Adobe Community: CS6 very slow saving large files

21,320 posts
Dec 23, 2006

Currently Being Moderated

1. Noel Carboni,

Jul 1, 2012 6:40 PM in reply to NikAinley12345

Report

Do you have the Maximize Compatibilty of PSD and PSB Files setting enabled? If so, do you NEED it to be? That can make a big difference in file saving time (as well as size).

-Noel

|

Mark as:

21,320 posts
Dec 23, 2006

Currently Being Moderated

2. Noel Carboni,

Jul 1, 2012 6:41 PM in reply to NikAinley12345

Report

Oh, and also, if you have plenty of disk space, try turning off compression entirely (same Preferences - File Handling dialog, different setting than the above).

-Noel

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

3. Curt Y,

Jul 1, 2012 6:44 PM in reply to NikAinley12345

Report

Many problems in CS^ are traced to the video driver. Make sure you have the latest version.

If you have a lot of layers your 8mb file can go huge.

In this case you can use background save. You have to start this with File/save or save as and the you can do other things while it work in background. If you have this opton enabled.

|

Mark as:

1,781 posts
May 24, 2010

Currently Being Moderated

4. Trevor.Dennis,

Jul 1, 2012 6:46 PM in reply to Noel Carboni

Report

20 minutes still sounds like a long time - even for 8Gb. Are you saving to the same drive you use for Scratch space? Having separate drives for a) OS & program files, b) data, and c) Photoshop Scratch would at least prevent simultaneous read/write operations to the same drive.

|

Mark as:

21,320 posts
Dec 23, 2006

Currently Being Moderated

5. Noel Carboni,

Jul 1, 2012 6:50 PM in reply to NikAinley12345

Report

Lastly, you'll be needing a gargantuan amount of RAM in your system to be regularly working with files that save to 8 GB file sizes. How much do you have?

-Noel

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

6. NikAinley12345,

Jul 1, 2012 7:01 PM in reply to NikAinley12345

Report

Thanks for the quick replies.

Noel: I did actually experiment with turing off 'maximize compatibility' and compression and it had both good and bad effects. On the plus side it did reduce the save time somewhat, to somewhere a little over 10 minutes. However it also had the effect of gobbling up ever more RAM while saving, only leaving me with a few hundred mb's during the save process. This is odd in itself as it actually used up more RAM than I had allocated in the preferences. The resulting file was also huge, almost 35 GB. Although total HD space isn't a problem, for backing up externally and sharing with others this would make things a real headache.

Curt: I have the latest video driver and keep it as up to date as possible.

Trevor: I am not saving to the same drive as the scratch dics, although my primary scratch disc does hold the OS as well (it's my only SSD). The secondary scratch disc is a normal mechanical drive, entirely separate from where the actual file is held. If during the save process my primary scratch disc was entirely filled I would be concerned that that was an issue, but it's not.

Noel: I have 48 GB with Photoshop allowed access to about 44 of that. FYI my CPU's are dual Xeon X5660's and during the save process Photoshop isn't even using 1 full core i.e. less than 4% CPU time.

|

Mark as:

21,320 posts
Dec 23, 2006

Currently Being Moderated

7. Noel Carboni,

Jul 1, 2012 7:13 PM in reply to NikAinley12345

Report

I'd say with 48 GB and a file that saves 35 GB uncompressed, you still have too little RAM to work on a file that large, and Photoshop has to go to its scratch file constantly during the save process. Thus the process is likely I/O bound.

I have a good workstation, not as powerful as yours but with a giant SSD array that can sustain 1.7 GB/second throughput. I just reproduced what you did, using a bit smaller image (I only have 16 GB in my system). I watched the Resource Monitor and Task Manager.

Just doing a couple of editing steps on the image filled the RAM and wrote the Photoshop swap file to the tune of 30 GB.

Compressed, the save took 10 minutes and was CPU-bound, starting fast but settling to around 8 MB/sec and it was busying around one core (not unreasonable, considering how compression has to be done).

However, with compression DISABLED, the save completed in 2 minutes and sustained around 200 MB/sec writing to the disk, and the file ended up being 21 GB.

The question needs to be asked: Do you really need to work with files that large?

-Noel

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

8. NikAinley12345,

Jul 1, 2012 8:24 PM in reply to NikAinley12345

Report

That could be the issue. The odd thing is I've worked with files almost twice the size (compressed, I never tried saving as uncompressed) in CS5 on the same machine when I only had 24 GB of memory. Saving took several minutes, but nowhere near the 20 this is taking. There may be other aspects to the file that cause such a difference in save time that I'm not aware of. This file happens to be 16 bit while the other was only 8, maybe that has some effect. As it is I need total HD space more than speed and so RAID arrays aren't an option.

I do need to work with files this large, if not ever larger (resolution wise). Luckily at some point I will be satisfied with the 16 bit elements and can convert and continue in 8bit. That should hopefully speed things up a bit.

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

9. Chris Cox,

Jul 1, 2012 10:09 PM in reply to NikAinley12345

Report

16 bit takes longer to compress well (depending on content) -- try disabling compression in preferences.

|

Mark as:

1,781 posts
May 24, 2010

Currently Being Moderated

10. Trevor.Dennis,

Jul 1, 2012 11:27 PM in reply to Chris Cox

Report

OK, I had to try it. The largest PSB file I had was 1.5Gb (for a two meter revolving advert in an airport) It had several layers and was 20,000 pixels wide. I upped it to 30,000 pixels, changed to 16bit, and didi several copy merged layers running artistic filters on each copy merged layer. It suddenly went from 3.5 to 13Gb in Photoshop, but is 8.7Gb on the hard drive.

I left all the save settings at default, and it took 10minutes 50 seconds as a background save in CS6. Which was frankly longer than I expected.

OS drive 256Gb SSD

Data drive 2 x 1Tb WD Green in raid0

Scratch reserved to 150Gb 10K rpm Velociraptor

32Gb RAM

Incidentally, I thought I'd check system usage when reopening the 8.5Gb file (see below) and it only took about 90 seconds to load) I was not able to use Photoshop during that time, but everything else worked fine with no apparent lag.

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

11. NikAinley12345,

Jul 2, 2012 10:12 AM in reply to Trevor.Dennis

Report

Since Photoshop crashed last night during one of its epic saves I've decided to go down the no compression route for the moment. It'll have to be temporary until I convert to 8bit as with just a few more layers the file has passed 50GB, which is rather inconvenient. Maybe saving up for a Revodrive is the answer.

|

Mark as:

21,320 posts
Dec 23, 2006

Currently Being Moderated

12. Noel Carboni,

Jul 2, 2012 10:36 AM in reply to NikAinley12345

Report

I'd advise against an OCZ Revodrive. I considered it but built a RAID 0 array of four OCZ Vertex 3 480GB SSDs instead. It provides better performance and more storage for less money.

However, keep in mind that with 1.7 GB/sec capability on tap, Photoshop only pushed 200 MB/sec of data during an uncompressed save.

-Noel

|

Mark as:

Photoshop General Discussion

CS6 very slow saving large files

Jul 1, 2012 6:30 PM

More Like This

Bookmarked By (0)

Answers + Points = Status