I just had a chat with OWC this morning inspired by this thread.
I ran LR and PS at the same time along with about a dozen other programs that I often have running (mail, safari, evernote, preview, chat, crash plan, etc) and observed the same slow behavior in LR that I'm used to.
I was only using 10Gb of my 16Gb of RAM. I'll need to try some other actions such as manipulating multiple files at the same time or stitching or something, but this showed me that in my day to day use, 32Gb vs 16Gb of RAM wouldn't do anything for me at all.
They suggested having my OS, Apps, and scratch disk on an internal SSD, then having an external esata 7200rpm bulk storage (photos, videos) hard drive running RAID 0 for "near SSD speeds". Makes sense to me.
Again, right now I have an internal 1Tb HDD with everything on it, no SSD right now.
What OS are you running? I have a 2010 MBP i7 with 8GB RAM that was previously running Snow Leopard at 32-bit. I found out that you can actually force it to run at 64-bit so I tried it and LR ran way faster after that. I have since upgraded to Mtn Lion and I've been very happy with the speed when editing D800 files. Even when dealing with 5-10 shot panos, speed hasn't been an issue.
Funny but just did an Activity Monitor with Photoshop open and Silver Efex converting a 400Mo image into B&W, and came up with the following figures (I rounded the numbers) :
Free : 10 Go
Wired : 1 Go
Active : 4 Go
Inactive : 1 Go
Used : 6 Go
Once again surprised as Photoshop performance has Photoshop allocated 11Go of 16Go...
What OS are you running? I have a 2010 MBP i7 with 8GB RAM that was previously running Snow Leopard at 32-bit. I found out that you can actually force it to run at 64-bit so I tried it and LR ran way faster after that. I have since upgraded to Mtn Lion and I've been very happy with the speed when editing D800 files. Even when dealing with 5-10 shot panos, speed hasn't been an issue.
Funny but just did an Activity Monitor with Photoshop open and Silver Efex converting a 400Mo image into B&W, and came up with the following figures (I rounded the numbers) :
Free : 10 Go
Wired : 1 Go
Active : 4 Go
Inactive : 1 Go
Used : 6 Go
Once again surprised as Photoshop performance has Photoshop allocated 11Go of 16Go...
Mark
Are you seeing any hard disk activity durjng this operation? One way to see would be to monitor all disk activity and ,ook for caching during the operation. Also, what is Go? If I had to guess, Gigaoctal?
I am working with my D800 files and a 2012 version of the mac mini with 8gb of ram -- working just great. .... that being said, I am considering maxing out the ram to 16gb sometime soon.
If this helps, I just ran Activity Monitor and inspected Photoshop while converting a 390MB TIFF image with Silver Efex. Screen shots below (of course fluctuating but gives some idea).
mholdef wrote:
Thanks Mark! Yes - I would think Wolwedans is quite recognisable - wonderful place but eye watering cost. Must get on and put some more up - loads to do still but been working through a backlog!
Just last week, i was asking myself if it was time to change computer.
I have the same Imac as thread Owner (2010, i7). However, i do not have a RAM upgrade so i run at 4gb, and its a nightmare since i moved to the D800 platform.
I've recently been wondering if it was time to change my imac to the latest model actually, use a SSD drive and 32gb ram.
Also, Photoshop is a pure Ram hog as well, the program bounces around a lot with the memory. I wonder if CS6 makes things different than CS5?!
I just got a new 27" iMac a couple days ago and hadn't had a chance to process any images when this thread was started. Now that I've been messing around, I'll share my random thoughts below.
Oh, first, the iMac is a 27" i7 3.2. I purchased with 8GB ram, went and upgraded to 32. 3TB fusion drive, 680MX video card.
When I process any file, I tend to build up quite a few layers (I end up in PSB, not PSD format), so it does tend to tax the whole system. D800 files really eat through memory, and I'm glad I have 32GB. It's cheap enough too - $258 total from newegg - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148609
Oh, @red oak - PS CS 6 is STILL a hog - you still have to shut the program down to get it to release all the memory it has accessed. Crazy. I had a bunch of ifles opened at once and despite closing 'em, PS wouldn't give up the ram. Actually maxed out 32GB!
The new iMac is faster than my previous gen i7 core (2.9?) windows PC, but it's not night and day. Used to be you'd get the next gen chip and everything seemed to go 2X as fast, but this is probably 20% faster overall (guessing). If you're using a previous gen iMac, you'll see a difference, but I wouldn't expect it to go 2X as fast or anything. It doesn't help that PS doesn't always seem to use all the cores available (win or mac).
