Photoshop using up to 40gb of RAM and Affinity Photo uses 9gb
Not using all of the available RAM is not a good thing…
E: my PC doesn’t have anywhere near 40GB of RAM and yet still runs Photoshop just fine. Why do you think that is? 🤔
This is only remotely true if you have a box dedicated to doing one single thing and nothing else. That is almost certainly not the case for the vast majority of Photoshop users
Consumer software running on a consumer OS should not be grabbing all available RAM just because. Doing so will cause other applications to be moved to swap and have to be loaded back into RAM when the user goes to use them. In a server environment doing something like running a SQL server it would make more sense to grab all available RAM and start aggressively caching frequently accessed data in RAM to present it sooner with the assumption that the server’s primary role is to perform SQL operations as quickly as possible.
Specifically with Photoshop what would be the benefit of it be aggressively reserving RAM beyond what is needed to function?
for whom? as a power user, I’d keep affinity photo or photoshop, maya, max, blender and godot/unity open at the same time. I DO NOT WANT PS EATING UP ALL THE RESOURCES. Affinity so far (only 4 months into it) has been a delight.
No, of course not. Why have all that RAM and not use any of it? This is a very common misunderstanding.
This is true but only to a point. I have 64GB of RAM and I have seen Photoshop overshoot that and start eating up 20gb of page file. Working with the exact same files in Affinity Photo - it uses a quarter of that.
There is a difference between “Efficiently use available memory for program functions” and “Fill all available memory with bloat and poorly coded rubbish”
If your software’s function can be replicated using only 1/4 of system memory then your software is poorly written. Which Photoshop is.
The benefit of having unused RAM is that every program you are using can remain in memory for quick multitasking access and when you go to launch a new program it can be loaded into that unused RAM without unloading any of the currently running programs. What part about that is a misunderstanding? Would the user be better off if the application in focus aggressively reserved RAM it didn’t need to slow down every other running application? Because that’s what Photoshop does
Not using available ram only is true when doing so could offer performance benefits. Many applications can’t be sped up by using more ram. Using more ram for no obvious reason is stupid, especially on a machine that has to do other things at the same time.
I mean what differences does it make if it’s needed or not if it’s not in use?
Bad memory management can actually slow down applications significantly. Allocating memory is actually a fairly expensive operation. So much that high performance software actually uses a bunch of tricks to avoid extra allocations where possible. Additionally, accessing memory is actually kinda slow for a CPU, and the CPU often has to sit around for many clock cycles waiting for memory to be retrieved if it’s not in the CPU’s cache. If your main data can be stored more compactly, more of that data can fit in your CPU’s cache, reducing that idle time.
