I'll apologize in advance 'cause this is really nebulous..........
Windows 7; I-920 processor; 12GB DDR3 memory; 2, Graphics: Ati 5770; 1TB 7200 rpm drives for images; 2, 1TB 7200 rpm internal drives for backups and cache.
I have my catalog on a separate spindle in it's own partition. Same for cache, separate spindle, partition of it's own, on a disk only used for backup, so nothing else is touching it.
CS6 has always worked fine for me. I'm editing Nikon D300 images as .dng files, generally loading them from Lightroom, so my usual workload is whatever's in background, Outlook, Lightroom 4.4, and Photoshop cs6. As far as I KNOW, nothing has changed in quite some time. CS6 is 13.0.1 X64, and I believe it's been that way for a while.
A couple weeks ago, I noticed that selecting a layer was "slow", or seemingly much slower than it had been. For example, my usual workflow has a layer for cloning, a layer for dodging, one for burning, an adjustment layer for curves and an adjustment layer for hue/sat. If I'm on Layer 0, and click on the Clone layer, it takes approximately 2 seconds to switch. Clicking on the hue/sat layer takes approximately the same 2 seconds. Previously, I know I never noticed the time to change layers, so I suspect it was
Changing tools, likewise, is significantly slower than it was previously.
In case it is/was something systemic, I checked the event logs, but I'm not throwing any errors in either the application section OR the system section.
I thought it might be a virus, so in addition to my daily run of Microsoft Security Essentials, I went to the online version of Trend Micro and had that do a full scan. It found only a couple registry errors that weren't actually errors, just artifacts.
I went through running services and turned off anything I didn't need, and went online and shut down any I didn't want running while testing.
So far, NOTHING has made any difference.
The only thing I'm seeing, and I've always had this, Photoshop uses a LOT of memory. At the moment, with one D300, dng file open, CS6 is using 7.75 GB of memory, an d Lightroom is using 1.8 GB. And, I believe if I GAVE Photoshop more memory it would use it.
At present, my preferences for performance are set at:
Available RAM: 10987 MB
Ideal: 6043-7911
PS Use: 8140
History and cache are
Tall and Thin
Default
Big and Flat
History States are 90 - this is down from 150, which I'd always used in the past
Cache levels: 6 - down from 8
Cache Tile Size: 1024K
Drawing Mode: Advanced (I've tried both normal and advanced, and it doesn't APPEAR to affect anytyhing)
Use Graphics Process is checked
30-bit display is checked.
Finally, in an effort to determine if I'm REALLY seeing a problem or just crazy, I went to my laptop, an i-720, 8GB system with a much less capable video card and images, catalog, and cache all on the same spindle, opened a file and played.......
Even on the laptop, although intensive operations are slower, I have easily sub-second response time to changing tools and switching from layer to layer. Again, either operation is virtually instantaneous. Which tells me there's SOMETHING going on with my desktop.
So, are there settings I should look at changing or even just experiment with? Something systemic I should look at? Blow it all away and re-install (an UGLY option)... Thoughts?