Will increasing RAM helps for my case?

[novetan]

Hi all,


Currently I'm using iMac with the en spec. My main task is mainly Photoshop CS5 and I have Silver Efex (SE) as plug in. Silver Efex is a program that converts colour to monochrome. Usual file size per image about 6MB. Not that huge.


It will take about 10s to load the image from PS to SE, and about 20s to convert back from SE back to PS. So all in abt 30s conversion time.


Will increasing the Ram to 32GB shorten the conversion time considerably to 3 to 5 sec all in? If increasing the RAM is not appropriate, what else can I upgrade to save conversion time.


Tks so much.

 

[HDFan]

When you are doing this what does activity monitor say about memory usage? How much memory is free?

 

[iRaynor SK]

I have the same Mac as you (watch my signature) and I had no issues like you. But I’m running macOS Mojave, fresh installation (no Time Machine or something like that) from March 2019.

 

[techwarrior]

Will increasing the Ram to 32GB shorten the conversion time considerably to 3 to 5 sec all in? If increasing the RAM is not appropriate, what else can I upgrade to save conversion time.
View attachment 843990

Most likely, with a relatively small file size, the disk i\o is the bottleneck. If you have Fusion or an HDD, an SSD might help considerably. Usually, SSD makes more of a difference than RAM.

The OS use disk to swap memory, so disk i\o impacts more than just opening and saving files.

 

[Fishrrman]

You didn't tell us what kind of drive is inside the iMac.

If it's a 1tb fusion drive or a platter-based hard drive, then things are just going to "go slower".

A cheap, easy, and safe solution is to buy a USB3 EXTERNAL SSD, plug it in, and set it up to be your boot drive.
It should have the OS, applications, and your user folder (but if you have large libraries of movies, music and photos, it's best to leave these libraries on the hard drive).

Also... something I've read about Adobe photo software (although I generally don't use Adobe products)...
... Due to the coding of the Adobe apps, they often are just "slow by nature", regardless of the hardware. They're not optimized to run as well as they could.

I could be wrong about this, perhaps others will jump in and comment.

But again, if you don't already have an SSD running the iMac, that alone can make a BIG improvement in overall performance.

 

[novetan]

Tks to all guys,

Think I hv a general good idea what's need done.