Question about memory usage in PI XL

[jimojimo]

Hi everyone,
I'm new to pixl, and I have a large project ahead of me. The problem is that I've noticed early on that PI seems to eat up a huge (unreasonable to me) amount of RAM, dipping heavily into the virtual memory.

I've got 512 Meg on the system, and with nothing else running, I look at the Windows XP Task Manager in the Processes tab, and PI (Iedit.exe) has about 40 Meg memory. Fine. But when I open a simple 20 Meg .jpg, it goes to over 400 Meg--and I haven't even started to edit anything. I've turned the Undo completely off because I thought this was the culprit, but it's not. When I start cutting and pasting and doing filters and all, the pagefile goes past 2 Gigs of use.

I guess my questions are:
What's up with that?
and:
Is this common--do you all see similar behaviour? Should I just accept it and maybe add memory to the system? Or is there some setting I should tweak? I don't have any system problems that I'm aware of--all other programs on my system run extremely fast and efficiently. But when PI runs, I stare at a hourglass and listen to the disk churn.
Thanks for any insight...
--Jim

[jimojimo]

Hi everyone,
I'm new to pixl, and I have a large project ahead of me. The problem is that I've noticed early on that PI seems to eat up a huge (unreasonable to me) amount of RAM, dipping heavily into the virtual memory.

I've got 512 Meg on the system, and with nothing else running, I look at the Windows XP Task Manager in the Processes tab, and PI (Iedit.exe) has about 40 Meg memory. Fine. But when I open a simple 20 Meg .jpg, it goes to over 400 Meg--and I haven't even started to edit anything. I've turned the Undo completely off because I thought this was the culprit, but it's not. When I start cutting and pasting and doing filters and all, the pagefile goes past 2 Gigs of use.

I guess my questions are:
What's up with that?
and:
Is this common--do you all see similar behaviour? Should I just accept it and maybe add memory to the system? Or is there some setting I should tweak? I don't have any system problems that I'm aware of--all other programs on my system run extremely fast and efficiently. But when PI runs, I stare at a hourglass and listen to the disk churn.
Thanks for any insight...
--Jim

[NetButch]

If you are planning on using PIXL alot, I would recommend getting a video card with at least 8X AGP and 128MB on it (make sure your mother board supports 8x) ... it is common for the newer photo programs to eat alot of memory. What video card are u using now?

[jimojimo]

Thanks for replying. I'm using an ATI Radeon 9000, with 64Meg memory, and the motherboard (Gigabyte w/nForce2 400) supports 8x AGP.

I guess another 64Meg on the video card would help, but I'm at a loss as to why this disk is thrashing like crazy. It's defragged every night, and no other programs--even memory-intensive ones like compilers or disk-intensive ones like databases--will bring the machine to it's knees like pixl.

I've got to think there's some setting I've got wrong because I can't see a professional who works with pixl all day getting anything done unless they're working with small files. I'll wait literally 20 seconds to get the control of the machine back before I do another operation on the image--but sometimes it goes for 4 or 5 operations, ie, copy/paste/crop/filter/save with no problems. But then I go to make another selection and the old selection box (that dashed-rectangle box) un-draws itself very slowly and then the new selection draws slowly over what I (blindly) drew with the mouse. It's not very productive.
Thanks for any info you might be able to give me,
--Jim

[NetButch]

Hmmm.. just thinking out loud here, I will look into more details today.. how empty is your Hard drive? If you have installed lots of programs which edit your registry, it could be some reg settings messing you up. I had huge problems with Corel like that.. I cleaned the hard drive and did a fresh install, worked great... also, what is your Vmemory set at? do a defrag on your HD... I will get back to you with more later (once my brain starts working today.)

[jimojimo]

This is a relatively new install of XP, but I do have alot of other programs installed. I defrag the HD every night (on the Task Scheduler), and I've got about 40 Gig free. I've experimented with different VM settings--It's my understanding that if you 'hardcode' the min/max VM settings, then Windows won't have to dynamically resize the VM. The problem first happened when I was using 'Let windows manage vm' setting, which, with 512Meg Ram, is set to 150% or 768Meg min VM size. So I set the Min VM to 2 Gig, and Max to 6 Gig. I also tried setting the Pagefile on the other physical HD, which has about 20 gig free.

In addition, I tried setting Pixl's own temp directorys to the other HD, then tried using both HD's (pixl allows up to 4 different temp directories) and the problem still exits. I've run speed tests on the HD's, they're both very fast, the nForce2 chipset has some good UDMA drivers, and the Mode is UDMA 5--100MB/Sec. Actual throughput is lower of course, but my tests show that it is still very good--I can copy a 100Meg file from one drive to another in under 3 seconds.

But 100Meg/3-seconds is 30 seconds for 1Gig, and this is what seems to be happening--while the system memory used by Iedit.exe goes to over 400Meg--the pagefile kicks in and goes to 1.5 gig, and I've seen it creep up to 2gig--so that (insane) disk usage is where I think the time is going.
Thanks agian for helping on this,
--Jim

[NetButch]

Dont defrag every night.. that moves your files around by repetition and will mess you up.. Try using a defrag by diskeeper (not XP) and only run once per week... if you are NTSF then only once a month or longer.

Processing files from two HD's will cause bottle necking.. you are reading, processing, and putting back on the HD in order to process information from another HD (the source program).

So put your swap file on the same HD as the PIXL and also make sure the HD's are on the IDE bus on the mother board, not on a PCI card.

Let me know how that stuff is working.
Good Luck.

[jimojimo]

Yes, the HD issue I changed, I've got it back on the same HD. I had gone back & forth with that, and the defragging I just started, when I thought that might be a culprit--and I of course had the problem before the nightly defrags also.

So what I'm assuming is that you've not seen this behaviour? I guess if this were the 'norm' we'd hear more about it or more likely Pixl wouldn't exist at all. So I'm going to keep looking at settings and see what could possibley do this. It's almost like I'm expecting to find some off-the-wall, hidden setting like "# of backup copies of each Opened file to make behind-the-scenes: 50" ...or something like that.
--jsteph

[NetButch]

Unfortunately I dont have PIXL yet.. I am still using PI8.. so I cant get into the settings and junk with you.. I will look through my PI8 settings and see if I find anything that could be changed to cause this.. have you contacted Ulead yet? they might could help you out.. BTW please post your fix if you find it in case someone else incounters the problem.

Best of luck.

[jimojimo]

Well I'm cautiously optimistic about this being fixed.

I had contacted ULead when this first started happening. They had said to re-install Pixl. I had done that--twice. The problem was still there. But yesterday I reinstalled for the third time, and now the problem seems to have gone away.

I say 'cautiously optimistic' because on one of the previous attempts at reinstalling I thought it had gone away-but after the second image I loaded it was back. But last night I worked for about 1 1/2 hours doing the same stuff that had problems before--but now with no problems at all.

So my fingers are crossed that this is fixed for good, but I have that nagging nervousness that one day it's going to happen again out-of-the-blue. And this of course is because I don't know for sure what the exact cause was, and further--I don't know for sure that re-installing will fix it every time, since I had tried it twice before. But the problem is definitely gone for now.

My guesses are that something else I installed might have hosed or overwritten with a new version some .dll that's critical to Pixl. This is a relatively new install of Windows XP, and I'm still in the process of gradually loading all of my apps, and there were a few things loaded after Pixl but before this problem started.
So thanks for all your help, and I'll post more if I get some more specific info on what the problem actually was.
--Jim