# Slow as a 2 legged dog



## jjlad (Jan 2, 2013)

Hi there,
Tonite, everything just slowed to a crawl.
I have 6 gigs of ram but couldn't even switch between LR4.3 and CS5.
I had to minimize one to get to the other.
Checked resources and found LR was using approx 350megs while CS5 was using 3.3gigs!
All I had open in CS5 was 1 photo which at that point had 4 layers.

That seems like a huge amount of RAM for CS5 to be using.  All I was doing was trying to reduce the shadow silhouetting the side of a person by selecting the person, putting him on a seperate layer, then cloning the background layer and using the patch tool on it to eliminate the shadow then masking that layer and painting the shadow area back in lightly. So:
 Selection 
Background Copy with Mask
Background

Its like each of those layers was using a gig.

How does CS5 develop such an appetite?

Now I just re-started CS5 and opened that file as it was from the 'Recent' selection and CS5 is now using 460 megs.
Why would it have needed 3.3 gigs to run the same file 20 minutes ago??
Checked the file sizes.
The RAW file I started with is      18,129 KB
The Tiff file from the last edit is 246,725 KB

Thanks,
jj


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## Bryan Conner (Jan 2, 2013)

The first thing that comes to mind is History.  Depending on how many history states and exactly what each history state contains, the working file size can become large.  When you save and close the image, the file size becomes much smaller.


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## Tony Jay (Jan 2, 2013)

Can't directly help with memory issue but I love your use of the simile

Tony Jay


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## Victoria Bampton (Jan 2, 2013)

In CS5's preferences, you can set the maximum amount of RAM you're willing to allow it to use.


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## jjlad (Jan 3, 2013)

Victoria Bampton said:


> In CS5's preferences, you can set the maximum amount of RAM you're willing to allow it to use.



I'll try that. Just went through all the settings and opted for a more economical allocation. I'll give feedback once I try it.

Thanks!
jj


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