Greedy Photoshop
Comments: 5
Does anyone know offhand why Photoshop needs to use 20%+ of the CPU when it’s sitting idle in the background (no open images)? If I bring it to the foreground (just click on the icon in the dock) the CPU usage drops to a more reasonable 2 or 3%. Hide it again and the usage stays low, but builds up over a few hours until it’s at 20-something percent again.
I can’t find any mention of this on Macintouch or anywhere else.
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Posted to Computers • 2002.11.03 (Sun) • 17:02
Comments
Posted by Matthew Maber 2002.11.04, 01:14
id guess its photoshop drawing off screen, but then when you hide it, it ‘knows’ it doesnt have to.
just a guess, im not techinically proficient.
Posted by resonance 2002.11.04, 08:49
Photoshop is highly dependent on its proprietary virtual memory scheme; perhaps sending the app to the background is the cue it takes to “prep” various parts its disk cache.
I’ve never had a situation in which a backgrounded Photoshop has sapped system resources to the point that what I’m doing is made slow, but it definitely gives the ol’ platters a workout when its in the background. I’ve found many apps like to perform their disk access tasks while in the background, but they back off when the frontmost app needs more “juice.” iTunes behaves similarly (though it’s not nearly as nice about backing off), as do various mail programs.
There’s probably a very technical answer to all of this, but most of us are probably better off trying to find a cure for cancer than trying to articulate the ins and outs of unix/app vm schemes.
For some odd reason this reminds me of one of my favorite .sigs (seen on a usenet post): “Apple OS X: because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows”
Posted by Kiffin 2002.11.04, 20:28
I use good old Photoshop 5.0 on a Windows XP Professional box (sorry about that). No problems there: idle CPU usage: 00 and Mem usage: 1,532 - 22,524 K.
Posted by marko 2002.11.05, 16:54
Who cares about 5.0 on a XP box?
It’s the healing brush that is driving the background processes.
Posted by fraze 2002.11.08, 01:16
‘ello all from cold North (Finland-2 b precise). Photshop generates ‘HUGE’ temp files (Which It then bins when closed) (why is it needed?!!?!)- Anyway I think the prog. is doing a background scurmish into crafting this temp file while its ‘sitting’ there… its only reason I could fig. that It should work its ass off main screen. I haven’t bothered investing in 7- Sitting on 6, running os 8.1.on 333mhz
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