Hopefully, I have not missed this in reviewing the forum, but here is the problem: I have a G5, 2.7GHz with 2.5 GB RAM and around 160GB of space on a 250 GB hard drive. I operate MAC OS 10.4. The phenomenon I encounter is Photoshop will gobble RAM until it maxes out physical RAM. It is set for 70% RAM usage. I have kept watch on my activity monitor and have seen it increase physical RAM until there is none left. It then slows to a crawl and the only way to free up the RAM is to close Photoshop, regardless whether a file is open or not. Photoshop will sit there with no files open and using 2.14 GB (over 80% of my total RAM) or more RAM plus a bunch of virtual RAM. I have 20 history states. In the circumstances I have describes, the files have not been big (around 30 to 50 MB). When I run both InDesign and Photoshop at the same time, the system is more sluggish than when I was running a Dual Proc G4 with 1GB RAM. It sometimes gets to where I have 3 to 5 seconds between mouse clicks and the only remedy I have found is to shut down, dump all the RAM and open up the programs again. Sometimes I need to do a full shut down of the machine twice to get back going. I read the memory management article (sorry, I did not note the article number) and while this was helpful, it did not address this issue. Any suggestions? -- Tom

log into a new SPARE USER to rule out your user preferences (if it clears there trash your preferences)...

<http://www.gballard.net/macrant/osx_troubleshooting.html>
<http://www.gballard.net/psd/troubleshootpurgepsd.html>

possible you have a flake (or corruption) in the install, including font or maintenance issues...

And this happens while you're not actively using Photoshop?

Something to try: go in to preferences and disable the font previews.
If that works, then the cause is most likely a corrupt font, and we'd LOVE to get a copy of that font to find out why it's causing that to happen.

Chris -
I have disabled my font preview and Photoshop apprears to be behaving better. I have not had an opportunity to put it through all paces as yet, but I have seen improvement in the RAM usage. As to the offending font -- I have a few hundred loaded. I will start narrowing down which font (or might it be fonts?) and will be happy to send it to you for dissection if you like. -- Tom

Give it a few days and let us know how it behaves.

(do try a binary search to find the bad font(s) -- taking out half at a time, etc.)

This problem still exists. I have not done the font search yet; the turning off the font preview, as it turns out, did not help. I have re-installed CS-2. I plan next to reinstall OS 10.4.2 and get the update 10.4.3, then reinstall CS2 again. (On the binary search to find bad fonts, I do not know what this is, unfortunately, so I haven't yet found out or done that.) - Tom

Have you considered you might have bad RAM

Tom,

A binary search is just an efficient way to locate something. You could try loading one font at a time and checking RAM usage, but that would take a couple of hundred tries to make sure you found all the bad fonts.

If, however, you load half of your fonts and check RAM usage, you can (theoretically) decide that all of those fonts are good, or that one or more bad fonts exist in the group. If all are good, load the other half.

If the second half cause RAM problems, then load half of that group of fonts. No problem? Then you've eliminated that half of your second group. Check the other half...

I'm sure you can see where this is going: by loading half at a time, you can identify the culprits much faster.

When you find the bad font(s), make sure you wear rubber gloves and load them into a sterile container. Address them to Adobe CSI--their crime lab will investigate.

OK, the font preview and a corrupt font are the only things we know of that could trigger a memory leak in Photoshop CS2.

Other possibilities: a bad printer driver, a bad TWAIN driver, a bad plugin (file format, filter, etc.) that you use a lot, or a bad OS install.