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RAM (Read 11620 times)

cofe

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RAM
March 30, 2005, 09:35:07 am
word.

so i acqiured a bit more RAM for my 'computer' - only about 64mb but it would have bumped it up to a whopping 192mb.

however, although the 'computer' recognised the RAM etc and booted up as normal it took bloody ages and actually ran slower.

so, i took out the extra 64mb and now the 'computer' won't boot at all (gets to screen where says "loading IDE-0...OK" or similar). deeply irritating.

two things:
1 - i want my 'computer' to boot again.
2 - i want the RAM to work so my 'computer' is a bit quicker.

help?

Bubba

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#1 RAM
March 30, 2005, 09:55:52 am
- Were the two sticks of RAM the same speed?
- Maybe you've dislodged the original stick of RAM :: try reseating it.

If it's an old motherboard it's possible that you may have to use identical pairs  - ie 2x 128 and not 128 +64

cofe

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#2 RAM
March 30, 2005, 10:11:12 am
it was 1 x 128 and 1 x 64. the motherboard is probably about 98/99.

sure the original RAM is back in right  - but won't boot...

Bubba

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#3 RAM
March 30, 2005, 10:57:59 am
Ho hum, not an expert on this stuff by any means - I know that lots of old systems needed matched pairs of RAM (ie same speed/size/etc) but dunno whether this was motherboard or bios specific - anyone know?

Have you put the original RAM back into the same slot it was in before? Double check it's seated ok and if it is then your PC is probably fucked. Well no, but it doesn't look good for that stick of RAM.

If you get desperate I'm sure I'll have some old sticks of RAM lying about that you could have, but dunno whether they'd be compatible with your m/board.

JR

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#4 RAM
March 30, 2005, 11:25:15 am
Quote from: "cofe"
it was 1 x 128 and 1 x 64. the motherboard is probably about 98/99.

sure the original RAM is back in right  - but won't boot...


by not booting do you mean that it doesnt turn on at all or you get beeps in the first black bios screen (if so how many beeps) or windows wont load.  If its the latter then its possible youve corrupted the windows installation by using incompatible pairings of RAM.  Otherwise you probably shafted the ram or the motherboard when you installed it.  Although its rareish you might have bust it with static.  Did you ground yourself first?

cofe

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#5 RAM
March 30, 2005, 12:04:48 pm
Quote from: "JR"
Did you ground yourself first?


you know me JR. hardly.

think it's windows not loading cos it pauses on the screen where it tells you all about your machine, drives etc.

am i screwed then?

Jim

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#6 RAM
March 30, 2005, 03:25:26 pm
can you get into your bios settings? if so try resetting them.

JR

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#7 RAM
March 31, 2005, 09:15:53 am
Quote from: "cofe"
Quote from: "JR"
Did you ground yourself first?


you know me JR. hardly.

think it's windows not loading cos it pauses on the screen where it tells you all about your machine, drives etc.

am i screwed then?


its freezing in your bios then.  If so, youve probably bust some piece of hardware or not seated somethign properly.  The system speaker should beep a few times and tell you.  It probably beeped once when it was working.  If it does then that will tell you what is wrong with it by the number and length of the beeps.  Or at least give you an idea.  Do you not get a message on that screen saying something like "memory test fail"?

As a first step, you could reset the bios to the default like jim said.  But that might not do anything if youve actually spannered something.  

Im back in shef next monday, if you can wait that long then ill come and have a look in return if you dont get it sorted before hand.

cofe

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#8 RAM
March 31, 2005, 10:34:58 am
how do i reset bios?

JR

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#9 RAM
March 31, 2005, 11:49:35 am
left you an answerphone message word...

Johnny Brown

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#10 Re: RAM
September 13, 2011, 05:29:54 pm
A bit like Cofe above, (having just received a 'surprise bonus check' from VG for my Tube photo) I was thinking of bunging some more RAM in my PC.

There are two spare slots, the existing ones have 2 x 2 GB DDR2 PC2-8500.

Was planning on getting another pair of 2GB sticks (think the mother supports 8GB max). Do I need DDR2 or can I get DDR3? DDR3 seems cheaper. Does the 6400/ 8500 bit make a difference?

