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Liquify & scratch disks - poor performance
I've just been playing around with liquify on my new PC (12Gb RAM, i750, Vista64, fast disks etc...) and it suffers from the same problem as my old PC - it stalls when using a large brush on a large image. I decided to look at what was happening and, using the resource monitor, I could see liquify writing to the disk, even though I have loads of RAM free!! (or believe I have - it's a one layer image 5dii file in 16 bit and 6Gb was allocated to Photoshop) OK, so I thought I'd try a RAMdisk for the scratch. I installed it and set it to be the scratch disk and only then realised that liquify is not using my specified scratch disk at all!. It was using F: drive, not the faster Y: drive! Specifically it was writing these kinds of files: "4542951_MVM_0.tmp". So, setting it to the ramdisk was obviously not going to help since it's completely ignoring my request to use the scratch disk of my choice! I know I can work on a small image and save/load the mesh, but I have a lot of liquify to do and it's a pain! Anyone else noticed this? Have a solution? Aug 22 09 02:02 am Link Aug 22 09 02:07 am Link Was just playing around a bit more and it seems not to stall when you have the mouse button held down ie. doing the actual liquify. But when you release the button and if you had done another liquify operation too recently, it stalls. Further information: I was wondering if it was the mesh or the actual pixels of the image, so I tried liquifying a much smaller image but with the same sized brush and it didn't stall! It's managing to keep up! So, my reading of this is that it's storing undo states - and actually saving the pixels of the image (presumably along with the mesh which will take much less space) in order to allow for a fast undo, but it's not using the scratch disk that I assign! And it ignores the number of undo states you set in photoshop so you can't switch it off  Aug 22 09 02:14 am Link This particular problem HAS BEEN DRIVING ME NUTS FOR YEARS. As you correctly point out; it's certainly nothing to do with the specification of the hardware because I also recently invested in a monster Vista64bit Quadcore machine with 32Gb RAM, all solid state drives and a killer graphics card, specifically in an attemp to solve this stupid problem... AND THE LIQUIFY TOOL STILL HANGS PS WHEN USING A LARGE BRUSH ON HEAVY FILES. Admittedly it doesn't hang for quite so long, or quite so often - but the problem is still most conspicuously evident, and it's still just as frustrating having my focus & concentration messed with by these infuriating interruptions. I would kill for a solution, SK Aug 22 09 02:18 am Link Hmmm. I'm using virtually the same equipment - both computer and camera. I have previously had the problem from what I recall as well, but not recently to my recollection. I'm going to try and provoke it right now and see if I can find a solution... Edit: Woops. Wrong profile. Aug 22 09 02:23 am Link I can't find any information on this on the net at all. It seems very few people know that it uses a disk other than the scratch disk - adobe seem to have "neglected to tell" anyone that and before vista it would have been difficult to find out. If they would just fix it so I could use a ram disk or at least one of my fast disks, it would be sorted, but it's using one of the disks with the most space (I suspect that's what it uses as it's criteria to decide what disk to use) and that's a "slow" drive. Someone on another forum said that they only had the problem when they connected to a network or something. Presumably that network drive had the largest free space or something. He had to disconnect in order to sort out the problem. You can't turn undo off. You can't change the disk it uses. Liquify doesn't have any individual performance settings that you can select from. Come on Adobe! Sort it out! Aug 22 09 02:23 am Link Seems that liquify gained "multiple undo states" in PS 7 and that's when people started complaining of poor performance.. Aug 22 09 02:28 am Link Here's something about people with USB drives attached: http://www.realgeek.com/forums/photosho … 72605.html Aug 22 09 02:31 am Link And here's another one pointing to the same problem: http://www.xpertgurus.com/showthread.php?t=171454 "I'm running a Dell 670 with 4Gb of ram and around 300Gb of free space between two drives with Windows XP Pro x64. I've been trying to use the liquify filter on a layer on a small rectangular shape in a 50Mb file and after about ten to twelve brush strokes with the push tool I get an error message that states that there is insufficient disk space to complete the task. I have two scratch disks set up for Photoshop internally and I've double checked my ram settings. I've also increased the paging space on the drive up to around 12Gb and unfortunately nothing I've done seems