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what's causing the slow?

mattspace

mattspace

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jun 5, 2013
3,417
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Australia
Just wondering if anyone can point to where the slowness I'm getting is likely to be:

Dual 6 core 3.06ghz in 4,1 -> 5,1. 48GB of Ram, Original GT120 GPU, no SSDs, running Yosemite using Photoshop CS 5.

Photoshop files are 300-600mb in size, with 20-50 layers, layer effects, masks etc. All report 100% efficiency, which should mean they're fitting into ram & not using any scratch.

The problem is zooming, moving & rotating around using trackpad - do a pinch to zoom in, it zooms a bit, then halts for 10-20 seconds, before completing the zoom. Same for rotation, only about half the duration of the gesture seems to be seen / acted upon.

I'm thinking either there is scratch being used and the drives are slowing it down, or the GPU doesn't have the ability to drive the viewport changes, or CS5 is old enough that it's ability to respond to trackpad gestures is primitive & inefficient... or a combination of all 3. Anyone solved a similar problem?
 
Has the configuration - PS CS5, Yosemite, GT120, mechanical hard drives etc, that you are currently using worked well in the past? Have you made any hardware changes?

Anything you could provide as to when specifically notice the change would help narrow the issue down.

I have a very similar setup - MP 4,1->5,1. dual 6-core CPUs - 64GB Ram, GTX780 (but the GT120 is still in it.) but my main drive is an SSD and my scratch drive is a second SSD - which makes a huge difference. I work a lot in Photoshop and until recently used CS6. I am now using CC. I have done many similar projects as you are describing and am not having issues.

I also have a Windows 10 computer with dual 4-core, 24GB Ram, GTX770 with SSD main drive. The W10 acts just as you are describing and I run PS CS6 on it. I no longer do anything taxing on it - just small projects. Of course it could be W10 - nothing would surprise me with that OS.

If it were my computer and I was convinced it was slow hardware, I would be upgrading the video card and changing the hard drives to SSDs.
 
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lclev said:
Has the configuration - PS CS5, Yosemite, GT120, mechanical hard drives etc, that you are currently using worked well in the past? Have you made any hardware changes?
Click to expand...

it's hard to quantify - i upgraded the processors from the original 2x 2.26 quads, another thing it does, is if you're trying to put down a vector path, if you put down points too quickly it'll randomly disappear a control point when you put down the next one. previous to this i was using a similar vintage mini with a lot less ram, and don't recall these problems.

On a hunch I just tried one of the medium sized images - 440mb in Affinity photo, and while a lot of the masks (vector masks i suspect) didn't come through, zooming, panning and rotating were silky smooth and instantly responsive, so I'm leaning towards it being something in Photoshop. InDesign CS5 is pretty creaky for that as well.
 
1 disable gpu acceleration
2 what are your scratch disc settings?
3 what are you catch settings
4 not using a ssd
5 lack of free space on spinning drive
6 fragmented spinning drive

i had to gess on a few due to lack of info but a good check list to look at

SSD scratch disc is supposed to be the biggest speed up for Photoshop (SSD as boot drive will not help as much but SSD boot+SSD scratch is better).
ie
boot from HD
scratch on SSD
is better than
boot from SSD
scratch on HD

having your scratch on the same drive as the OS is relay bad >.>
im cheep so use a WD black for scratch (dedicated it is only used for scratch for all my adobe apps)
 
well the scratch is set to a different drive to boot, which has plenty of space, but the fact PS is reporting efficiency at 100% means it shouldn't actually hitting the scratch (afaik) at all. I've set scratch to a RAM Disk before, and it didn't make any appreciable difference, so my hunch is it's not disk related. I'm also wondering if it's something really braindead, like PS of this age doesn't actually use the trackpad gestures natively, but converts them into a series of its own keyboard shortcuts for zoom pan and rotate, and just chokes on getting to many of them.
 
