Allocating RAM in Photoshop

[Doug Nelson]

I just saw this mentioned in another thread, and it reminded me that I've been wanting to see a discussion on this subject.

I've been using Photoshop since version 2.5 or so. And I've never changed the default RAM settings. I'm working on a decent system now, but that hasn't always been so, yet I've never had a problem (and I've worked with some big honking files).

Granted I'm in Windows, which has a totally different memory management scheme than Macs, but the prefs are still there.

So, is this voodoo? Placebo? Or does it really matter? Has anyone tried it both ways? Has anyone tried it on both platforms?

[Ed_L]

With my old system, I originally had 128 megs of ram with 50% allocated to Photoshop. When the file sizes got larger, I decided to buy another 128 megs because things were getting pretty slow. After I installed another 128 megs, if I remember correctly, I allocated 85% to Photoshop. This made a big improvement.

Ed