Photoshop CS4 heavy stuttering...

[Mangas]

Hello to all.
I have PS CS4 (no any plug-ins) and even a 36Mb *.psd file is impossible to work with.
Very-very slow operations... Any... (any smuggle tool movement lasts for minutes! )
I try to have a minimum quantity of layers, but it's pain to have everything on just a few layers...
Any suggestions what can be (software) optimized?

My spec: C2D E8400/P5K/2048 DDR2 800(860)/8500GT 256/512...
Swap file is min-max 4096Mb...

[inkworm]

First thing is more ram is better. How many other services/apps are running? How many history states do you have? (More is useful however too much in the cache can cause slow down). Do you have a second scratch disk? What graphics card do you have?

Those are all I can really think off off the top of my head for possible causes, otherwise just turn it off and on again!!!!!!!!

[Jesters-Ink]

2gig of ram is ok, 4 gig is much better. I use 6gig, but I have friends who are using 12.
You also need plenty of drive space for your scratch disk, I have set aside 250gig on mine plus it is not recommended for the scratch disk to be on C (or same as your OS installed drive). Hope this helps.

[Supah]

To be able to use more then 3,8 GB of RAM under Windows you will need a 64bit version of your OS. I'd say make more scratch disks and add more RAM. If you already have scratchdisks make them on a faster HDD (or even SSD's)

[Rufe]

As far as software goes, one sometimes overlooked item is defragmenting your drives. Also, do you have a second drive or partition to move the scratch file to? (as mentioned above). What does the task manager tell you about processor load?

Another item, is the fan on the graphics card working?

Sorry if this is too basic, however, it is sometimes overlooked.

[adlabs6]

In my past experience, this tended to be a CPU related issue. Biggest things to choke my CPU:

What size is your smudge tool brush?

How much edge feather does the smudge tool brush have?

How many layers are you simultaneously smudging?

*EDIT* - Just to test my current machine, I opened up a 4 layer image at 6400x4000 pixels in GIMP. The smudge tool only works on one layer at a time in GIMP, and a 400 pixel brush with full feathering took 10 minutes to make a stroke across the image. A three layer graphic element as an example, would be around a half an hour processing for three brush strokes.

CPU is an A64 5000x2 (@2.6Ghz) with 2GB ram. CPUs were full throttle, and my physical memory use was reported between 70% and 80% of capacity. Compare to 25% with just the browser open.

I had not even seriously used the smudge tool in years. I found that the airbrush tool and my WACOM tablet was far superior for most of the types of things I was smudging.

[Mangas]

Thanks to everybody for the replies/advices.

Can you be more specific please? If I have only 1 physical drive (Seagate 250Gb SATA) -- do I have to allocate some unpartitioned space for that (apart from any logical drives I have)? What cluster size should I use for it?

I have a fanless solution:
Âèäåîêàðòà PCI-E 256ÌÁ Leadtek "WinFast PX8500 GT TDH Heatpipe"
but GPU's temperature is never above ordinary 45C (case fan does his job)...
So I'm looking for another 2x1024Gb memory modules now... Right?

[Mangas]

OK, I added 2 more memory modules... I know XP (32-) can only see 3,25Gb of RAM, but why Photoshop still see only 1,7Gb of RAM overall?!

[Mangas]

Any suggestion how to reduce a project file size? 122Mb is too heavy to work with... I know about keeping big jpegs out... Plus I try not to use overlay textures... Any other ideas?

I'll soon run out of drive space working like that:

[Mangas]

Okay, I'll try to put my previous question more correctly:
I know that keeping the large filesize is bad in many aspects... And the best thing is to keep some details like "let's hope this bloody machinery stuff will never be changed" as just a single merged layer... But still, what is the optimal PSD.filesize for (more or less) comfort work for the PC specs mentined above? At least theoretically?