Where I work I am the Media Coordinator. They created that title because the did not know exactly what to call me! Anyway, I do all the video, photo and graphics work plus networking and computer maintenance (IT) .

That said - When I started replacing mechanical hard drives with SSDs I became much beloved :). The speed increase from booting to opening apps is tremendous. So replacing your main drive with an SSD would be my first step.

As to creating vector points and PS CS5 with a trackpad. I am afraid CS5 could be the issue there. CS5 is long in the tooth. A very easy way to check - and what I would try - is download Photoshop CC. Yes, Adobe made all their apps pay to play app now but you can do a free trial for I believe 30(?) days. I did this when I got a big HD video project in and found out CS6 did not have the codex to handle it. Ended up convincing work I had to have the whole package. But try the trial and if your trackpad and vector issues go away you have your answer. And if not - go shopping???

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/catalog/desktop.html?promoid=NQCJRCJ2&mv=other

Lisa
 
carpsafari said:
100% the issue is you not having SSD's!
And a crappy GPU...
Do what @iclev is suggesting!
Click to expand...
I appreciate those are generally the goto fixes for most problems. Though, my system isn't doing any paging on its own, and photoshop is reporting what I understand means it's using no swap either, I don't know what the drive speed could have to do with it, unless the Efficiency rating doesn't count some types of swap use.

Flattening the image produces a huge speedup (though still not as fast as Affinity), so I can only guess it's complexity of all the masks and vector stuff it's choking on trying to move around in the viewport. I wonder if that would be improved with a better GPU?
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lclev said:
As to creating vector points and PS CS5 with a trackpad. I am afraid CS5 could be the issue there. CS5 is long in the tooth. A very easy way to check - and what I would try - is download Photoshop CC.
Click to expand...

Yeah the vector points issue (along with sliders and layers that are sticky and don't release when you let go of the mouse button) seems to be equally problematic with mouse, trackpad and wacom. I'm suspecting I'm seeing symptoms of software that's too old for the system. I don't know if the fact I'm on a dual processor system has anything to do with it, I think I've heard around here that it can slow photoshop.

Since Photoshop isn't really on my long-term toolchain, I'll just wait it out (or try to find an old CS6 copy to see if it's an improvement) and start all my new work in Affinity.
 
in CS5 can you disable GPU acceleration ?
i know in CS6+ that can slow things down.

it may be something simple like Photoshop is only using 1-2 cores most the time so your hitting a cpu speed roof.
 
One thing I had forgotten is that in CS6 they added Mercury Graphics Engine which means the GPU is utilized.
I just think you are being bogged down by an older version coupled with older graphic card and -maybe - no SSD main drive. (Trust me an SSD makes a huge difference.)

Check out this chart that compares versions:
https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/versions.html
 
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Yep you need more VRAM and an SSD if you're going to have files like that. Forget about the efficiency meter it was designed for optimising 32 bit and older systems that couldn't access more than 3.2 GB RAM. It only tells when memory resources have run out. It can't tell when you just need better caching speed and graphics acceleration.
 
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orph said:
well the gpu thing has been know to make Photoshop slower. (the setting not old gpu's and if it's not in cs5 then it's not relay a thing)
this is worth looking at
https://macperformanceguide.com/OptimizingPhotoshopCS5-Intro.html
it explains almost all the prefers and most things you can do to optimise in prefes,filetypes,hardware etc
Click to expand...

CS5 definitely has GPU settings, which it uses for all the viewport things that I'm getting slowdowns on, it also uses them to anti-alias all the vector art, which becomes important, for example if you want to stroke a vector curve with lines that run perpendicular (in my case, manga speed lines) - with a jaggy vector they crash into each other at the change of every step in the curve.

so could very well be a GPU problem, either primitive support, or underpowered card.
 
almost every thing i read about Photoshop and the gpu options say turn them off or you will have problems.

soycapitan know's his stuff
 
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