Illustrator RAM: Please Help!

It is recommended to add about 150% of your physical memory to your virtual memory.

So if you have 1024 Mb RAM, your virtual memory should contain about 1536 Mb. You can add more if you like, but it will not always be used. And keep in mind that a harddisk is not such a good memory container due to its long accessing time. Flash memory like USB drives is faster on the short term than harddisks, which are faster on the long run. If you have 128 Mb RAM and 100000000 Mb virtual memory, your computer is still a slow poke :P

Originally Posted by Julian Geez, a lot of misleading advice here. I run 512mb RAM and Illustrator CS2 and Photoshop CS2 run fine together at the same time. I only have a 1.8mhz P4 for my work rig and it runs sweet.

how demanding are your documents? (IE heavy photo print documents) because the machine i have at work is a 1.81ghz AMD athlon 2800+ w/ 1GB of ram and it runs like trash.

i can barely do anything in cs3. it crashed just turning off the guides already today, on a flat 72 dpi jpg.

edit: it just crashed again turning layers on and off too fast. i'm just going to keep updating this post every time it dies.

crash #3 - i tried to free transform my header photo.

crash #4 - i reopened photoshop after crash #3.

crash #5 - i reopened the document and zoomed in.

just having cs3 open is using 96 172kb of my resources. opening the document it jumps to 190 632. free-transforming my header jumps to 202 996kb.

crash #6 - i opened another document to duplicate a layer. i'm giving up and going back to cs2.

on my macbook (2.16ghz core 2 duo, 2GB ram) i can smoothly have photoshop cs3, illustrator cs3, flash cs3, safari, mamp and itunes running. in the pc with half the power i can barely do one of those processes by itself.

The difference could be cs3 vs cs2 Derek. I have had some extremely demanding vectors loaded in Illustrator with post processing done in Photoshop and both programs open. As well as Explorer and other vital programs to the job at hand. Watching the Task Manager the RAM useage does peak over my physical RAM (512mb) and has to access the hard disk for virtual RAM. But there is no perceivable slow down. It also does not use even 80% of the processing power when using high intensity parts of the applications.

Also consider that you are using AMD, AMD processors are not as good at multi tasking applications such as Photoshop with other programs as well as Intel processors. Trust me, I also have the same processor as you running in another rig (XP 2800+ overclocked to 2.2ghz) and it has never run as sweet as this old p4 1.8ghz.

The thing is too, my rig is clean, it is spotless. There are absolutely no unnecessary resources running in the background. It is highly tuned and optimized to run fast and effectively. I also have a p4 1.33ghz rig and it is almost as good as the 1.8ghz rig.

CS3 is optimized for Vista, which is a resource hungry piece of software. I tried to load a trial of CS3 and it wouldn't load with less than 512mb RAM and Vista as minimum.

So Derek, please compare apples with apples, your macbook is an entirely different beast to your 1.81ghz amd xp2800+. It's running a C2D processor with 2gb RAM. The dual cores are capable of running 40% faster than a comparative p4, and that's not even comparing it with slower amd chips like yours.

Avarus, that's why I am running 768mb of RAM on each of my HDD's, I have 512mb of RAM. Oh, and 10,000 rpm HDD's are super fast. Flash memory is optimised for Vista, as far as I know there is no option for running it with XP Pro. There is no noticeable slowdown unless I am loading large 3D renders. The largest bottleneck in PC's is normally the HDD, therefore running at least one 10,000 rpm HDD in your system is recommended. I have a 20gb one with windows and my main applications on it, and man it is fast! It runs in conjunction with my two other slower 7200 rpm HDD's.

An application runs as fast as your system allows it to, there are ways to optimise your systems to run applications. I simply stated that having more virtual memory can help the original poster.

all i was saying is it makes a big difference to have a powerful machine. my pc at work was horrible. if it had decent specs like everyone else's i could probably run cs3 without those problems.

i brought it up, because people should have specs above it, for the obvious reasons. cs2 had errors just as frequently, it would just give me an error dialogue box that said "the following command could not be completed due to a program error".

im sure if i got to hack around the machine, like i'm sure you've done to get rid of all unnecessary processes it probably wouldn't have been so bad, but it's a work machine, with xp home so there wasn't much i could do.

that was more of a rant for me anyways. i'm free from that job now. i really wanted to go office space on that computer though.