Reply To: Face Crop slowing down on large batch and freezing

[PixnubKeymaster]

First thing, are you running Face Crop 4.0.8 on CC 2022?

I know that you don’t think this is scratch disk related. However, when batches slow down like this, it almost always has somethign to do with scratch disk. So I’m going to probe there first.  So a few questions.

1. Is the RAID where your scratch disk is separate from the OS drive? Or do you have the OS installed on RAID? I would assuming that windows is on it’s own local drive and then the RAIDF is separate. However, just need to make sure.

2. In the Photoshop scratch disk preferences, do you have both the RAID drive and the C drive selected?  If you have both selected, then that could be the problem, even if the RAID has 4TB free as you mentioned.  When Photoshop uses the system drive for scratch disk, it can fill up a large part of that drive and slow the system down, regardless of how much extra scratch disk space there is on the other drive.

3. Is the RAID SSD or Mechanical?

Photoshop tends to use lots of scratch disk when batching for Face Detection. I’m not sure if usin g a RAID system for scratch disk is the best choice.  RAID writes redundancy to multiple drive so in case one drive fails, you have a backup.  So I think this could be causing the scratch disk temp file to also get written multiple times for redundancy as well. That doesn’t seem very efficient, especially as the files get larger during the batch.

Here is what I think you should do to test it out.

– If you have both the system drive selected and the RAID, uncheck the system drive from the scratch disk. Then restart Photosohp because the scratch disk changes don’t take place until a restart. Then retry the batch without the operating system disk being used for scratch disk and only the RAID drive being used.

– If you still get the slowdowns when only using the RAID drive, then I would like you to test with an external SSD drive with at least 1TB free.  That is what I recommend anyway to people. In the scratch disk preferences, turn off all other drive except the external SSD. Then restart Photoshop again and retry.  I have never seen any issues like you mentioned when using an external SSD a the only scratch disk.

Regarding the batch resuming, you should get the option to resume the batch. The only time I have seen where it doesn’t give that option is if the plugin doesn’t have read/write access to the source image folder (where the original images are stored).  It needs to be able to write a text file in that folder to keep track of the progress. Sometimes Photoshop won’t allow the plugins to write to network drives… or it may be the OS blocking it.  In any case, should should see a text file in the folder when the batch is aborted. If you don’t, then the folder permission is the issue and Face Crop is being blocked from writing the text file.