I also primarily do retouching and every image I work on has a separate adjustment layer for each specific "touch-up". Just eyes for example: irises get a layer, pupils get 2 layers, whites get a layer, the whole eyeball gets a heal/clone layer, the eyelashes get a layer, catchlights get a layer. Then it's on to teeth. A simple portrait will easily have 25 adjustment layers. Typical retouches end up around 100, complex ones can approach 200.

Altonmusic's usage seems very similar to mine, but I haven't seen a significant performance difference from CS5. I am using windows, and per Adobe's advice I just updated my nvidia driver (which annectdotally seemed to help slightly).

That being said. I still see the dodge/burn, healing, blur/smear/sharpen tools get laggier the longer I keep a given instance running.  Last night I retouched about a 10 photos. All of them at some point contained at least 20 adjustment layers, as well as maybe 6 smart object/filters. When retouching the 10th photo, the lag between moving the stylis and seeing the change on the screen became too troublesome to continue. Closing and restarting PS solved the problem, but THAT is an issue I didn't have with CS5.

I'm sorry Adam per your request (post 18).  I can't seem to be successful recording an action of my worksteps most of which involve the running of actions - my workflow actions seem to fail (errors like "invert layer is not currently available") while I am recording the new one. Probably my lousy job of making actions. I will try again tonight, but is there some specific system data I could capture that would help? I was watching the windows performance monitor last night, and  as far as I could see, I never ran out of memory resources - at least 40% were always available. CPU usage was never more than a blip.

Should I move my issue to a new post rather than hijacking Alontmusic's? I am no longer convinced we are having the same problem.

Thanks Adam ...

I will definitely send you an email. Tonight I only did 8 images, but on the last, I began to notice a slow down of the healing brush.

Here is my system info:

i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 GHz

Windows 7 Home Prem build 6.1.7601

RAM: 16GB

GPU: NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti with 1 GB

NVIDIA Driver: 9.17.12.9610

Wacom Intuous 4

PS preferences:

memory for PS 8703 GB (59%)

This  memory table I created from the Windows Resource Monitor

Stage:                    In Use          Modified          Standby          Free

----------                   -------------     -------------          -----------          --------

Fresh Start             2070MB      44MB               866MB          13394MB

Start Bridge           2230            64                    1179               12863MB

Launch ACR          2780            86                    1640               11800

Open 1 smt Obj     5090           112                   1833               11333

close 2 images      5775           112                   2628                 7841 - edited / closed 2 photos, , PS running, no active img

close 1 image        6516           159                   3318                 6374 - PS running, no active image

close 5 images      6732           247                   4543                 4843 - PS running, no active image

close PS                2318           108                   4613                  9327 - PS closed, Br still running

close Br                  2090           108                   4652                  9530

Somehow during the process of launching PS & Br, editing 8 images, and closing PS & Br, free memory was reduced by

just shy of 4GB. The troublesome part is that in use memory increased after each image was closed. Although it wasn't as bad tonight (with only 8 images) by the time I did 12 last night, the tools were noticably sluggish.

Thanks Chris. That makes sense.

What happens if "in use memory" exceeds the amount I have set in PS preferences (in my case 8.7 GB)? Would that result in sluggish tools?

I haven't watched it long enough to see if that happens when the tools get sliuggish.

Ted

I don't think it's writing to scratch disk frequently. The largest file I was working on last night was only about 760MB and 21 layers. The most "in use" memory reported by windows was 6.7GB and I have 8.7 allocated to PS out of 16GB total installed. But last night, I only noticed a slight increase in sluggishness as opposed to previously when I had opened and closed a dozen or more documents.

What I will do today is just keep running the current instance until the tools become what I would call painfully sluggish - in other words when I would normally shut PS down and start a new instance. What statistics would be useful to you when I reach that state?

Ted

…and what I want to add is that, without seeing your screen shot, I don't know what you're referencing.  Everything looks fine under snow Leopard 10.6.8, if that helps.