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8 core Mac: Optimizing Mac for Photoshop CS3

Greetings,

I had a discussion with Jack Flesher about the recent 8 cores and how photoshop handles hardware.

I would be interested to learn what you guy's epxerience in setting up an optimum work environment for photoshop.

For example, talking about scratch disks. Jack found it most beneficial to have scratch disks on stripped volumes and uses OSX for that, not a dedicated controller. He also told me that it is more beneficial to have multiple scratch disks instead of one. Say 4x 100 Gig instead of 1x 400Gig.

I was doing some testshots and found that the efficiency on my system, where I initially had only one scratch disk assigned, went down to below 40% when I wanted to crop a 1GB picture and it took long to do it.

A shame that PS can not adress more than 3 Gig at the moment, hopefully this will be adressed with an update sooner than later.

Do you you have any further hints concerning optimizing PS for post processing?

Thanks
 
Who is Jack Flesher? An Adobe or Apple technician?

Nicolas Claris Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Tanaka
Who is Jack Flesher? An Adobe or Apple technician?

Another OPF member;-)

....worse.... Insurance!

LOL

Apart from that....

http://forum.getdpi.com/forum/index.php

Jack?

Tell me about your striped setup again, if you don't mind.

Take a 1 GB pic and crop it, what does your efficieny say in the process?
 

Jack_Flesher

New member
My system is an 8-core 3.2 Mac Pro with 16G RAM and 4x of the new WD 640 Caviar Sata2 drives with high-density platters, an $85 or so drive now at NewEgg or MacSales. I have 100% or 3G RAM assigned to CS3 in CS's performance preferences.

I simply striped (RAID 0) a pair of these drives using the Mac disk utility in Leopard. First you partition each drive then you do the RAID configurations on those partitions. So in this case, I partitioned off 60G off the top of two of the drives, leaving 2 partitions on each drive of 60G and roughly 560G actual. I then striped each of these into RAID 0 using the software. Note that the first partition on a drive is on the fastest part of the drive, latter partitions getting to progressively slower portions of the drive platter.

With the above done, I now have two striped partitions, one at 120G on the fastest portions of the drives and another at 1.1TB using the rest of the drives. I use the 120G for scratch and the 1.1 for current working image file storage. The I/O on either partition is about 2x as fast as any single drive, and thus scratch times are greatly reduced and the time to read or save large image files is cut in half.

Note 1) RAID 0 has reduced reliability due to any single drive failure creating the entire stripe to fail, so any critical data mounted on them for speed needs to be redundantly backed up somewhere else; the more drives in the stripe array, the more likely a failure. (Count on striped arrays failing, because they almost certainly will at some point in time.)

Note 2) When Georg says 4x100 is better than 1x400 for scratch, what he meant is 4 STRIPED 100G partitions -- which look just like a single 400GB partition to CS -- is better than a single drive partitioned to 400G. This is NOT the same as naming scratch disks 1 through 4 in CS preferences! Here, in the unlikely event I ever run out of scratch on the 120G partition above, I set the 1.1TB current image partition as my 2nd scratch disk. (No this is not an optimal arrangement, but it is a near zero probability event and will be faster than having the 2nd scratch default back to the OS page drive should it ever occur.)

Note 3) Important to note that a software or hardware RAID0 on two drives essentially doubles the I/O performance compared to a single drive. However, as we RAID0 more than two drives, hardware RAID starts to outperform software RAID due to the added overhead required for the software to manage the drives. So a 3 drive RAID0 via software might only increase 2-drive performance by 30% while the same thing done with hardware will give you a 50% boost...

Georg, if you downloaded my CS performance test action from this thread in that link above (http://forum.getdpi.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2440) you can run your own comparison for your system.

I will crop a 1G file when I'm in my office tomorrow and report back on timing for my system... However, I suspect this to only take a fraction of a second since I have 3G of ram reserved for CS?

