Painter and RAM usage

[Terro]

The initial RAM needed for a 10000X10000 is 382 just, but even if you set 95 percent to painter there are other factors to look into. Like painters Undo feature. Lower the amount of Undos painter remember, because each one of them is basically a copy of the previous image in memory. This is what could be eating up your ram after a few brush strokes. My undos are set at 4. By default they are either at 16 or 32, don't remember.

[Shizumauru]

No, this isn't what I meant.
The 10000x10000 was sample picture was to fill the RAM as fast as possible, my problem isn't that it uses so much ram, it is that it doesn't use the full available RAM.
I wanted to know if anyone gets Painter allocating more then ~1230MB (in Taskmanager).
That's my problem, the Painter process itself doesn't allocate more than that, whatever I do.

[Terro]

Ohh, I get it now. To let you know the truth, I have never checked my task manager while running painter, I'll have a look tonight and post back with my usage.

[Shizumauru]

Ok, that would be nice!

[DigArts]

Hi there,
I have a strange behaviour in Painter (and also other Apps, not sure):
I have 3GB RAM installed, and 2GB Swap. (WinXP pro)
When I create a new file, i.e. 10000x10000px, work around with large (700px) brush, the process size rapidly increases to 1230MB and stays there.

Can't explain your RAM usage, but Painter had some issues with available RAM back in v.6.

The point of my post is to advise you that Painter writes it's own temp/swap file. Allocating a large swap area/partition to XP Pro has little if any effect on Painter's virtual memory demands. Your configuration would likely be better served, and this would apply to virtually another other raster image editor, if you create a dedicated swap partition for these apps.

Try this. Keep what you have allocated to XP. But, create a new, separate partition for Painter/Photoshop etc. Given the sizes you're working at, you better make it 5 GB or larger. That way, you will avoid having Painter's swap file competing with XP's swap file on the same partition, which can lead to trouble when working with very large files. Tell Painter/PS/PP to use that partition.

Hope this helps.

Dennis @ DigArts
http://www.gardenhose.com (http://www.gardenhose.com/)
Electronic paints for electronic artists

[Shizumauru]

Ah, I forgot to mention, I'm using Painter 9.5.
Afaik, 32bit OS limits to 4GB in total and 2GB/Process. There's also a switch in the boot.ini which allows to raise that limit to 3GB/Process, but only if the application also supports this.

So it would be interesting if Painter is capable to use more then 2GB/Process.
Thanks for the advice with the swap disk, I already have it set on another physical disk, but I still would prefer using RAM instead of the disk.
I have set Painter's options to use 100% RAM, in Taskmanager I see Painter.exe with 1280MB and it will not raise anymore, no matter how many additional files I open (or undo steps).
I have over 1400MB Physical free and Painter.tmp has 500MB in the meantime. Sick. ;)

[Cris-Palomino]

I'm curious, what you are painting at 10kx10k? The largest I have painted is 2.5kx10k for a matte painting. My normal work is between 4-5k and have printed up to 18x24. At 4-5k, I could print even larger with no visible degradation. If I wanted to print much larger, I would probably do a test and if needed, use Genuine Fractals to output the larger image.

I'm on a G5 Quad with 3 gigs of ram. However, my paintings average 20-40 layers and I normally am running Photoshop, C4D and by browsers, chat programs and mail programs, so I'm always pushing the envelope on what my computer handles.

Are you only running Painter?

I looked at your work. You do very nice, precise work. Do you primarily work with airbrush and masks?

Cris

[Shizumauru]

Well, the 10x10k was only an example to make the process size rise quickly.
But I'm currently planning a large group image of 11 People, and I spend a lot effort in the faces and some details. Currently, my planning is 12000x8000pix for prints in 67x47cm @450 dpi. Of course 150dpi would be far enough, but I want to include as many details as possible and I can work smoother when I have a bigger res.

Yes, I do the whole pictures in Painter, thats why it whould be good if one process could use maximum RAM. (Of course some minor programs are always additionally open, but no PS or something like that.)
As long as there's no way to let painter use at least the full 2GB/Process, I made a 1GB ramdisk where the Scratch Disk is located.

I'm still experimenting with the tools I use, every CG image I've done so far is different, now I think I will stay with doing lineart with some pencil first and then coloring with Airbrush.
After a lot of trying I returned to the techniques I used on paper with colored pencils.

