Why is Photoshop still so slow??

I have bought also a new Mac Studio Max with 64GB and 1TB internal SSD for the same reason.

I used to have a Mac Pro (late 2013 - the “trash can model”) running El Capitan with Photoshop CS6.

A few issues as well :

• the Mac Studio is barely faster than my old Mac Pro
• Sonoma is full of bugs, unstable and a real pain. Two of my problems are the connection with my Wacom Cintiq Pro is not stable and going to sleep mode is a huge issue. But other problems along…
• Photoshop 2024 is slow, unstable, with lots of poor thought changes compared to my old trusted CS6. Just trying to quit (unless I force quit) Photoshop take a god 5 minutes… Once restarted, it works fine for a while until it slows down again to being very very sluggish to a point it’s impossible to work.

As a pro painter (+30 years experience incl. almost 20 years on computer), I would NOT recommend this latest Mac (machine and OS) and the latest Photoshop. They are a complete waste of money IMO and experience.

Are you running any VPN, Anti-Virus, or Cleaning apps?

We need to see what all is running, a report from this will not display any personal info...

Using EtreCheck - Apple Community

EtreCheck is a FREE simple little diagnostic tool to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac. It will not display any personal info. Give it Full Disk Access.

https://www.etrecheck.com/

Give etrecheck Full Disk Access before running.

Thanks for Old Toad’s etrecheck instructions…

Slow iMac 2017 - Apple Community

Your Etrecheck report does not show any know Bad Actors (other than Chrome).

Activity monitor reports 100 as 100 percent of ONE CPU, and you have many, so 500 percent is not alarming.

Have you checked/enabled explicit Hardware assists inside Photoshop? That is generally supposed to push more work to the GPU processors, allowing more overlap and better overall performance.

Leaving Chrome (the biggest blatant resource-hog that is not obvious malware) open at the same time is Not the way to get high performance. You should Quit Chrome when you want performance.

it looks like mdworker may still building the spotlight index. it only runs during awake-but-not-too-busy times.

why are you limiting RAM to that number? are you renting out the excess?

and you appear to be saving 50 History states. Is that 50 levels of Undo? that takes a LOT of resources. how about something smaller?

You may be able to compromise on fewer undos by saving MULTIPLE intermediate versions more frequently.

if you want top performance, go at least as high as the top number shown on that page. If you go too high for your existing conditions, other things will start to break down like Swap file will start to grow, which will be effectively slower.

if you see Activity Monitor compressed files growing, that is not a real performance hit, but getting close.

are you mirroring the screen using airplay to another device?

if so, turn that off snd see if it is better without that.

Top Processes Snapshot by Network Use:

    Process Input / Output (Source - Location)

    AirPlayXPCHelper 217 KB / 84 MB (Apple)

Ah That MAG(netic) Safe, not the one that electically charges your MacBook and 'breaks away' if you trip on the cable.

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are you using airplay to share your tunes through a local device?

Not certain it will make a big difference, but consider disabling airplay

if you are not using it.

settings > General > Airdrop & Handoff > disable airplay receiver

dangerboydesign wrote:

I just bought a Mac Studio M2 Max with 96GB of RAM for the express reason that Photoshop was very slow on my iMac when working with large (2G+) files. I set the machine up and have been working on it for a week or two now, and finally had a large file to work on. It's 2.7G and 12 layers, so not huge or anything.

Do you honestly think that a 2.7GB 12 layer image file isn't huge??? It is, and you are pushing Photoshop to or perhaps beyond its capabilities. No surprise that Photoshop even on a Mac Studio is struggling with an image file that big. The problem is your image size + Photoshop, not the Mac Studio.

And, are you using PSD files (2GB limit) or PSB file types?

dangerboydesign wrote:

In my line of work, it's not a big file. That's only 27" x 27" at 300dpi. I often create files with a working size of 5G or more. And yes, I'm using .psb for the file. Photoshop won't let me save anything over 2G as anything else.

So you work with files that are in the size range of 2 GB – 5 GB?

That's for the finished, saved file – right? And you say that you keep Photoshop set to allow 50 levels of Undo? Depending on how much of an image you usually change, and how clever Photoshop is about storing the data it needs to carry out an Undo, that's potentially MANY times more than 2 GB - 5 GB of data that you are asking the application and the system to juggle during a typical session.

You could check the Memory tab in Activity Monitor and see if the Memory Pressure graph shows Reds/Yellows during Photoshop editing sessions, and whether the Swap numbers get very large. Although I am not sure that you would necessarily see "too little memory" conditions reflected in Activity Monitor. (Photoshop has its own swap file and could be hitting that up instead of asking macOS for more RAM.)

I didn’t see this question, sorry if it was asked already. What version of Photoshop are you using? Are you still using the Intel version that would be running under Rosetta 2? Photoshop is now a subscription app and many are still using the older versions instead of subscribing. If you are running the latest version of Photoshop check to see if it’s being opened with Rosetta 2 or Apple Silicon. Right click the app and select Get Info.