Tips for Photoshop Memory Management

I feel like I've won the lottery! My laptop computer is the happy recipient of 1.5 GB of additional memory, bringing the total RAM available from 512 MB to 2 GB. I resorted to this move (reluctantly, and at considerable expense) after tiring of sluggish performance, overheating, and frequent crashing when using Photoshop and other memory-intensive applications. The hard drive churned like a demon constantly as Photoshop paged out what it couldn't handle in memory to the swap file. It was even worse with fractals. The screen refresh rate was slow and it took many hours to render complex images to disk because of limited memory.

The additional RAM has turned my humble little laptop into a powerhouse, virtually solving all my Photoshop performance issues overnight. If you are experiencing similar problems and you don't have the luxury of adding 2 GB of RAM, there are some things you can do to boost Photoshop's memory handling. For a good discussion of this topic, see the MacWorld article, Optimizing Photoshop CS2.

The tips provided in this article improved the situation considerably in the lengthy interim before I finally bit the bullet and sprang for more RAM. Among the things I learned was that I had been allocating too much memory to Photoshop. This caused long delays — and even crashing — when saving, as Windows and CS2 duked it out for the tiny amount of available RAM.