Photoshop leaks memory like an Alzheimer's patient.

[jlizarraga]

Photoshop CS3 has been leaking memory really badly for me. It's not a big deal to restart the program every so often, but still. I tested it by opening the program and leaving it running all day (without using it), and it managed to rack up a full gig of memory, just by being opened and left running like that.

Is this a known thing? Google didn't help me very much, or at least the forums I came across had posters who didn't sound like they knew what they were talking about and just guessing. This isn't exactly the place I would expect to get help with Photoshop, but the people here are always gurus so who knows.

[djr33]

I find that the newer releases (increasing with every release since the beginning, I guess) of Photoshop (and other similar adobe applications) hog more and more memory.
It's also annoying how the newer versions take so much longer to load.

You'd think that the newer versions would be better, as in faster, etc., would not take so much more RAM, etc., but they just seem to be getting much heavier. Personally, for this and other reasons, I'm quite happy with version 7.

I'm not really sure what to suggest. One option would be to use an older version of photoshop if you have that, or maybe a less intensive graphics program.

[techno_race]

My solution is to just go buy more RAM.

Edit:
I've had it on for a couple DAYS now, and it still only uses 329 MB of RAM. Less than Firefox...

[djr33]

Y'know, one thing you could try, to see if it is your system, would be checking that your hardware matches the configuration in Photoshop. If you have a 64bit system and/or multiple processors, it might have something to do with that. For example, the gig of ram might be allocated to photoshop and for some reason not usable in other programs, due to some odd situation with having photoshop set for only a single processor, or something like that.
I know that there can be odd issues when using After Effects (ie Photoshop's big brother that works for videos), but maybe they aren't for photoshop. I'm still using an earlier version so I can't check for you, but I do know that AE CS3 has some system configuration options that would probably improve workflow if it was taking too much ram.

[jlizarraga]

Thanks for the responses guys.

[Twey]

I find that the newer releases (increasing with every release since the beginning, I guess) of Photoshop (and other similar adobe applications) hog more and more memory.
It's also annoying how the newer versions take so much longer to load.

That's not the point. jlizarraga was talking about an actual memory leak: that is to say, the application gradually uses more and more resources due to unfree()d memory. This is just down to sloppy coding, and can be distinguished from genuine memory use for features or general useless bloat.

[philnolan3d]

Well I've had CS3 extended running since last night, probably about 19 hrs or so now, and I've been using it for much of that time. It's currently showing 192MB of memory. So now I'll close it and wait a minute or two... Now open it again... OK now it's open with no files. 54MB. Take that for what it's worth. This is PS CS3 Extended on Vista x64, 4GB ram, quad-core 2.8GHz

[magicyte]

I wish that Operating Systems nowadays could still be like Windows 3.1...

Easy to choose memory location.

-magicyte