Mac Pro, Adobe CS3 and pretty pinwheels: Am I doing something wrong?

Question

I have been a designer happily on PCs for many years but the time had come to migrate the business across to Mac.
On paper, I thought my new rig was the duck's guts. I waited patiently for CS3 (to take advantage of the Intel processor) before I bid the PC a fond farewell but I find the performance om my Mac Pro far from impressive and at least, a minimum, a million miles away from what had been promised by the salesman and advertising.
Forget about the time I spend staring at the little wrist-watch... what is up with that bloody pinwheel?
I am not running dozens of apps at the same time. Just InDesign or Photoshop in less than a minute would keep me happy. Why does it take over 30 seconds for a file to open? Am I expecting too much for a $6k machine to perform at least twice a fast as my 3 year old PC?
I am not very happy. Or is this somehow my fault? I bloody hope so...

Answer 1

There isn't a single diagnostic tool that can test for why your system gets a spinning wheel. Adobe has user forums like this and this is really a PS CS3 issue so you might want to look and ask at http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.ee6b362/[email protected]@ . A search on "spinning wheel" leads us to http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.ee6b362/[email protected]@ where it suggests my first thought also and that would be to have a secondary hard drive available for a scratch disk. Even with 7gb of RAM PS will regularly use a scratch disk as you work, weird but true. You should have few pageouts with 7GB of RAM, but you might also check your Activity Monitor to see if you are getting many pageouts. With 4GB of RAM PSCS2 was causing a huge number of Pageouts and consequently spinning wheels for me. If you have a lot of stuff kept in RAM it's not impossible to generate pageouts enough to cause the system to need to write to disk often and cause that behaviour. If you are using PS alone it should not be an issue. A few hundred pageouts after rebooting and working for an afternoon would not be unusual. Many thousand would indicate a need for even more RAM. A second hard drive for Scratch is nearly a requirement for PSCS3. I've never even run PS with a single HD so I can't say from experience how bad it is but it's one of the first things suggested in terms of performance. Also, do check and see that all your RAM is actually being "seen" and recognized. If you have PS set in its prefs to use 100% of memory you might try backing that off to 80% to free up more memory for the system. It's quite easy for PS to use all 7GB of RAM, starving your Mac. In fact I'd back it off to 70% and if that helps, bring it up (restart) 10% at a time to play around to find the highest setting you can use that doesn't cause a spinning wheel. Some searching at the above (first) URL under the terms optimize or memory usage or beachball etc etc and some of your own posts there should turn up some information that may be more directly helpful. I had the same issue with CS2 and in my case it was a lack of RAM and a need to update to CS3. I doubt that is your issue, but your Pageouts will tell you if you need more RAM, and you definitely can use a second HD for Scratch disk usage.