The slots are in two banks, currently with one stick in each bank. I'm a bit confused as to whether the new ones would go in the spare slots (ie one in each bank), or whether I should move them around so each bank is a matched pair. :???:

Thanks.

tomtom

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#11 Re: RAM
September 13, 2011, 05:46:41 pm
Are you running 64 bit? (assuming its windoze) else it wont see/use more than 3.5gb...

Johnny Brown

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#12 Re: RAM
September 13, 2011, 05:50:22 pm
Sorry, should have said. Yes, I'm on Windows 8 64-bit, its 2011 dontchaknow? Makes Cofe's 64mb seem a long time ago...

Jim

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#13 Re: RAM
September 14, 2011, 01:06:55 am
do you need the extra RAM? dont think it will make that much difference with your set up. you'll need to find out what the mb supports. probably better putting money towards ssd or new computer o recon

tomtom

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#14 Re: RAM
September 14, 2011, 06:39:55 am
do you need the extra RAM? dont think it will make that much difference with your set up. you'll need to find out what the mb supports. probably better putting money towards ssd or new computer o recon

Yup, do you need the memory? I run some pretty hefty sims for work and 4gb does me fine...

Tom de Gay

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#15 Re: RAM
September 14, 2011, 07:48:41 am
Upgrading from 6 to 8gb ram on my laptop has made the heavy photoshop work much more bearable. Well worth it. For the money, ram has to be a better upgrade than an expensive ssd...?
I think you need cs4 or above on 64bit to access all that ram though.

Johnny Brown

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#16 Re: RAM
September 14, 2011, 08:28:34 am
Christ on a bike. What Tom said, except I'll be going from 4 to 8.

Yes I have CS4 and a 64 bit OS. Scans come in at 5000 x 7000 px, ie 35 megapixels. I then add layers. RAM intensive, no? For £50 I'll get a quick, cheap performance improvement. And I'll have 8Gb to stick in a new motherboard in a years time.

Am I correct in thinking an SSD would cost £140, require a fresh OS install, and mean faster loading programmes but little effect on getting big files off my data disks and juggling them in photoshop?

tomtom

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#17 Re: RAM
September 14, 2011, 08:33:56 am
The ssd would help a lot with the in-photoshop juggling I suspect, and tends to make the whole machine more responsive. You may not need to do a full install - not 100%. But sounds like you're using memory hungry shizzle so go for it, but back to your OP... Sorry I'm no memory expert.. jim's normally spot on with hardware & prices..?

Johnny Brown

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#18 Re: RAM
September 14, 2011, 09:54:12 am
Where did you get your MB/ CPU bundle from tomtom?

tomtom

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#19 Re: RAM
September 14, 2011, 10:05:20 am
Envisage.com

They were ok, but were a bit crap with a later order from work... So mixed review from me. We got the stuff ok and it all works fine though etc..

If you google amd phenom and bundle you'll get loads of offers. I read that amd have slashed the price of some of their procesors this week so there may be some bargains about. We bought a few 6 core 3.0 phenom bundles with 4gb memory for c.£300 each a couple of months back.

slackline

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#20 Re: RAM
September 14, 2011, 10:21:44 am
If you've already got DDR2 in there, its unlikely that your Motherboard will support DDR3 because each of the incarnations of DDR/DDR2/DDR3 have the notches between connectors in different places (see diagram here.

The 6400/ 8500 number is the module name and is basically the maximum MB/s transfer rates you can expect.  Ideally you'd need to know what your Motherboard supports to be able to say whether its worth getting the higher spec, but if you've already got two 6400 and bung two 8500 then it will probably all run at the lower spec.

Suspect you can access the hardware settings under the "Control Panel" somewhere, but have no idea where to look I'm afraid (alternatively you could just open it up and read it directly off the board itself).

As to which slots to put them into, that again depends on the Motherboard, the manual will tell you how this should be done, can't advise without knowing the model.

mr__j5

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#21 Re: RAM
September 14, 2011, 10:22:23 am
I am fairly sure that there is only one memory bus clock so that has to run as the speed of the slowest memory that is installed.

So buying faster memory won't work any faster than the existing memory. Also the motherboard manual should say what types of memory it can handle.

I am fairly sure that if you have DDR2 in at the moment, then you will have to buy more DDR2 to go with as the mobo won't take DDR3, but it won't matter if the new memory is rated faster than the existing memory, it will just run underclocked.

