On Nov 25, 2006, at 7:42 AM, Mark Cassino wrote: >> We'll be processing as many as 500 6-10mp files into 3000 or more >> 8x10 >> package prints. >> Gigabytes at a time is a pretty close assessment. >> Right now, it takes us about an hour of computer time to do it. >> I'd like >> to speed things up a bit. > > If you are doing similar work now you can run a batch with the task > manager open to the performance tab, and see what the memory usage is. > When Photoshop (I assume you are using Photoshop) has to start > swapping > to the drive, performance will tumble. > > As Godfrey noted, it sounds that the bottle neck would be in the I/ > O. If > you are loading and saving a bunch of relatively small files (6-10 mp > seems small to me) then you might benefit most from investing in fast > drives and enough memory to cache the image while it is worked on.
My understanding is that Photoshop on Windows XP cannot take advantage of more than 2G RAM at the present time. I am not sure about it on Mac OS X. My strategy, though, assuming a similar memory need, was to fit my G5 with 3G RAM as a minimum, then fit both a very fast 500G main drive and a second fast 250G scratch drive to point Photoshop's cache at. That seems to give it a good shot... I've clocked it, while watching the system monitor, while doing a heavy batch RAW conversion processing and scripted operations job. It never consumes all of the available RAM, even with me running several other processes simultaneously (like web browser, terminal, email) and paging is minimal. Other processes with lots of IO can impact the photoshop batch performance as can rendering occasionally but that's to be expected ... degradation unless I'm doing something truly silly is minor percentage points. Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
