idunnoisok wrote:
I recently installed Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 and they tend to lag even on just during normal work operations like zooming, opening a file, selecting a tool, browsing menus etc etc.
... And I got 30GB left on my hardrive which is little but I believe is enough.
So I cannot believe this slow performance is due hardware limitations. There must be some driver issue or something else.
Anyone knows why CS6 is so slow?
Software version:
Photoshop CS6 13.0.1
Illustrator CS6 13.0.0
My Specs:
Os: Snow Leopard 10.6.8
Cpu: Intel Core i7 2.3 GHz
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
4GB ram
AMD Radeon HD 6750M
My experience is that Photoshop can demand and use prodigious amounts of memory and disk space, much more than one might expect from the size of the files being worked on. While I don't have direct experience with CS6, my daughter uses CS4 on a Macbook Air with 4 GB memory and she had 100 GB free (on a 250 GB solid state drive). CS4 is less demanding than CS6, and in fact with the SSD, it runs pretty well, even with just 4 GB memory (the solid state drive is basically like memory, in fact, in some ways). However after running Photoshop on some projects for a while, we noticed she had only 60 GB free disk space. After restarting her Mac, she had 100 GB free again. Photoshop CS4 was using up 40 GB of disk space! And this was simply editting some (multiple) photos from a digital camera. Photoshop not only has its own memory management processes, but it also pages to disk and uses disk space as "scratch space" in its own fashion. I think that it is inadvisable to run Photoshop with less than 100 GB free disk space, and that's with CS4, not even CS6. And if you don't have a solid state drive, the throughput might slow down immensely unless you have a lot of memory (I think someone else pointed this out already).
Bottom line -- based on what I have seen with CS4, 4 GB memory is too low by at least a factor of x2 (16 GB memory would be even better), and I'd say a minimum of 100 GB free disk space is a must as well. I saw CS4 using more than 40 GB of "scratch disk space" and you are using CS6, which must use significantly more resources than CS4, and you indicate only 30 GB free space. That seems too low to me. I think other Adobe major software packages are similarly demanding, unlike any other software I have seen or used. For instance, I think you would have no trouble running MS-Office software (which is also known for using computer resources, but not anywhere as much as Adobe software).
One thing you can do is when you notice things slowing down, not only quit all other software except for CS6, but also in the Finder, under the Go menu, enter
/private/var
under Go To Folder ...
and then look in the folder called
vm
If you see swapfiles, add up the total space they are taking, and also the space taken by the sleepimage file. These are working to decrease the amount of free space you have and they can quickly grow to tens of GB when Photoshop and other Adobe softwares are running.
Since it sounds like you have now upgraded your RAM, that should help, but you may find that the swapfiles and sleepimage files are taking even more disk apce faster and I think 100 GB free space is needed to avoid further slowdowns.