Johnny Brown

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#22 Re: RAM
September 14, 2011, 10:44:40 am
Cheers guys, that was just what I was after. Will probably just get two more the same as the existing two. £45 nicker. Could do with upgrading screen before I get into processors and drives...

Jim

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#23 Re: RAM
September 14, 2011, 08:28:46 pm
you are well out on the price of ssd.
with regards to the memory, get same as what youve got. make sure you dont buy any stuff with big heat sinks on so they will fit in. also make sure youve got 4 slots on your mb for it to go in

Johnny Brown

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#24 Re: RAM
September 15, 2011, 08:32:29 am
Ta. Where in Jimland would I get this bargain SSD for a couple of fuck-alls then? £140 was the cheapest 120gb one on Microdirect.

slackline

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#25 Re: RAM
September 15, 2011, 08:47:33 am
Very roughly £1/Gb at eBuyer give or take a bit (e.g. 96Gb for £82.99 (although not the fastest transfer rates))

Johnny Brown

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#26 Re: RAM
September 20, 2011, 05:11:17 pm
Quote
do you need the extra RAM? probably better putting money towards ssd or new computer o recon

Well I've running Task Manager for the last few days to see if the RAM really is the limiting factor.
Been like this for the last two hours; a fucking joke. New RAM has been ordered.






dave

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#27 Re: RAM
September 20, 2011, 05:16:55 pm
You sure you not got weird trojan shit chewing shit up? That ram usage looks crazy.

slackline

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#28 Re: RAM
September 20, 2011, 05:32:02 pm
I don't know about M$, but just because RAM is showing as being used doesn't mean its a limiting factor.

This is the situation under Linux/Android and I would be amazed if M$ isn't different....

Quote from: slackline
Android is running a Linux kernel and the way Linux handles memory is to allow a program to have its memory space whilst its running, when the program ends it still sits in memory using up the space it used, so it may appear that you have no memory left and you think you'll improve performance by killing some of those programs that are sitting in RAM using it up but not being used by you.  But Linux has been designed to do this on purpose, if you restart a program, e.g. a web-browser, its already in memory and starts up quicker.  But what about when a new program is started and there isn't enough free RAM I hear you ask, well thats not a problem, because at that point the kernel glances at whats in RAM, checks to see whats actually being used and kicks out that program which is sat there and not being used, freeing up enough RAM for the new program.

 Thus you don't actually need to waste your time actively killing programs you've exited just to free up RAM, because it won't make any difference to performance as the kernel is very good at managing RAM.

 My Linux systems (one with 6Gb and one with 8Gb RAM) regularly have close to 0% of RAM free, but I never experience any delay/lag in opening up new programs or with general usability.

 And to get to the crux, stuff sat in memory doesn't use any power, stuff using the CPU will do.  If you've apps running that you don't want stop them from starting up in the first place, otherwise you'll be forever trying to kill them. (See under Settings somewhere, kind of depends on which app, some have settings within the app, I found ShopSavvy always started up on its own and sat there, never use it so deleted it).

 You can read an article on this specifically about Android task managers here.

To start trouble shooting look at CPU/RAM usage from a fresh boot (not suspend or hibernate), if its still high then I'd do what dave says and look at which processes are actually using the RAM.

(More fundamentally though I can't see a scale on the x-axis to indicate whether that is usage over the last few minutes or the full few days you've been monitoring things, the up-time is quoted but I don't see whether this is reflected in the graph, could just be the last few minutes for all I know, but I'm guessing you've been glancing at this perodically over the past few days :shrug:  :geek:).

Jim

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#29 Re: RAM
September 20, 2011, 05:37:43 pm
click on the applications tab in task manager and sort by memory usage to see whats eating it all up.
New Ram might help the situation but it won't solve your problem

Johnny Brown

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#30 Re: RAM
September 20, 2011, 05:44:41 pm
Nothing wierd going on, Photoshop is using 2.5GB, Lightroom 1Gb, with Firefox, Thunderbird and OS fighting it out for the rest.

Quote
New Ram might help the situation but it won't solve your problem

Why not? I'm guessing most of you aren't flipping big files between LR and PS like I am. PS is famous for chewing RAM, as soon as I exit it things are fine, and RAM useage drops down to 1.3GB/ 32%.

Only annoying thing is a lot of the time LR will export a big file, I'll downsize it in PS significantly, but purging PS cache doesn't seem to do owt and I have to exit PS to free up RAM.

