Memory available to Lightroom

[Gronlund I]

Hello all
In Lightroom when I click Help/system info, a window opens that says (among other things): "Real memory available to Lightroom 716.8 MB". I have 4 GB
of memory in my Windows XP PC, so can I somehow add more memory to
Lightroom and does LR benefit of it. Having about 4'''' pictures in one catalog,
so additional speed would allways be welcome.

 

[Brad Snyder]

Edit: Whoops you do say Windows in your message, I just looked for a sig block when I was responding, sorry

You don't specify your OS, so it's hard to say. From the 716MB, I'm assuming it's some flavor of Windows. If XP, you want to investigate the /3GB switch in the win.ini file. Read this thread:Memory problems

From information I've encountered from the designers, it's not so much the total amount of memory available as the contiguity of available segments. Apparently the Mac OS is far more cooperative in allowing a program to allocate contiguous memory than is Windows. Beyond enabling the /3GB, there's not much you can do. Some common sense approaches of limiting co-resident programs, e.g., browsers, email, etc, are reported to have some positive effect.

Because of the wide variety of computing, imaging and photography hardware and software encountered here, it's customary for folks to add a signature block sharing their setups, which saves a lot of time asking boilerplate questions. See User CP, above left.

 

[Katherine Mann]

The issue of contiguous available memory in a Windows OS has a lot to do with the amount of fragmentation of the hard drive. Over time, as files are written to the drive randomly in the available sectors, the amount of contiguous space becomes smaller. Defragmentation will set things to right and all programs that require more than the RAM memory you have available will be able to access more virtual memory on the hard drive.

I think you should be able to access at least two of your GBs without having to reconfigure anything .. but I stand to be corrected.

On edit, I checked the "real memory" available to Lr and it is the same as yours - 716.8, despite the difference in our systems and RAM.

 

[edgley]

I have XP 64 and 4GB and I have 1.2 showing as available.

 

[billg71]

Mine says 716.8 as well. Since LR doesn't have a Preferences-Performance feature like PS, I assume the LR engineers just decided on a safe, one-size-fits-all setting that wouldn't give anyone any problems.

Something to look forward to in V2, maybe?

 

[Gronlund I]

Thanks everyone for your reply's. Martin Evening in his book says: "Lightroom
will certainly benefit from having as much RAM as possible", so hopefully I put
a little extra RAM to my PC ( from 2Gb to 4Gb) to speed it up a little. May be this is one of those "Windows things", don't know. May be in Mac world everything is different (better?). But I'm not complaining, LR is a fine program and it works fine and I love it and I could not live without it anymore.

 

[Brad Snyder]

It's definitely a Windows (at least at 32-bit) thing. For publicly available info, you might look at the Adobe User to User Forum for LR, and search
'Windows Memory Fragmentation" . There is some talk there of methods for squeezing out maximum performance.

 

[edgley]

I cannt believe a site from Adobe looks as nasty as that one does.

I tried to find the thread over there but couldnt.

Found the search option.

 

[Brad Snyder]

Yes, it's kind of Wild Wild West over there. I usually only visit when I want to confirm something that I vaguely recall but am not positive of the source.
Frequently, it's not very civil either.

That's probably the main reason I choose to participate here. Ian can be quite proud of the culture he's nourishing here.

Back on topic:
Here's how to find some topics related specifically to the OP
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx?126@@.3bc2cf'a is the LR forum search page
enter "Windows Memory Fragmentation" as the search target.