PS edit: FWIW I just created a 1G file on my MacbookPro, (dual 2.6, 4G ram total, 2G to CS3) cropped out 1/4 of it, and it took less than a second...

Cheers,
 
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Thanks

Thanks for the write up and the link Jack.

I did not know that you can adjust the slider to the full 3 Gig, as it recommended only "2. something" as the best setting, which I kept.

To me, this whole scratch disk scenario appears a little antiquated in times of 32 Gig OSX maschines. <shrugs> On a side note, interesting that Windows gets the Adobe update to use more Ram quicker than OSX, then again, I can see why.

Currently I have my cpu activity window active a lot to see what application utilises this power. Photomatix for example, when it generates a HDR usually uses one core only to the max, then when it comes to tone mapping it utilises more.

I think, the Macs we invested in are well equipped for future software updates. I got the same macbook btw. I had really fun observing Photoshop when I used Photomerge the first time, boy this baby is flying through the Layers! No need for another coffee as usual. :)

I was just doing a bit of searching, and this made me laugh like Hell. Don't you just love it, all those really usefull informations in the Adobe Tech Notes you can come across:

Photoshop CS3 supports up to 64 exabytes (EB) of scratch disk space on a total of four volumes.

Ohhh Goodie! That is 65,536 petabytes or 67,108.864 Terabytes. We sure all waited on that feature! LOLOL

However, there are interesting other notes in this document on cache level and font management for example:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb401089&sliceId=2

On forcing background maintenance:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2319

About your Raid again Jack, what about your Raid block size setting?

Considering MFDB Files, PSD, TIFF, they can be quite large, I wonder whether it is advisable to increase the default 32kb size.
 
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Jack_Flesher

New member
About your Raid again Jack, what about your Raid block size setting?

Considering MFDB Files, PSD, TIFF, they can be quite large, I wonder whether it is advisable to increase the default 32kb size.

For the CS scratch partition, I used the standard 32K since I wasn't sure how CS scratch wrote, smaller tile sections or larger full blocks, or both. For my image partition, I used the largest or 256K. For these two applications, I doubt the block size is going to have all that significant an impact on performance...
~~~

History and cache, I use 100 on history and 6 on cache. These use up some additional resources but make life more convenient :)
~~~

As for maintenance, I do not sleep my MacPro even at night for that very reason. Also note for some added CS3 performance you should activate larger tiles by removing the tilda (~) from the front of that plug-in and go through and eliminate file formats you do not use by placing a tilda in front of the the ones you don't need as this will increase performance. Also, CS3 holds still onto scratch disk space and virtual memory, so shutting down and re-starting CS3 can be useful if you are experiencing lags. This is a holdover from slower system days and is essentially now a bug for faster systems and should be addressed in CS4...
~~~

A FWIW PS: Just cropped 1/4 out of a 1.1GB image on my MacPro and it took 0.7 seconds.

Cheers,
 
For the CS scratch partition, I used the standard 32K since I wasn't sure how CS scratch wrote, smaller tile sections or larger full blocks, or both. For my image partition, I used the largest or 256K. For these two applications, I doubt the block size is going to have all that significant an impact on performance...
~~~

History and cache, I use 100 on history and 6 on cache. These use up some additional resources but make life more convenient :)
~~~

As for maintenance, I do not sleep my MacPro even at night for that very reason. Also note for some added CS3 performance you should activate larger tiles by removing the tilda (~) from the front of that plug-in and go through and eliminate file formats you do not use by placing a tilda in front of the the ones you don't need as this will increase performance. Also, CS3 holds still onto scratch disk space and virtual memory, so shutting down and re-starting CS3 can be useful if you are experiencing lags. This is a holdover from slower system days and is essentially now a bug for faster systems and should be addressed in CS4...
~~~

A FWIW PS: Just cropped 1/4 out of a 1.1GB image on my MacPro and it took 0.7 seconds.

Cheers,

Hi Jack,

you are right that he blocksize is neglectable in terms of performance, or say it should be neglectable. It rather has to do with creating "slack" or unusable diskspace and in that respect it could influence performance.

