Subject:  Slow Photoshop? A solution.
From:     Jonathan Hoefler
Date:     Friday, July 6, 2007 5:18 PM




Pardon the wide distribution, but I've just solved a 
long-standing Photoshop problem and wanted to see if the 
solution would help other fellow sufferers. If you've been 
experiencing very slow performance in Photoshop, read on, 
otherwise you can ignore this.


SYMPTOM:
Intermittently, Photoshop will start taking EXTRAORDINARY 
amounts of time to open files, regardless of their size. This 
problem has persisted from CS2 to CS3, and from a PowerPC to 
an Intel Mac. The problem is intermittent, seeming to go in 
long cycles (a few months at a clip), but when it strikes, a 
2k file -- or a 100mb one, curiously -- will take upwards of 
two minutes to open. Also curiously, an open file can be 
saved and saved again without any performance hit. But saving 
a new file creates the lag as well, especially loathsome if 
you're using "Save for Web" a lot.

CAUSE?
Apparently, when Photoshop performs certain I/O operations 
involving files it's seeing for the first time (either 
because it's opening them or saving them), it likes to go 
snooping on all connected volumes. If you're connected to a 
file server -- especially one connected remotely, over (say) 
a DSL connection -- you're in for a bad time.

SOLUTION?
It doesn't seem to matter whether you're working off a server or a  
local drive (though the problem *might* begin by once opening a file  
from a remote server; I'm not certain about this.) At any rate,  
deleting these two files seems to fix the problem:

     ~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Photoshop.plist
     ~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.mediabrowser.plist

Photoshop rebuilds them correctly next time it's launched.


Hope this helps. Feel free to pass it along!



-- Jonathan