Why can Perspective Warp cause my Mac to run out of application memory?

Solution 1:

You don’t actually specify what model of Mac you have, nor what you mean by within a session.

However, the perspective warp function is a rather CPU and GPU intensive task. How long it takes will depend on a number of factors, such as the complexity and size of the files you’re working with, the amount of VRAM your GPU has access to, and so on.

Also, if you’re trying to use the perspective warp function repeatedly during relatively short periods of time, you may find that your system starts heating up beyond acceptable limits and the CPU and/or GPU become throttled in order to protect them from damage.

Finally, while you do seem to have a good amount of RAM (32GB is nothing to be sneezed at), the perspective warp feature is actually more demanding of the GPU and the amount of VRAM it has access to. So you may find that’s the cause of your memory issues, especially if you’re using perspective warp repeatedly within short periods.

Solution 2:

Tuning Photoshop to cover all the possibilities would take most of a one semester course for Mac, but you might be able to make great progress by watching your efficiency in the app before and during the operation you see causing a slow down.

• https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-photoshop-cc-performance.html

Don’t try to change lots of things in the article all at once, instead make one or two changes and then test / document your results. Since you mention that it gets slower and slower over time, focus on the history state controls and the part that talks about purge.

Start with giving Photoshop 1/4 of total RAM up to 6 GB max (if all you ever really want to do is photoshop) and then watch efficiency per window. If you see efficiency go down, experiment with bumping up the RAM reservation as needed. Saving RAM for the macOS usually is a winning decision - so take photoshop down to 1 GB if you can based on efficiency of your documents remaining high.

Most times when I find Photoshop slow is due to someone giving all / too much RAM to this one app, starving everything else on the Mac access to that resource.