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#31 Re: RAM
September 20, 2011, 06:12:55 pm
Nothing wierd going on, Photoshop is using 2.5GB, Lightroom 1Gb, with Firefox, Thunderbird and OS fighting it out for the rest.

Quote
New Ram might help the situation but it won't solve your problem

Why not? I'm guessing most of you aren't flipping big files between LR and PS like I am. PS is famous for chewing RAM, as soon as I exit it things are fine, and RAM useage drops down to 1.3GB/ 32%.

Only annoying thing is a lot of the time LR will export a big file, I'll downsize it in PS significantly, but purging PS cache doesn't seem to do owt and I have to exit PS to free up RAM.

The linux post is irrelevant.

You need more RAM.

Note that a lot of applications do what PS does: once they've grabbed memory, they won't release it back - just hang on to it so they don't need to compete with other stuff to get it back from the OS if they do want it.

tomtom

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#32 Re: RAM
September 20, 2011, 06:42:07 pm
Photoshop must be written by a room of lazy bastard slugs on valium then... I code in .net and it manages memory really well.. I can write some code 'reserving' a 100 million element array and the program will be titchy memory wise until you load up the array and sizes memory according to how much of this array I'm using... So sounds like PS is written without any dynamic memory allocation, which is in one word Turd.

Unless youre keeping huoouge images loaded up all the time.. Maybe it's a case of bad porting from mac many moons ago?

Don't think that's any help.. Sorry..

Jim

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#33 Re: RAM
September 20, 2011, 07:11:47 pm
so photoshop & lightroom constantly uses 3.5 gig when open even when not doing anything?
in that case what tomtom said, piss-poor programming, either that or you've got your computer set up badly.
speaking of valium, i'm just off to have some more

Johnny Brown

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#34 Re: RAM
September 20, 2011, 07:45:43 pm
Its a case of massive files I think, that's all.

Tom de Gay

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#35 Re: RAM
September 20, 2011, 10:44:43 pm
That RAM usage seems entirely normal for Photoshop/Lightroom combo (with big files). With 8GB installed Photoshop sometimes gets up to 5GB. It does free it up again though.


The other thing which made things run a little more smoothly was the disallow flate compression plugin - no more epic saves!


Edit: quitting browser, mail and non-essential background applications makes a difference too.

Jim

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slackline

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#37 Re: RAM
September 20, 2011, 11:16:01 pm

The linux post is irrelevant.

You need more RAM.

Note that a lot of applications do what PS does: once they've grabbed memory, they won't release it back - just hang on to it so they don't need to compete with other stuff to get it back from the OS if they do want it.

Is this true even when applications have been shut down?

How is memory managed under Win7?

You can't possibly have applications grabbing memory and not releasing it in some fashion when the program is formally exited.  It would seem sensible that they either release it immediately by vacating the memory address or sit there waiting to be recalled (affording marginally faster start up times as is the case under *NIX, but being scrapped if there isn't enough free RAM for a new application).  If they hold onto it all the the time and never release it then RAM would get filled up pretty damn quickly, and people would have to reboot regularly non?

Had a cursory search but neither M$ pages nor Wikipedia are enlightening in this regard (EDIT : Found this but it still doesn't really answer my question, but may be useful to check out alternative ways of measuring RAM usage than the one thats been tried so far).

It does sound like PS isn't very efficient in its use of RAM though.
« Last Edit: September 20, 2011, 11:45:40 pm by slack---line »

tomtom

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#38 Re: RAM
September 21, 2011, 07:33:55 am
Iirc, (it's 8years since I researched this) then how a program manages memory is down it the language coded in and how it is coded rather than the OS etc..

In normal C and C++ memory is reserved for the size of the variables you declare when the prig starts to run - you then have to use malloc or similar commands (they're grim to use iirc) to dynamcically assign the memory from inside the program duping it's operation.
The .net languages are slower and have other performance overheads, but deal with this memory management automatically - dynamic memory allocation - which can be a real advantage. Anyway, I'm no pro programmer so happy to be corrected but that's my understanding..

slackline

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#39 Re: RAM
September 21, 2011, 07:38:52 am
I've a vague recollection of that stuff from when I did some rudimentary C programming (and also remember malloc being a pain to understand).