I put that question on how CS3 writes to scratch and what blocksize they recommend to Adobe. I'll let you know.


Sorry, but:
Also note for some added CS3 performance you should activate larger tiles by removing the tilda (~) from the front of that plug-in and go through and eliminate file formats you do not use by placing a tilda in front of the the ones you don't need as this will increase performance.
I have absolutely no idea what you refer to. LOL :)

What tiles? Have an example?
 

Jack_Flesher

New member
Sorry, but: I have absolutely no idea what you refer to. LOL :)

What tiles? Have an example?

The "Bigger Tiles" plug-in tells photoshop to process your data in larger chunks, recommended for any system with more than 1G ram dedicated to CS. It is "off" by default. You find it on your Mac (similar location on PC) under Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-ins/Extensions/Bigger Tiles, then remove the tilda from in front to turn it "on." It will activate on the next launch.

The file formats plug-ins are for additional image formats you want CS3 to support. These are all on by default, and since they have to load every time you launch CS3, they take both time and memory. I advise you turn off the ones you don't use regularly. On your Mac (and similar location on PC) these are located under Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-ins/File Formats, and you'll see around 18 of them. I turn all off (by placing a tilda in front of the name) except BMP, GIF and PNG. You will notice a significant increase in CS3 boot speed after truncating this list since the overhead required to support file formats is relatively large.

Cheers,
 
The "Bigger Tiles" plug-in tells photoshop to process your data in larger chunks, recommended for any system with more than 1G ram dedicated to CS. It is "off" by default. You find it on your Mac (similar location on PC) under Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-ins/Extensions/Bigger Tiles, then remove the tilda from in front to turn it "on." It will activate on the next launch.

The file formats plug-ins are for additional image formats you want CS3 to support. These are all on by default, and since they have to load every time you launch CS3, they take both time and memory. I advise you turn off the ones you don't use regularly. On your Mac (and similar location on PC) these are located under Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-ins/File Formats, and you'll see around 18 of them. I turn all off (by placing a tilda in front of the name) except BMP, GIF and PNG. You will notice a significant increase in CS3 boot speed after truncating this list since the overhead required to support file formats is relatively large.

Cheers,


That's brilliant, I am sure there are plenty other folks who will find that information most useful, thanks again Jack!

I was in for a unpleasant ride to update to the extended version. Messed up a lot and did not do what it was supposed to do.

Here a general Information for those who update from CS3 to the extended Version, do NOT install this over your CS3 Version, even if Adobe Sales or wherever you purchase it from recommends that, it is plain wrong, and you will end up with a mess or in the best case only your CS3 version again.

The way to do that is to uninstall CS3, then run a script from Adobe:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402767&sliceId=2

This script cleans up all traces, the best way to do that is run it as LEVEL 2, reboot, then delete the log file, and run it again as level 2. Afterwards install the CS3 Extended that's it. You will be asked for your original serial number fo CS3 in the process.
 
The "Bigger Tiles" plug-in tells photoshop to process your data in larger chunks, recommended for any system with more than 1G ram dedicated to CS. It is "off" by default. You find it on your Mac (similar location on PC) under Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-ins/Extensions/Bigger Tiles, then remove the tilda from in front to turn it "on." It will activate on the next launch.

The bigger tiles plug-in may or may not help.
Bigger Tiles plug-in
The Bigger Tiles plug-in, which is located in the Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-Ins/Extensions/Bigger Tiles folder, is disabled by default. When you enable it by removing the tilde (~) from the file name, then you increase the image tile size in Photoshop. You should only enable the plug-in if you have more than 1 GB of RAM installed.
If you enable the plug-in, then Photoshop redraws more data at a time because each tile is larger, and each tile is drawn, complete at one time. Photoshop takes less time to redraw fewer tiles that are larger than it takes to draw more tiles that are smaller. Because Photoshop redraws more data at one time, each tile takes longer to be redrawn; so bigger tiles can look like they are redrawing more slowly, but they are actually redrawing more quickly than if the image had more smaller tiles.
- http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb401089&sliceId=2

Please note, I am running PS CS3 on XP Pro and that most of my comments are within the realm of computers in general in this section. I have experimented with the bigger tiles plug-in on a dual core system with 3 GB of RAM. I ran into various issues at various times and finally decided not to use it.

