Re: [Photoshop-Haven] Re: Is CS4 any faster than CS3?

Thankyou to those who replied to my question, your responses were
helpful.

In response to Richard's comments (below), my system is home-made,
based on a 2.6GHz dual-core Athlon with 3GB RAM. Since I'm running
32-bit XP Pro, there's no point in putting in more memory. I have 3
internal HDDs, the OS and software are on one, with system stuff on
the C-drive partition (plus PS scratchdisk, 70GB free), and PS (plus
other software) on another partition. Images are stored on one of the
other HDDs. I also have 4 external HDDs for backup, but I don't scan
these with Bridge, so they're not cached. I regularly use a registry
cleaner and have defrag software running continuously in the background
(plus all the usual stuff for firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spam,
anti-malware, etc.).

I have some 50k images on the image HDD, amounting to ~ 170GB,
mostly jpegs, with some RAWs, which I use only occasionally, though
I now shoot RAW+jpeg all the time. The RAWs are archived on the
externals, as are unprocessed jpegs and (separately) processed jpegs.
I liked to have all my images immediately available (10 years of digital
imaging) rather than having to switch on external HDDs, but I guess
that it's probably time to have a rethink about this, and only include the
most recent ones on the active drives. That way, the blobs files could
be reduced, I suppose. It bugs me that, even though PS allows caches
to be saved in individual directories, it still has this huge central blobs
file that just grows and grows as more images are stored. My original
question was about whether PS4 had a more efficient method for
distributing the cache and whatever else it saves!

I'm not worried about the speed of PS itself, but about that of Bridge.
The image processing itself never seems particularly slow. The slow
part is Bridge! I'm still puzzled as to why Bridge spends so much time
scanning through the images in a directory whenever I click on it, even
though it has previously cached that directory. I would have thought it
not beyond the wit of man (and PS software engineers) to devise a
method to check quickly whether anything has changed, before initiating
a full scan. But the wheel in the corner still goes round and round!

Since there are other features in CS4 I would find useful, such as DOF
stacking, I will probably go for the upgrade, anyway.

Once again, thanks for everyone's replies.

Best regards
Chris
________________________________________

At 16:29 01/03/2009, you wrote:
> > I've been using CS3 for a while now, and find that Bridge has
> > become really slow.
> > My question is this: is Bridge in CS4 any faster? Does it consume
> > fewer resources than in CS3? Does it still generate multi-GB blobs
> > files?
>
>If you are seeking gains in performance it is more likely that an
>improvement to your system will do more for you than an upgrade. If
>you go to CS4, there may be enhancements to the product, but you are
>going to run into the same system issues, IF that is what you are
>experiencing. I assume you are because you suggest that everything was
>running better before.
>
>What I am suspicious of is the "large number of images" you say you
>have. Do you practice backing images up and clearing off your hard
>drive(s)? if not, I would suspect you are taking up oodles of space,
>and THAT may be where you are losing performance. The Blobs and other
>database resources are meant to help speed up performance (and you'll
>note that your attempts to rebuild these backfired to some extent in
>that it takes longer to build than add...).
>
>Photoshop makes a lot of use of available disk space, and if you are
>editing large images on one drive that is crammed with photos, likely
>your performance will diminish. While it is totally over-kill, I have
>a drive dedicated to scratch space on my machine...250GB. It was one
>of the smallest drives I could get, but also serves as a backup in
>case a drive in my RAID should go down. my point: leave Photoshop
>plenty of scratch area, and preferably on a fast internal drive.
>
>How old is your computer? Have you run maintenance recently? Do you
>have enough RAM? Do you have a backup routine? Should you consider a
>backup drive or additional storage? All of these things will probably
>cost less than an upgrade to PS...and may have better results over the
>long haul.
>
>Coincidentally I happen to be writing up a blog about my favorite
>features in the CS4 release...I'll post a link here later today when
>it is released!
>
>Richard Lynch
>author, The Adobe Photoshop Layers Book (due March '09!)
>http://aps8.com/taplbcs4.html
>
>
>
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>
>------------------- Photoshop-Haven --------------------~-~>
>
>BlogViewsByRoz.com<br>
>http://www.BlogViewsByRoz.com<br>
>
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