Oh, if it helps LR seems to (completely) render a D800 file in about 5-6 seconds, my old computer was more like 7-8. That's probalby the best way to compare. I also tried the PS CS6 noise reduction filter at the default settings (6, 60, 45, 25 ) on a D800 file (no other layers) - 12 seconds. Not sure if that's good or not since I don't normally use that filter, but it does give you something to compare it to. One thing I did notice is that Windows seems better at some tasks in PS and the Mac in others, not sure why or if it's my imagination.
The screen is really nice - it's glossy but, at least in my office, it doesn't seem very reflective. No troubles working on files. The Fusion drive also seems to work well, the software acts like it's loading from an SSD (probably because it actually is). The SSD part of the fusion drive - although fast - still doesn't seem quite as fast as the SSD in my MacBook Pro (2012).
Hope this helps and sorry for the disjointed nature of this post, I'm a little tired today, had some drunk idiots shooting off fireworks at 3:00AM and stuff...
jtjacka wrote:
@Steve Perry How does the iMac compare to your Macbook Pro and what are the specs of your Macbook Pro?
The iMac is faster, no doubt about it. My 2012 Macbook Pro is running a 2.7 i7 w/ 16GB ram. The SSD in the macbook does seem faster than the fusion drive for loading, despite the fact that the fusion drive is using the SSD portion for programs (the fusion drive defaults to the SSD portion until that starts getting filled, then it starts balancing the files by priority).
Beyond drive speed, the iMac wins - LR is about 7 seconds to fully render a D800 at 100% magnification file vs about a long 5 seconds for the iMac.
15 seconds or so vs 12 seconds on the noise reduction set in my post above. It's not a huge difference, but overall long term workflow wise it does help. In any case it's faster than my old PC
Fresh after a restart, with none of my main programs running, my imac's activity monitor shows "VM size" of about 250Gb, but about 13Gb of free RAM.
Is this a huge problem in my memory management? I thought with 16Gb of RAM I shouldn't be running any virtual memory.
I feel the other side of NAS taking hold, thinking of ordering internal SSD and big external esata storage. Processing 150 new images this AM and it's taking a long time...
Thanks Steve. I currently have a bit older Sandy Bridge 17" MBP that I love and I have a the original i7 desktop. I have been thinking about selling both and combining them into a rMBP and possibly a Thunderbolt monitor. or Building a new PC desktop because for that price I could build myself a ridiculous desktop. I don't have my D800 yet but I am nervous about the workflow so I want to be prepared.
mholdef wrote:
I can't add any more RAM to my current system and I'm wondering if upgrading to the latest 3.4 GHz iMac with 32Go of RAM would make a huge difference. I am torn as I would like to upgrade to the latest iMac in part for its better LCD, but I wouldn't want to do so unless I would be getting a major step up in performance.
Any thoughts on this would be highly appreciated.
Mark
Run Apple's "Activity Monitor" and check of the CPU utilization is high. If not them getting a faster CPU speed will not help. In other words if you are not pushing what you have past 80% getting a faster one will not help.
Same with RAM. See how much of your RAM is used and look for any "page outs". Any number of page outs is a sign you are low on RAM.
Look at disk activity too. This might be your bottle neck. But "Activity Monitor" will tell you.
One of the problems with using Nik or other plug-ins is that the huge files need to get copied. Plug-ins work on copies of the data and this takes time. Even with an SSD it can take a long time. to copy a huge TIFF file., Yes Aperture copies your image to TIFF in order to pass it to a plug-in.
workerdrone wrote:
Fresh after a restart, with none of my main programs running, my imac's activity monitor shows "VM size" of about 250Gb, but about 13Gb of free RAM.
Is this a huge problem in my memory management? I thought with 16Gb of RAM I shouldn't be running any virtual memory.
I feel the other side of NAS taking hold, thinking of ordering internal SSD and big external esata storage. Processing 150 new images this AM and it's taking a long time...
No. 250GB to 300GB is pretty much normal. Mac OS X maps "everything" into RAM but only the stuff you are really using gets into physical RAM. What tells you that you are short of RAM is when the "Page Outs" start getting larger than "a few".
CAlbertson wrote:
Run Apple's "Activity Monitor" and check of the CPU utilization is high. If not them getting a faster CPU speed will not help. In other words if you are not pushing what you have past 80% getting a faster one will not help.
Same with RAM. See how much of your RAM is used and look for any "page outs". Any number of page outs is a sign you are low on RAM.
Look at disk activity too. This might be your bottle neck. But "Activity Monitor" will tell you.
One of the problems with using Nik or other plug-ins is that the huge files need to get copied. Plug-ins work on copies of the data and this takes time. Even with an SSD it can take a long time. to copy a huge TIFF file., Yes Aperture copies your image to TIFF in order to pass it to a plug-in....Show more →
I have to ask.......If you are concerned with file size and speed.....why on earth are you using the TIFF format?? PSDs are smaller file and they ARE the native format for PS.