[jmBoekestein]

I just tried the same on a large canvas, I was curious because I run xp x64 on a dual core machine. It seems painter can only use one core at a time, and I couldn't get the memory to go very either. I hope they improve their compatibility with newer technologies soon, it woudl seriously improve performance.

I think painter doesn't have high memory usage functions yet considering it canonly us eone thread for instance I think they're sticking with what they know for now.

[Shizumauru]

So the memory usage is nota local configuration problem here.
Strange is that you can only use one core. If I remember right, I monitored CPU usage during drawing, and it was about 70% on both cores all the time, and there were no other apps running in the background. (except minor things with 3-5% each)
Maybe it depends on what exactly you are doing if it's multithreaded or not?
i.e. brush stroke yes, rotating canvas not, maybe?

[Hecartha]

i've the same problem, Painter IX.5, windows XP Pro SP2 with 4GB (/3G switch activated or not)
Painter did not want to use more than 874MB....
i hate these strange behaviors, Painter is not able to open two documents (mostly 6000x4000px or more with +/- 10 layers) at the same time without writing on my hard disk when i switch from one to the other. It slows down a lot something which should be smooth.

And now, for any reason Painter just doesn't want to use more than 599MB...i tried to initialize all painter settings but nothing works. Because of this new limitation some documents need to use the scratch when there is enough memory.....

I've on another hard disk (in the same computer) another copy of XP installed with just the drivers. I use it when i need to know if a problem is software or hardware. I installed Painter on this system and it can use again just ~874MB..........

last information, there isn't any problem with photoshop, it can use with /3G switch something like 2,6GB

if anyone knows anything about this problem, please give us a hint! I'm now really tired........

[Ghiangelo]

i'm sure Painter is still programmed like it's 1999. P6 had issues on systems with ram greater than 1 GB. P7 made it better but it's still a HDD dependant program as it is today. set up a 10 disk high speed raid and ur in business.

[genocell]

So, does Painter X has the same memory limitations as IX? I would really like to know. Thanks. :)

[Hecartha]

i'm sure Painter is still programmed like it's 1999. P6 had issues on systems with ram greater than 1 GB. P7 made it better but it's still a HDD dependant program as it is today. set up a 10 disk high speed raid and ur in business.You are problably right, anyway i would prefer another solution :D
So, does Painter X has the same memory limitations as IX? I would really like to know. Thanks. :)I tried to install the demo+patch 10.1 and painter X is able now to use a little bit more memory...10MB above what painter IX uses lol
Anyway something has changed in my system because it was able to use more memory before............i would be very happy if painter could use as much memory as Shizumauru

[Shizumauru]

Whoa, my old thread from one year ago is still active! :)
But still no solution. :(

Over all the time I was experimenting a lot with different ramdisk-tools but couldn't find any acceptable. Do you have any recommendations?
I tried many, some cannot allocate 1GB, others crash or are very expensive.

I think it would be a good workaround if it WOULD FINALLY WORK...

[vonsomething]

I just upgraded my machine a few months ago, and finally got around to upgrading Painter (to Painter X) a couple of weeks ago. I didn't have serious issues with old versions of Painter (v. 4 and V. 6) on my old machine, as I was working small and/or low-res.

With a dual processor G5 with 2 GB of Ram, I thought I would be able to work on large documents - as I do in photoshop. But I experienced a lot of lag in Painter - especially when working with certain brushes (I was still in the experimenting-with-every-brush mode). I posted an inquiry on another forum, and had 3 suggestions:

1. More memory
2. A separate scratch disk
3. Record a script of a low-res version of painting, and play back at hi-res.

I tried the script, and one brush didn't play back properly. Tried a second quick painting, and Painter crashed when I played back the script. Can't take those kinds of chances.

So, I bought more memory and a second hard drive. Not a big deal, I upgraded to 4 GB of Ram, and added a second hard drive (SATA 7200 Seagate) to be used exclusively as a scratch disk pretty inexpensively.

But then I read this thread, and figured out how to use the Activity Monitor, and sure enough - it doesn't look like Painter is even using close to the original 2 GB that I had. Not that I mind having the extra memory and 2nd hard drive anyway... but does anybody have any additional information on this? Am I misreading the Activity Monitor? Is this something that I can correct, or something I (we) have to wait for Corel to correct?

