Task Manager numbers..

[Justin Passing]

Ac.cording to Program Manager, my PC never uses more than a small amount of its CPU or memory. About 20%, apart from a browser, but the RAM figure for that doesn't make sense to me. 3.7MB isn't 46% of 32GB

But if say I have Youtube playing and I'm doing something in Photoshop, it's noticeably slow in Ps. Same if I have Acrobat pro doing much.

Are there settings to say Use more memory" or "Use more processor"?

Does this tell y'all enough:

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[Swwils]

Your storage is most likely the bottleneck.

46% is the total ram use, not including anything reserved for vram allocation.

 

[rossj81]

I can't see anything obviously wrong with your stats, but I agree with Swwils that it's mostly likely a storage bottleneck.

If you still have a magnetic disk (HDD), you should get a solid state drive (SSD). If you already have a SSD, you could use a RAM disk program to create a virtual drive directly in memory. RAM disks can be 7 x read/5 x write faster than SSD. Examples include: ImDisk Toolkit, AMD Radeon RAMDisk, Dataram RAMDisk, and Gavotte RAMDisk. If you do this, change your Photoshop scratch disk to the RAM disk.

You also try increase the memory available to Photoshop under Preferences > Performance. Check the GPU settings while you're there.

 

[Justin Passing]

Those processses don't add up to anything like 46% of 32GB ram though - should they?

C drive and data drive are currently both M.2 SSDs.
Samsung 970 EVO Plus V-NAND M.2 iirc. Total 1.25TB. Only use spinny ones for backups.
If I'm working on say an 80MB file it can take a second or two to save, but that's OK.

I think the most obvious slowth is when I open a biggish complex pdf in Acrobat (pro), it takes many seconds indexing or whatever it's doing as it chunters through the pages, at about 2-3 pages/second. The CPU usage doesn't go up much.
OCRing pages is slower.

Shouldn't programs be using ram anyway - that's what it's there for?!

The thing used to have a liquid cooler but it packed up so I can hear the fan increase in speed now, not much makes it speed up.

Checked this:

I know it's over-clockable but I don't have any games so it's not life or death.



edit:
Just ran a "Userbenchmark.com" speed checker, which said:
UserBenchmarks: Game 31%, Desk 95%, Work 27%
CPU: Intel Core i7-7700K - 89.1%
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050-Ti - 29.8%
SSD: Samsung 970 Evo NVMe PCIe M.2 1TB - 289.4%
SSD: Samsung 960 Evo NVMe PCIe M.2 250GB - 178.3%
HDD: WD Gold 4TB (2016) - 78%
HDD: WD Gold 4TB (2016) - 82.3%
USB: WD Elements 1.5TB - 19.3% (old usb2)
USB: TOSHIBA USB 3.5"-HDD 1TB - 18.9% (old usb2)
RAM: Kingston HyperX 2400 C15 2x16GB - 40.4%
MBD: Asus PRIME Z270-P

So the ram may not be set up correctly. Even so, why doesn't it use that ram?
Not surprised the graphics isn't fast - cheap card, as no games, tho I'm not sure what the percentages mean exactly.

 

[Justin Passing]

Still grumpy.
How long should it take to save a file? Mine seems to spend some time period I'd have expected to "spin up the disc" - except that it's a SSD.
To a folder I saved to within the last 10 minutes, it takes about 4 seconds for a small file. That seems too long.
It is NO quicker than saving to a rust disc.

Is it possible the beast is getting all discs up to speed before saving, or something daft tlike that?

In say Powrrpoint, I click SaveAs, and it takes about 4 seconds to bring up the folder dialog box. That seems slow. Is it?
(I checked in Policies that disc caching is turned on.)

 

[IT Minion]

Those processses don't add up to anything like 46% of 32GB ram though - should they?

So the ram may not be set up correctly. Even so, why doesn't it use that ram?
Not surprised the graphics isn't fast - cheap card, as no games, tho I'm not sure what the percentages mean exactly.

The reason it doesnt add up to 46% is that it isn't showing you everything. The windows RAM management system is pretty complex, it is designed to run with insufficient RAM and also to take advantage of excessive RAM.

When it has more than it needs, as you have, then it tries to gather up as much as it can reasonably make use of for caching. That is where your missing RAM has disappeared to.

if you hop over to the Performance>Memory tab you'll probably see roughly 10GB in use as a cache, as well as a few other uses. Now if you started using more RAM then windows will release some of that RAM for other applications, reducing the size of its cache until you hit a point where it'd start using virtual RAM.

Tldr: Nothing seems wrong about your RAM.

Four seconds to load a save screen? That is sluggish. It took less than 1.5 seconds to load a save dialog for me running the current O365 version of ppt. It is unlikely to want/need to spin up disks to render, that stuff is heavily cached.

 

[Justin Passing]

Thanks ITM

OK?

Today opening that "save As" screen is snappier.



WHat really irks is if say I open a big pdf file and process it to OCR it, the cpu only goes up to 14% , memory use 220MB max for Acrobat (showng 34%) but it takes ages, 3-4 minutes for an A level biology book. Get on with it!!
Is there a way I can tell it to concentrate more of its energy on the task in hand ? ! ?.



I ran a thing called CPU-Z which gave me loads more numbers whch don't mean a lot, but apparently my Ram is running single channel.
Should I change that?
Is it a matter of where the dimms are plugged in?

 

[IT Minion]

Thanks ITM
View attachment 233180
OK?

Today opening that "save As" screen is snappier.



WHat really irks is if say I open a big pdf file and process it to OCR it, the cpu only goes up to 14% , memory use 220MB max for Acrobat (showng 34%) but it takes ages, 3-4 minutes for an A level biology book. Get on with it!!
Is there a way I can tell it to concentrate more of its energy on the task in hand ? ! ?.



I ran a thing called CPU-Z which gave me loads more numbers whch don't mean a lot, but apparently my Ram is running single channel.
Should I change that?
Is it a matter of where the dimms are plugged in?

Yes, looking at your manual you should be using sockets A2 and B2 for dual channel operation. That should make a difference to performance.

Your i7 has four cores and hyperthreading. That makes the OS think it has 8 in total. A single threaded process will be able to use 12.5% of the CPU at most. If the software isn't able to use more than one thread that's not something you can change. The i7 should be able to shut down some extra cores and speed up one or two to let it run faster.

Adobe has its own approach to optimising file performance which I've never liked. Try Foxit pdf reader, it's much better than Acrobat in general use and might be faster.

 

[rossj81]

Have you got the 64-bit version of Adobe installed? 32-bit versions will happily run on x64 architecture, but can only use half the memory with instructions so are slower than their 64-bit counterparts.

Also, do you have any network drives mapped? That could impact your open/save as dialogues.

 

[Justin Passing]

Thanks.
Er, yes, and no.

 

[rossj81]

You could try unmapping your network drives to see whether that improves the speed of open/save as dialogues.