to resolve the problem. Currently I'm running Photoshop CS2 with the latest upgrades." Aug 22 09 02:32 am Link And here's another one pointing to the same issue: http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/754197/0 When people on here say Photoshop is no longer accessing the scratchdisk as they have lots of ram, are they SURE? I initially thought it was odd when a noise I hadn't noticed before (More than likely due to having loud music on whilst editing) when using alt+click to hide/show all layers was infact my hardrives seeking. It's almost inaudible but I tend to have very sensitive hearing. So, i'm just working on a large 120 scan building up my layers as you do, and I go to liquify a section of the image. Now it's a large image and even though my PC is fast I don't expect it to absoultely blitz everything I throw at it, and liquify is typically a pretty crap part of Photoshop for speed anyway. So out of curiosity I open up task manager to see what my CPU usage is like.. bouncing along the bottom, jumping upto 25/30% every so often, usually when making larger adjustments, felt happy, and clicked OK. Something made me open up Resource Monitor and noticed the hardrive jumping upto 180mb/s usage. Expand the view and it is indeed Photoshop absolutely tanning the hardrive. All the while my Ram usage is at around 5GB. So, if this is indeed normal, a word of advice folks Invest in a RAID0 scratchdisk volume if you do large edits on large files.. Because photoshop seems to prioritize the scratchdisk before ram in some cases. If this is not normal or doesn't happen to you, please state specs, PS version, settings etc, tar. For those interested, computer is a 3.2ghz Quad, 16GB of ram, RAID0 array for OS (Which is also the scratchdisk), and Photoshop CS4 64-bit ram usage is set at 70%, Cache Levels 6, History states 20. Aug 22 09 02:36 am Link Why don't you post on John Nack's blog? He's the Principal Product Manager for Photoshop, maybe he can guide you to the light. http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/ Aug 22 09 02:36 am Link Thanks  I will do Aug 22 09 02:40 am Link The best person to ask about this is the bloke who runs this website: http://www.retusz.info/ He actually hacked the liquify tool to allow 9000 pixel brush sizes, which would have required decompiling the plugin and examining the code. Aug 22 09 03:30 am Link *Edit* I misread the OP where he said that he knew how to do this already. So I will leave this here in case someone didn't know about it... 1.Shrink the image down to a manageable size before using the liquify tool. I personally go down to somewhere like 1000x1500 pixels in size. 2.Using this smaller image go into the liquify filter and make your adjustments. 3.To the right of your screen you will see a button marked "Save Mesh". Click on it and save it (either as "Liquify"(the default) or a name of your choice). 4.Click cancel to return you back to the image. Then step backward to get back to the original size of the image. 5. Go back to the liquify filter, this time using the original size image. 6. Instead of working on the image, click on "Load Mesh" and click on the "Mesh File" you saved in step #3. It should make your larger version of the image look like the smaller version you just worked on. It just makes it easier on your computer to do all the adjustments on the smaller version and the output of the larger version will look the same. Hope this helps, rather than confuses Schultzy Aug 22 09 03:37 am Link To the OP: I'm just curious if you're using 15k SCSI / SAS disks? I always believed it would be latency rather than raw data throughput causing the blockage (hence the reason these SSD disks are becoming popular for certain applications). On reason I'm curious is that 16gb is the amount of RAM I'd be looking at with the Xeon setup I'll be building for myself once Windows 7 is established (ie. once it has reached SP1) Aug 22 09 03:42 am Link I don't know what happened to my reply(ies), but they seem to be gone now. It's late, maybe I posted in the wrong thread somewhere. Check your TEMP and TMP environment variables (user and system). In XP, it's in right click My Computer->Properties. If you don't know what these are, a quick google will get you all the info you need to update them. Aug 22 09 03:46 am Link Davepit wrote: I'll check it out later - thank you Aug 22 09 03:53 am Link RRags wrote: Good question - I'd not looked at that. Seems they are all pointing to the C drive. Thanks for that, but doesn't look like it was the issue. Aug 22 09 03:58 am Link RedChecker wrote: I'm using a 300Gig raptor for my C drive, but have 3 x 1.5tb 7200RPM drives for data. It's one of these that Liquify is choosing, presumably since they have the largest space free.. Aug 22 09 04:00 am Link Retouching By Schultzy wrote: Yes - thank-you for posting - it's a good technique Aug 22 09 04:02 am Link |