But regardless the OS will still have to handle which programs are using which bits of memory and when to invoke swap(/page-file under M$) if physical RAM requirements are exceeded, and thats what I'm hazy about under Win7 (and indeed other incarnations of Win).

tomtom

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#40 Re: RAM
September 21, 2011, 07:42:27 am
I've a vague recollection of that stuff from when I did some rudimentary C programming (and also remember malloc being a pain to understand).

But regardless the OS will still have to handle which programs are using which bits of memory and when to invoke swap(/page-file under M$) if physical RAM requirements are exceeded, and thats what I'm hazy about under Win7 (and indeed other incarnations of Win).

Hmm you have a point there, from memory if unix apps were too large it would swap a load out to the swap file which would make it bloody slow but it wouldn't crash.. N idea about ms..

slackline

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#41 Re: RAM
September 21, 2011, 07:47:22 am
I've a vague recollection of that stuff from when I did some rudimentary C programming (and also remember malloc being a pain to understand).

But regardless the OS will still have to handle which programs are using which bits of memory and when to invoke swap(/page-file under M$) if physical RAM requirements are exceeded, and thats what I'm hazy about under Win7 (and indeed other incarnations of Win).

Hmm you have a point there, from memory if unix apps were too large it would swap a load out to the swap file which would make it bloody slow but it wouldn't crash.. N idea about ms..

Thats what page-file is for (i.e. paging)  They're essentially the same concept except under *NIX it tends to be a separate partition called swap, whilst under M$ its a file on the hard-drive (often hidden).

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#42 Re: RAM
September 21, 2011, 10:52:30 am
You can see from the posted image that the OS only has 482MB in cached memory and it normally only uses this for caching file I/O.

There is then a generally fixed amount of memory used by the OS (kernel) to run stuff, most of that these days is for graphics resources. After that, it is all down to what the applications ask for and whether they give it back in a hurry.

But yes, all OS's use paging to a swap file to avoid running out of memory, but you never want to get to this state as your machine will be running so much slower by then.

and yes, memory allocation in C/C++ (native) applications is a manual process that requires you to hand it back explicitly when done where as in .NET there is a garbage collector that detects when you have finished with memory and takes it back off you, making it much harder to walking off with GBs of memory.

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#43 Re: RAM
September 21, 2011, 12:45:27 pm
.NET is a special case yes - as is Java.  The programs you write with these run within a framework - the JDK, or the massively annoying .NET framework you had to download updates for every ten seconds with win 2K.  The framework manages your heap for you, and does "garbage collection".

What that means in a nutshell is that the framework is configured to have a minimum and maximum heap size.  These can be the same.  When it starts, it grabs a "heap" of that size from the operating system - and this will be what appears as the memory usage for the OS.  Say 1Gb.  The minimum will be reserved from the OS when it starts up.

When the program actually needs to use that, it will try to grab something from the framework (not the OS), use it etc., and then when it's done the framework marks it as unused.  It'll then free it up - but not necessarily back to the OS, just ready to be used again by the program running within the framework.

If you need more than the 1Gb, then the framework will progressively grab more up the limit... and when the limit is hit your program will crash.  Even though you might still have plenty left on your machine.

The advantage of this approach is simply the management: it makes it harder to write programs that leak memory.  Remember early versions of firefox?  They had a memory leak where the program's memory footprint just got bigger and bigger and bigger slowly.  This is a memory leak.

For unmanaged heaps, you can do either.  You can either just grab memory when you need it and release it back to the operating system, and this is what small, simple apps will do.

Things like photoshop will do something inbetween.  They'll grab a huge chunk at the start of day, and then apportion bits of it internally when they need it.  There isn't a framework per se that manages it - the programmer writes that function themselves as they see fit.  They do this because, basically, it means that they can get large contiguous chunks of memory by grabbing it in one go - and manage their own memory better than the OS can.  It also makes it easier to write portable applications with varying memory management requirements.

As to the difference between swap and not swap, and cached and the like... this is a big subject.  Fundamentally though, 4Gb is a LOT of memory.  If you had to page in and out even a quarter of that, although your application won't run out of memory, it'll run like a dog as moving stuff between actual real memory where the CPU can get at it and the disk is slow.  Even with an SSD.

Fundamentally, everything you do with your computer will be gated, performance wise, by one of three things.
- CPU speed
- memory (either total usage, or the way it's used and how fast the CPU can get at it)
- disk access.

For photoshop, it seems like the total memory footprint is the problem.

 

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