Photoshop cs5 is spiking ram use and lagging

Question

When I open Photoshop CS5 its sitting idle with nothing open and still using 330,000 MB of ram.
After opening a simple file, fairly small, 40 MB. It jumps its ram use to almost 2 gigs. It then lags very badly when I try to save taking almost 10 min to save a 40MB file. What is going on? I have 4 gigs of ram. Suggestions?

Answer 1

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Hayes27 wrote:
When I open Photoshop CS5 its sitting idle with nothing open and still using 330,000 MB of ram.
330 MB maybe.  Not out of the ordinary.  This is not svelte software.
function(){return A.apply(null,[this].concat($A(arguments)))}
Hayes27 wrote:
After opening a simple file, fairly small, 40 MB. It jumps its ram use to almost 2 gigs.
Not sure what you mean by "40 MB"...  How big is the file in pixels and on disk as a .psd file?  Does it have a lot of layers?
A file with a lot of layers can take a long time to save, though 10 minutes is rather excessive.
I did as you said and opened a 40 MB .psd file containing one layer, and Photoshop's commit size went up to 1 GB.  Not too surprising.
You can probably adjust Photoshop's memory usage in the Edit - Preferences - Performance menu and get better performance.  If you're running a 32 bit operating system you won't be able to use all 4 GB though.  Photoshop drives a lot of people up to using an x64 operating system.
Make sure you shut down and restart Photoshop after making RAM option changes.
What else do you have running on your system?  Is the RAM being used up by other apps?
-Noel