12gb of Ram and full scratch disks?

I'm finding during my workload that my scratch disks are filling up.

With 12gb ram I didn't expect this to be an issue?

The only thing I can think of is that I gave 10gb of the 12gb Ram over to CS5, will CS5 be usins that allocation as it's scratch disk as well? Or does it use whatever Ram isn't allocated and the the hard drive?

I'm not sure re; CS5, but with older versions, it reserves it's scratch disk, and uses it, regardless of RAM installed. No idea why. It appears almost as iff Adobe insists that certain memory related tasks like history, be written t a drive, regardless of memory installed. But this is just my theory.

One way around this is to use a program called RamDisk (or is ot RamDrive?) to turn some of your memory into a virtual drive complete with drive letter.
Then you can tell even 32 bit apps to use the Ramdrive as the scratch disk, and get RAM speeds from it I used this trick fro years while I waited for Adobe to finally release a 64 bit version of PS.

From memory, Photoshop will use scratch no matter what you do. It proactively tries to get things it's unlikely to need out of memory.

I can't see any good reason to give PS 10GB of RAM, unless you're working on massive images, or have a huge history or something. Mine works fine on 2GB of RAM. I rarely use PS anyway, I use Bridge way more.

Gel wrote in post #10585482
I'm finding during my workload that my scratch disks are filling up.

With 12gb ram I didn't expect this to be an issue?

The only thing I can think of is that I gave 10gb of the 12gb Ram over to CS5, will CS5 be usins that allocation as it's scratch disk as well? Or does it use whatever Ram isn't allocated and the the hard drive?

How big is your scratch disk(s)? I never see mine go very high (CS4 or CS3). Regardless of how much space you give PS it's going to use the HDD to keep changes to images, filter use, history and things like that. Once PS is closed and restarted, it should dump all those cached files. If PS has crashed in the past there may be a lot of junk on your scratch disk just taking up space. The files are hidden with the ~ symbol in front of them. You would need to delete them.

Here's more information on PSCS and RAM/Scratch disk (link). Some of the information does not pertain to 64bit PS. You also may want to look into this article (link) on ways of optimizing PS.

Also, if you leave RAM free, Windows 7 will use any free RAM as a file cache. That will help performance. Windows XP isn't very good at file caching.