Memory issue with illustrator (but not really)

[Gilligan]

Built my wife a beast... 6 core AMD with 16gigs of ram, running Windows 7 64 bit.

Problem is, Illustrator is still 32 bit, so it only sees 4gigs of ram.

So we get a LOT of "Can't finish previewing, there isn't enough memory  ID= -108" errors.  This happens with even the most simple designs open.  Obviously this is a HUGE pain and it's worse than when she was running on the 64bit 3gig machine.

As a computer guy it seems like it's fighting for that 4gigs of ram with the OS who thinks "Hey, we got 16 gigs here, lets go crazy" and sucks up the first 4 gigs real quick.  It doesn't think it needs to give up any ram for Illustrator because it has 12 gigs that illustrator could use if it wanted.  Of course illustrator doesn't know about the other 12 gigs.  Conundrum.

I can't be the only one experiencing this sort of mess... what is the solution though?

FYI, this is CS5 if that matters.

[jsheridan]

Get the 64 bit version, problem solved.

[GraphicDisorder]

Get the 64bit version.  32bit version is useless. 

I got my photoshop using 20gb.    But its ok cause I have 24gb.  Haha.

[ScreenFoo]

What version you guys running?  I haven't found any info on 64 bit Illustrator release dates.  Photoshop, yes.    Illy, have only heard rumors on CS6.

[GraphicDisorder]

I was under the impression CS5 was 64bit, I dont get memory errors in it anymore like I did in CS3.

[Gilligan]

What version you guys running?  I haven't found any info on 64 bit Illustrator release dates.  Photoshop, yes.    Illy, have only heard rumors on CS6.

Yep, no 64 bit illustrator.  What kind of fool do you think I am?

For the record I already clarified that issue...

Problem is, Illustrator is still 32 bit, so it only sees 4gigs of ram.

[GraphicDisorder]

Well mine dont error out at all like CS3 does.  HMM...

[jsheridan]

Really..  I thought the entire suite was 64 bit 

[Gilligan]

Hardly any of it actually is.

[GraphicDisorder]

Well whatever they did with it it's a lot less buggy.

[Gilligan]

It worked great before we moved it from a 3gig system to a 16 gig system.

Obviously we had memory limitations at 3gigs but they were rational.

[mk162]

funny, i have no problems with my 12gb.  I also run a thumb drive as a readyboost device.  Check it out, it works really well.  I bought a faster transfer 32gb thumb drive and plugged it in and set it up.

[Gilligan]

At the end of the day I set up her USB 3 external as a primary scratch... we shall see.

[GraphicDisorder]

At the end of the day I set up her USB 3 external as a primary scratch... we shall see.

Externals are generally slower drives (5400pm even a lot of the time), put a faster secondary internal in as scratch disc.  In my computers I have a 10,000RPM drive just for scratch disc. 

[Dottonedan]

Well, mines dead now, but web I installed CS5 in my PC, we had the option of running it in 32 or 64.  Since Puerre loaded it, I don't remember what we loaded. I think it was 64.

One thing I had not seen posted yet, is that  you will need to "assign a %" of your ram to Illustrator so it knows how much to work with. It will assign an amount by default but I ran Illy and Photoshop CS5 on 8 GB.

Also, what do you guys do with your computer that you might need 24gigs of ram?
Artist who are creation and rendering image files for animation could use something like that, but I can't imagine Photoshop needing more than 8 or 10 but I'm not real familiar with ram and PC. I know a pC uses probably 20% more ram to do the same thing in a Mac. Just stating differences here. Still, 25gigs?  Shazam!