It is in general unrelated to the amount of RAM in your system. It's primary utilization is to change the tile size (how much of an image is processes at once) so that you can match it to the sizes of you L1, L2, and L3 cache memory. If all the data from a tile plus any extraneous memory needed for processing it fits in your cache, then the processing of the tile is faster because memory accesses in cache are roughly an order of magnitude faster which means the CPU cores spend less time waiting for memory access (locality of reference).

There are some additional issues reducing performance in multi-socket systems if communications from one socket to another occur. This communications lag becomes very complex in systems with more than two sockets and is part of why large many socket computers cost so much money.

The 1 GB memory limitation is actually related to the fact that this tile size is used uniformly across Photoshop for everything. So when you increase the tile size, the amount of memory that every single brush, texture, and etcetera you have also ends up being increased. This means that the basic PS storage requirements for the application's resources increases significantly and this ends up forcing more scratch disk usage on systems with less then 8 GB RAM.

Stepping back to the Mac Pro, the caches should be large enough to benefit from the bigger tiles so this is a plus. Having 8+ GB or RAM, the extra storage for application resources should be negligible (large caches and fast RAM).

For older systems with less cache memory, larger tiles can destroy the locality of reference to data in cache memory which in turn will cause the CPU to go to main memory and entail an order of magnitude performance loss. Not having a lot of RAM on a older system can cause excessive usage of the scratch disk which in turn will entail more performance loss. Hence even if your system has large enough CPU caches, the additional memory usage for brushes and such may make your system slower.

The file formats plug-ins are for additional image formats you want CS3 to support. These are all on by default, and since they have to load every time you launch CS3, they take both time and memory. I advise you turn off the ones you don't use regularly. On your Mac (and similar location on PC) these are located under Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-ins/File Formats, and you'll see around 18 of them. I turn all off (by placing a tilda in front of the name) except BMP, GIF and PNG. You will notice a significant increase in CS3 boot speed after truncating this list since the overhead required to support file formats is relatively large.

I personally find on XP that once PS is started once, subsequent restarts are very quick and that extra plug-ins are not exceedingly detrimental. It is just the cost of getting them off the disk into RAM the first time that hurts.

Beyond these comments, the best performance optimization settings depend on your workflow. Do you use dozens of layers and non-destructively stack changes in files? Then you only need a few history states. Do you paint a lot with a brush on a single layer? Then a huge number of history states might help. Do you run lots of global filters? Then a huge number of history states might be detrimental. What are your zooming patterns? Do you work at many resolutions (50%, 66%, 100%, 200%, 400%, ...) or just a few? Tune your usage of cache levels to the that usage. Do you use PS in long monolithic sessions or do you quit and restart it often?

At the end of the day, we do not want to tune our tools to best use our other tools, we want to tune all of our tools together to make the best usage of our time. Hence, tune PS and your OS to your needs/workflow. And without knowing more of your workflow for post work it is hard to guide you beyond just listing options as has already been done here.

some thoughts,

Sean
 
Hey Sean,

Thanks, a very interesting read, and of course, you are right about the individuality factor in fine tuning PS to personal requirements.

Apart from that, I guess the Mac Department probably has to wait until PS 11.5 or so until we can say that it is multicore and 64 bit optimized and most of all, can utilize as much Ram as we throw at it.

It is fascinating, looking at software in the audio and midi recording segment, it is the same game at the moment. In the past, we ran after them by upgrading our hardware to be able to squeeze the last drop of performance out, today, the hardware has surpassed software performance and they have to play catch up.
 
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