Mac G4

[Keith75]

Down here at work my mom was working on an Adobe Illustrator CS file that a customer had given us that was huge! Her dual G4/450 Mac was taking about 90 seconds to open the file then another 45 seconds just to paint the images on the screen. I told her that was rediculous and that we should just work on the file on one of the faster AMDs. We put it on an XP 3000+ with 768 Meg of RAM and a Maxtor 250 Gig. HD, the same drive the Mac has in it, and proceeded to open the file. To my shock it took almost 4 minutes to open and 2 minutes to paint the screen. It has an nVidia GeForce FX5700 in it with 256 Meg of VRAM.

How could this be? Do you think that Illustrator is just optimized for OSX and not XP or what?

Keith

[Empty_5oul]

just to clarify how large was that file, 90 secs must meen a massive one.

the only thing i can think of is if its checking for updates on every open. This would casue a considerable slowdown, this can be changed under the help menu // Adobe online. I recommend turning it off completely and doing it manually when needed.

only other thing it could be from looking in help is if memory is poorly configured, SWAP files have been edited etc. If everything is default and handled by XP or equivilent it should go as fast as it can.

[Keith75]

This time wasn't how long it took to load the application. It was already loaded on both machines and there weren't any updates going on.

The XP swapfile was at it's default setting. :D

[Empty_5oul]

ah, i see.

sorry, cant help you then. that was all i could gleen from their help. so i guess you'll just have to wait for the files to open in their own time lol.

[Beerknurd]

Try opening it with an Intel. That should speed it up. :twisted:

[rrcrain]

By default, Windows (all versions) handles the swap file extremely poorly and as time progresses, system performance will degrade as a result. On system install, you need to over ride the default swap file settings by specifying the upper and lower limits to the same value of 2.5 times the physical RAM you have installed.

Hardware wise, Windows XP really needs at least a gig of RAM for high performance when doing graphics manipulation. How is the hard drive formatted? FAT, FAT32 or NTFS?

[BigDawg]

A MAC will almost always out perform a windows machine when it comes to graphics and graphic related software. That is why most graphic designers use macs.

[andrewdodd13]

i used to agree with the 2.5 rule, but if you think about it... whats the point in having 4gb RAM just to have a 10gb swapfile?
i usually just make a swap file thats 512-1024mb big if below 2gb of ram, and turn it off if its above, because windows will probably start using swap before you run out of ram, which is a bad performance hit

[Empty_5oul]

i remember having this conversation on here before but we ended up none the wiser, what size is it best to have for swap file ??

you say 2.5 x memory ???

[rrcrain]

2.5 X memory.

I'll try to relate what I've read and been told in my MCSE classes, but I'll preface what I'm about to type with the simple disclamer that I remembered the setting better than the reason for it.

Windows handles virtual memory in what I consider to be an odd and extremely inefficient fashion in that it writes everything thats in RAM into the page file on the premise that it might need to be paged out. If indeed it needs to page out that section of memory, its already written expediting the process and simply marks that section of the page file as active. As your app demande more and more memory, the page file will grow as designed, but if you left the page file settings at the default values, the page file starts to become fragmented. Needless to say, as the page file becomes fragmented, performance deterioriates to the point that the machine will even take loner to boot up.

The built in defragmenter will not address page file fragmentation nor does it address directory fragmentation or scattering and to be frank, it does a poor job of defragmenting the drive in general.

Another thing to consider in this mess is what motherboard is being used. Does it have a dual channel memory controller, or is it an older model with a single channel controller? The dual channel board will outperform the single channel board hands down.

I frequently manipulate JPG files of 500 Mb or larger and have acceptable performance. The only issue I have is that Paintshop Pro can't address enough memory in spite of my best efforts at tweaking the system. My geneology database file is now over 500Mb and it does take around 10 seconds to open and 45 seconds to save to a RAID drive.