Sluggish Photoshop

[gnomus]

I'm looking for some advice regarding Photoshop 6.  I have a reasonably high spec machine: i5-6500 3.2GHz chip, 32 Gb DDR4 3000 MHz Ram, and a GeForce 960 Strix video card with 4 Gb of GDDR5.  

The machine has been blisteringly fast, with PixInsight especially showing an increase in performance in slow processes like LHE.  

Over the last few days, however, I have noticed that Photoshop seems sluggish.  The first symptom is when I using the paintbrush to paint into Layer masks.  I will click a blob of paint onto the mask and then nothing happens for a few seconds,  Photoshop will not respond.  Then 'Brush' appears in the History list and I can go again.  When this happens, what used to be a few deft swipes with the brush turns into a slow and cumbersome process.  

I often will have a few images open in PS and PI at the same time (usually various versions of the same image in different states of disrepair), but I usually have things like this and the problem is quite new.

I have tried using the Edit-Purge-All feature, but that didn't seem to do a great deal.

Anyone have any ideas?

Steve 

[Woolnut]

9 minutes ago, gnomus said:

I'm looking for some advice regarding Photoshop 6.  I have a reasonably high spec machine: i5-6500 3.2GHz chip, 32 Gb DDR4 3000 MHz Ram, and a GeForce 960 Strix video card with 4 Gb of GDDR5.  

The machine has been blisteringly fast, with PixInsight especially showing an increase in performance in slow processes like LHE.  

Over the last few days, however, I have noticed that Photoshop seems sluggish.  The first symptom is when I using the paintbrush to paint into Layer masks.  I will click a blob of paint onto the mask and then nothing happens for a few seconds,  Photoshop will not respond.  Then 'Brush' appears in the History list and I can go again.  When this happens, what used to be a few deft swipes with the brush turns into a slow and cumbersome process.  

I often will have a few images open in PS and PI at the same time (usually various versions of the same image in different states of disrepair), but I usually have things like this and the problem is quite new.

I have tried using the Edit-Purge-All feature, but that didn't seem to do a great deal.

Anyone have any ideas?

Steve 

Have you got any plugins / extensions enabled that could be causing the program to run slow? Could be worth disabling anything you have added additionally to see if that helps the performance. At least then you can work backwards to see what was causing it (if a plugin is even the issue) 

[gnomus]

I have a couple of plug-ins from Nik Software, but I have been using them for years without issue.  I haven't changed anything in my PS-6 setup for a time.  I've not installed any new ones.  Indeed, I don't think there has been any update for ages.  (I don't especially like the subscription idea so I will not be 'upgrading' to the current version of PS.)

[wornish]

What operating system are you running  ?

If its Windows 10 then have you recently installed an update ?

You say its "seems" sluggish compared to a few days ago, are you running some other app, or have updated another app.

How much free disk space do you have if its low then that certainly affects system performance.