Cacheing strategy ?

[simonfbarnes]

When I'm browsing my photos (70MB TIFFS) FPV quickly allocates as much RAM as I allow it, but as soon as I select an image into Photoshop, its allocation drops to ~5MB, so that when I return to photo browsing there's a delay while FPV starts refilling its cache. I'd like to be able to tell it to hang onto its cache unless I specifically tell it to release it!

[Axel]

FPV uses memory quite aggressively to preload and cache images and you cannot have two memory-hungry apps competing with each other.

Releasing as much memory as possible when launching external applications is a feature that helps avoid memory contentions, where your Photoshop instance would starve for memory and cause excessive paging while FPV holds images loaded in RAM while sitting idle in the background.

Currently the program clears its image cache and shrinks its memory footprint to a minimum (the 5 MB you saw) to free up as much resources for the external editor being launched. There is indeed a cost when swapping back to FPV after you are done with the external program, but we feel it's better like this than to suffer from slow performance or "out of memory" errors in the other app because resources are held in use. There is (currently) no preference option to alter this behavior.

[simonfbarnes]

Well, it doesn't suit me - I have enough RAM for both programs to grab as much as they need - according to the configuration limits I set them ie 2GB for PS and ~700MB for FPV

[Axel]

We'll think of adding some option directing the program to retain memory when launching external applications.