not cause unnecessary page swapping. The maximum physical amount of memory Photoshop can use is 1.7GB, due to technical limitations of both hardware and the operating system. Scratch disks are used when Photoshop has used all the RAM available to it, and still needs more space to store data. The scratch space is used by Photoshop as a series of temporary files, stored in a directory appropriate to the scratch disk location specified in the Photoshop Preferences section. The files are named “~PST####.tmp”, where “####” represents four numbers. If Photoshop crashes during an operation, sometimes these files are not deleted as they should be. It is usually safe to delete them while Photoshop is not running, to reclaim scratch space. |
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A page about Photoshop Memory
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