I love Painter (out of habit, the first thing I do when I put down my tablet is wash my hands, it's so similar to traditional materials). But surely there is a way to get it to utilize the ram on my system...

Thanks for any insight.

Michael

P.S. I did find reducing the number of undos helpful. Thanks.

[Shizumauru]

Imho the whole Painter code should be adapted to the hardware we're using today. This means multicore support (Dual core is nearly standard, quad core coming up) usage of 4GB+ RAM (64 bit support) etc. This may need a lot of money that Corel wouldn't like to spend. To be honest, Paiter X was a huge disappointment, there is nothing inside that would help speed up my workflow ar could help anyhow in the way I'm using it.
I don't feel it's faster if not using exotic brushes and it's not more stable.
What about a complete redesign instead of bringing some minor upgrades for the full price?

Why isn't it possible to add keyboard shortcuts to brush variants?
Switching from Airbrush to "Just add water" by a hotkey?
Or smooth painting with large brushes on a zoom factor below 100%? That alsways looks awful, as mentioned in another thread.
Or the scratch disk, why can't I specify more than one? Corel's own Photo Paint can, but in Painter, when setting the scratch disk to a 1GB Ramdisk, what happens as soon as it's full?
Game over!

I usually work at high resolution for large prints and use many layers to have the possibility to change things afterwards - I have a fine workstation and Painter still runs like on my old machine I used years ago. That's sad, Painter offers nice things for a professional workflow but when it comes to the code - ouch. That's imho the biggest challenge for the future...

[Hecartha]

And now, for any reason Painter just doesn't want to use more than 599MB...i tried to initialize all painter settings but nothing works. Because of this new limitation some documents need to use the scratch when there is enough memory.....Ok, I've found the origin of this problem...the trial version of techsmith snagit (version 8.2.3) was responsible, once uninstalled, painter can use again ~870MB...
Painter still cannot use the available memory to work smoothly with two RIF files opened but it is now enough to work on one document without any limitation (for what i need to do anyway)

[genocell]

Imho the whole Painter code should be adapted to the hardware we're using today. This means multicore support (Dual core is nearly standard, quad core coming up) usage of 4GB+ RAM (64 bit support) etc. This may need a lot of money that Corel wouldn't like to spend. To be honest, Paiter X was a huge disappointment, there is nothing inside that would help speed up my workflow ar could help anyhow in the way I'm using it.
I don't feel it's faster if not using exotic brushes and it's not more stable.
What about a complete redesign instead of bringing some minor upgrades for the full price?

Why isn't it possible to add keyboard shortcuts to brush variants?
Switching from Airbrush to "Just add water" by a hotkey?
Or smooth painting with large brushes on a zoom factor below 100%? That alsways looks awful, as mentioned in another thread.
Or the scratch disk, why can't I specify more than one? Corel's own Photo Paint can, but in Painter, when setting the scratch disk to a 1GB Ramdisk, what happens as soon as it's full?
Game over!

I usually work at high resolution for large prints and use many layers to have the possibility to change things afterwards - I have a fine workstation and Painter still runs like on my old machine I used years ago. That's sad, Painter offers nice things for a professional workflow but when it comes to the code - ouch. That's imho the biggest challenge for the future...

I hear you. I've just made major some upgrades to my computer and it's dissapointing that Painter can't take advantage of these new advancements.

Those suggestions have been brought up many times. Unfortunately we can only hope that the good folks at Corel take these into SERIOUS consideration. Another SERIOUS problem faced by many is brush artifacts while using multiple layers with "pick up underlying color" posted in wishlist for Painter thread in addition to many others.

Painter is my favorite digital painting software but I continue to use it and support it even though these problems are serious because Painter offers some really great advantages over any other painting software and it's really a joy using it but other times I really don't have any choice. Most of the time I just shrugged off any software limitations and get on with the job.

Painter has the potential of becoming much much better. Well, I guess beggars can't be choosers right? :sad:

[Shizumauru]

I want to add one thing: Painter handles RAM as it would be the only application running in the entire universe.

1) Open Painter
2) Open Taskmanager and check the process size
3) now open some large files, paint a little etc.
4) Check process size again
5) Close all the files and open a blank file -
now guess what happens to the process size and the scratch file - nothing!
Painter still allocates memory as there whould be all the files open!

Do you like a 1GB Painter process when drawing on a 1000x1000px file? ;)
Another example how-not-to-design a professional app.

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