Reply To: Big Batches & Scratch Disk Size

[Damon BellKeymaster]

Unfortunately, I don’t think anything changes how PS uses scratch disk. The scratch disk is a “black box” and no way to see inside it, or control it. I don’t know if changing history states preferences will help. I did some testing a long time again and it didn’t. I also tried having SPA doing a PS “purge all” in various places and it didn’t help.

It is a terribly designed system and has been for 20 years now. Photoshop doesn’t release the memory after closing images, even though it doesn’t need it anymore. It just keep shoveling onto the pile. I’ve reported issues and made suggesting to Adobe on several occasion… other developers have too. Adobe has only ever given vague “canned” responses I’m sure they know of the issues.

The issue isn’t really Pixnub. I’ve tested and by doing the same steps manually, the scratch disk usage ramps by the same exact amount as Pixnub doing the step. It’s just that Pixnub does a lot of work automated to it highlights the problem.

A couple of things you can do that I have seen help quite a bit……

1. Uncheck the “Use Smart Objects” checkbox in the PSA settings. I have seen that help a lot. Editing Smart Objects can really drive up the scratch disk usage. With it uncheck, SPA will bring in the players as normal layers. If you are not resizes players afterwards, then no big deal, you won’t see any differences at all. However, if you may need to rescale images after they are brought in then you want them as smart objects.

2. Consolidate the template layers so the templates are as lean as you can make them. If you are feeding it 2GB templates then it can ramp up the usage more than a 200MB template.

Let me know if these steps help.