Photoshop: Is there a way to free up memory used by Photoshop?

Not a bug - Photoshop reuses memory constantly. There is no need to quit and restart unless you've been running a third party plugin that leaks memory.

This is less of a fragmentation issue and more of an application performance issue.

There is a significant performance benefit to allocating and re-using memory instead of de-allocating and re-allocating it each time we need it.

If you want more RAM available to other applications and the OS, lower the PS RAM % in Photoshop Preferences > Performance.

In the current version of Photoshop - If you hold the Option (macOS) or Alt (Windows) key while selecting About Photoshop the application will flush (release) all RAM and scratch disc in use by Photoshop.

Tough topic. Photoshop keeps the memory for future uses to avoid memory fragmentation.

See: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/786514... for explanations by one of its engineers.

Look also at: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404439... or search for 'memory and performance" in the help files.

ok, I use buy more ram :)

Say I open a 250mb file in Photoshop. We'll say this is a 300dpi image at around 5000x5000 pixels. This takes up quite a bit of memory and modifying this file consumes even more. I can see in the task manager that memory in Photoshop shoots up to anywhere from 500,000 to 1,000,000 KB -- particularly after several operations.

When I'm done using this image and close it, this memory should be RETURNED to the system -- instead of just sitting there with Photoshop.exe at over a gigabyte. I've heard programmers use the term "garbage collection" and I think this is what Photoshop needs to do better.

I find myself continuously RESTARTING Photoshop due to this poor release of memory. Otherwise, the application becomes entirely unusable --- even on a modern quad core system with 8GB of RAM.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Why doesn't Photoshop release memory after a file is closed?.

my experience has been to have alot of ram - i have 16GB - which isn't alot for PS but not bad and - set PS to use 70% - any more than this I find causes big slowdowns. 70% not any more, seriously. And dont have any flash websites running in the background, use a flash blocker and run only what's necessary. This makes a big difference on my MAc Pro's

Just to follow up on my previous post, my frustration would not be present if Photoshop didn't seriously slow down after I closed a large/high-res document that caused the memory usage to increase.

The issue again is that after I work with large files and PS's memory has ballooned up to 1GB or more, everything in Photoshop slows to a crawl and becomes unresponsive. As I indicated, the only way to solve this is to restart PS, which is why -- despite was said above about a "performance benefit to allocating and re-using memory" -- the inability to use PS becomes a serious problem. If there was a way to clear memory (maybe a command in a menu?) or better yet, PS did this automatically, that would help this situation considerably.

Dear Adobe Gripe #13922

"Please look at the TaskManager and observe how memory is never released until you quit Photoshop - not even when you close a file. This is very very wrong."

I was making a high res image in Photoshop CS5.5 x64 on Windows 7 x64 SP1 with all the patches, and I closed the documents, went back to Photoshop adn it seemed snappy but when I went to Task Manager, it revealed that Photoshop was using ~2GB of RAM.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Photoshop doesn't release memory after closing all open documents..

I often work on multiple images or very large images, so I have 16GB of RAM in my Mac for Photoshop to eat up. However, I've noticed that even when I've saved and closed all my images, Photoshop seems to hang onto whatever is in its RAM. If I open new images and continue to work, I often run into the "bonk" when Photoshop slows way down as it dumps less active data into the scratch disk and spinning beach balls of death dance in front of me. Rebooting Photoshop will clear up this problem. This is something I noticed with the Beta, and it seems to still be happening with the official release. I believe they call this problem a memory leak.

I had also figured this might be a product of the auto-save feature that Photoshop now has, which is awesome, but still it's annoying.

-Bruce!

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
PS CS6: Memory leak?.

It's pretty simple, memory has to be reallocated to the system. it's sloppy, and you can try to justify it all you want, but it's ridiculous, nothing anyone says can change that.

Is there a difference in the way Photoshop handles memory between CS5 and CS6? Everyone I work with who has upgraded to CS6 has had to include regular Photoshop restarts in their workflows and often complain about Photoshop becoming extremely slow and nearly unresponsive after a while, even after closing all Photoshop documents. I would expect that if all my multi-gig documents were open at the same time, but not after the point I close them!

Using PS Elements 10 on a Mac Book Pro. No plug ins. No hardware apart from what's in the Mac. PS leaks memory like a sieve. I have 8GB and watch memory use using MemoryFreer (mac utility). Inactive memory climbs as PS runs. Free memory continues to decrease until it is gone as PS runs. Then a reboot is needed. Despite what Chris has to say, there is a serious glitch in PS memory management that causes all of us to frequently reboot.

Why doesn't Photoshop CS6 clear the cache (RAM) it's using after i close the file ? it's not like any of the undo history or anything else is needed anymore.

The only way i can get Photoshop to do that is by closing it completely, then i have to re-open photoshop for the next file i wanna work on.

If i don't close it after each file the ram memory usage just keeps piling up, so that after 3 panoramas or HDRs my 8GBs are full and my PC slows right down.

This is a rather stupid problem to have, (i haven't seen any option in the preferences to fix this) i need an update to fix this asap.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
PS6 not clearing the RAM it's using after closing a file.