PE6 in 1GB?

Question

This is not a rant, but I'm puzzled. I've always accessed Adobe's groups via
NNTP, but the PE Tech Issues group seems only to be on the webbish forums and
not on the news server. I only see .featurerequests and .organizer on NNTP,
even after deleting and recreating the acct. in OE. So pardon this possibly
OT post. I'll cheerfully repost, if you tell me where, in NNTP-land.
I'm mostly a PS (CS) user, but I've acquired a PE6 with a computer I have the
use of for some months. It's a P4 2.2, just before HT (i.e., singlecore).
It's a Dell desktop, with 1G of the kind of rare-bird memory you don't even
want to THINK about augmenting. Other apps on this machine run nicely, and
I'm an experienced user. This machine runs a clean XPSP2, Classic theme, and
everything one can turn down is turned down. The graphics are a 128MB Ti4600
(the high-end GeForce2 of 1992), at a modest 10x7x32bit.
PE6 is a positive PIG. I have perhaps 550 photos on the machine, half on C:,
half on an external FW400. I use no tags or ratings.
Periodically, I've had clots and stalls, which are temporarily relieved by
re-doing all thumbnails. If I have one folder up in the organizer, with only
TEN TIFs and JPGs in it (30MB, 3MB), and load the Editor from the Organizer,
it's paging city. And it gets worse the longer you try to use the program.
Starting with a commit charge of 220 MB at boot, the above two Adobe modules
kick RAM use up to 600MB, and a half-hour later, after massaging two pix (one
at a time), I'm up to 900MB, and every keystroke lights the HD light for many
seconds.
Enough of that.
1. Is there a db cleaning function built in? Might it help? If not, anyone
know a good "nuke index and redo" util for SQLite?
2. Is PSE like PS - needing up to 5x the RAM of the base uncompressed image,
if you edit a lot, with layers?
3. Is the program secretly designed just for folks with 2G+ of RAM, and
multiple cores? PE 4/5 sure weren't.
I'll stifle myself, and refrain from commenting on the @#$@#$ dark-grey
backgrounds - that would be ungentlemanly.
-Frank

Answer 1

Frank,
PSE is definitely a memory hog, especially the full Editor. But I use it several hours a day on a wimpy 1.5 Ghz, 1.5 GB laptop and it's ok. I regularly edit 40 MB TIFFs (one at a time) and sometimes have up to 6 layers, and it's ok, with most editing commands finishing in less than a second or two with at most modest disk activity. But I find that the Editor does go "stale" with memory bloat and restarting it every 10 edited TIFFs or so makes things go faster.
Perhaps there's a performance cliff between 1 and 1.5 GB of memory and the extra .5 GB I have compared to you is crucial.
If you haven't deframented your disk recently, that would be good hygeine. It would at least make the Editor's disk accesses faster. But it's unlikely to have a huge impact.
As for optimizing the SQLite database underlying the Organizer, you could do File > Catalog > Repair follwed by File > Catalog > Optimize. That's unlikely to have any effect, however, on the speed of the Organizer (and it won't affect the Editor at all). I doubt that the SQLite component is responsible for the slowth of your system -- it's a very lightweight application relational database specifically designed for applications. But an occasional Repair/Optimize is always good hygeine that doesn't hurt.