PS CS5 suddenly slows down
I have a strange issue with CS 5 at the moment. From one day to the other PS suddenly is extremely slow, sometimes during drawing, but always while saving or loading a file. I have already done a google search but the solution proposals didn't work (cache changing, turning off and on OpenGL). I also un- and reinstalled the program, to no avail. Illustrator works fine.
Has anyone encountered that problem or knows a solution?
I've always considered PS to have a memory leak, meaning that it slowly just draws more and more on the memory, even if it doesn't use it. I usually close PS every night and open it fresh daily. I haven't noticed it as much since Cs4, but I do it anyway.
Sorry to hear that, man. I always seem to have a stall while the program itself is loading, but I do have a lot of patterns and brushes and styles to go through but not nearly as many as as I used to. Slowing when loading or saving is only a problem when my file gets over 2 gigs (in PS memory but only 600 megs in actual disk space). So if you're having this problem on nearly every file then it's something I haven't heard of or experienced, thank goodness. If you find the root of the problem and the fix be sure to let us know so that we can avoid such things ourselves.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Only other thing is it could be a hardrive/page file issue... But I highly doubt it since you have a decent machine from the size of files you pull off. I know mine has RAM issues with GIMP.
Cheers, Julien
Battlemaps, Town Maps, Tutorials.
All my maps and content are posted and published under this Creative Commons License.Click Here for information on licensing.
I haven't yet played with CS5, but I was having intermittent slowdowns with After Effects CS4 on Windows Vista. I found that running it in XP compatibility mode solved that problem.
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
My actual challenge entry is only 450 MB large, but it needs more time for saving and loading than a 1,5 GB file I worked on last month. I will thoroughly check the task manager the next time I start PS. I have done this before and from my 4 GB RAM on my 64 bit machine, PS never needs more than ~ 1,9 GB. I hope I find the reason, otherwise I'll set up my PC completely new. I simply don't have the nerves to work under this slow-down-effect.
Problem solved
It was not a PS but a Microsoft problem.
There is a wmpnetwk.exe process which runs in the background; a windows media player network access process. Every time I opened or saved or did something RAM-intensive in PS, this tiny RAM-sucker blew up from ~ 9 MB RAM use to over 2 GB! without doing something useful. What was strange is, that it wasn't displayed in the normal 'process' tab in the task manager (then I would have seen the problem earlier). Only when I opened the detail views in the resources tab in the task manager I found it.
I disabled the wmpnetwk.exe permanently - only shutting down is no help, it is restarted automatically within a few seconds.
Together with PS this process used nearly my entire RAM capacity of 4 GB; I'm not sure, but I think that wmpnetwk.exe is granted priority by Windows 7, because PS went down to a few hundred MB RAM use, while wmpnetwk.exe became bigger and bigger.
I hope this information can help others in the future.
Thanks Sap, great piece of detective work. I've just checked mine while running a big PS file and there and it registered zero on CPU usage and 15k on RAM, that didn't change whether or not PS was running. As I'm not a techno person I have no idea what this tells us!
I'm going to check this out on my machine so big thanks Sap.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Thats not normal ! What do you think its doing with the 2Gb its working with. What I am betting is that its looking for new files saved and checking them off on a database on the internet for whether its a pirated copy of some vid. Its probably doing some kind of fingerprinting hash on your file. If you find that you cant stop it from starting when you boot then here are some tips. MS do a nice download called "system internals" google that and download the suite. Its a set of tools written by this great russian (white hat) hack who was bought by MS cos his stuff is so good and useful. One of the apps he wrote was the startup list where it runs through every which way possible to start an app from boot and lists them all. You can tick which ones you dont want to start. So for me the Java and Adobe Reader updater and so on get the heave ho and chucked off the list. When you get a really stubborn one then heres a great tip. Boot up in as high an admin mode as possible to get it this work. Find the file exe thats starting. Copy it to some name like SapsOld_xxxx.exe where the name was just xxx.exe and then create a nice little text file with a note in it like "Dummy file to stop xxxx.exe" and rename the file xxx.exe then change its permissions to read only. Now boot back up in your normal user mode.
In sys internals there is a process viewer called procexp.exe which is better than MS's version of the process explorer. This one tells you the filename and path to what is running and also when you want to shut it down it does not stall for 10 seconds trying. It just boots it off the system. To be honest I cant run a windows box without the sys internals suite. Its a PC life saver and thats not an overstatement.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
