Are Graphics Plugins Memory Hogs?

[D_Spider]

Greg Schorno (Greg's Factory Output) says in the readme.txt with his plugins that Filter Factory filters are "memory intensive (hogs)." Someone else says that keeping your filters in a non-photoshop folder unless you're using "these" specific ones (etc) is good because that way, they don't get loaded into memory. Are these cautions outdated now that having 512MB of RAM is not extreme? Or does Photoshop load all the plugins it can find (i.e., in folders accessible to the main program) into memory as soon as you start up the program? I've just checked this out with Paint Shop Pro (but I use version 5, five years old), and not much happens. I had 332MB memory free, then started up PSP, opened a 1.6MB file and applied one of Greg's Factory Output filters to it, and the lowest my free memory got was 326MB.

[This part is for Aimie: I just clicked on that MaxMem systray icon (that's the memory manager you said "well, if it helps your system..." about), and my free memory jumped from 326MB to 415 !! Of course, anything I do right now will begin kind of slowly...]

Anyway, my question above is to satisfy my curiosity. I have not noticed anything when using plugin filters, and I'm wondering if Photoshop does load all the plugins into memory, and why?

[Amie]

You might have read this, but just in case I will post the link.

http://graphicssoft.about.com/library/extra/blpsplugtip.htm

This page has links to more articles about managing plugins.

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pluginmanagement/

[D_Spider]

I've tried the shortcut trick in Paint Shop Pro 5 and Photo-Paint 9, and unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work. So this is a Photoshop-only trick.

That's from the first article. But from my perspective, there's no "unfortunately" about it because I can't see that PSP loads all the filters in the folder that one specifies in the Preferences-window dialog. I presume that Windows doesn't unload the filters one's been using--at least, not right away--but I have not been able to detect any problem arising from having many filters in the folder that PSP "knows" how to find. That's part of why I'm curious about whether or not Photoshop loads all the filters into memory once it starts or once a filter is used; and if it does, what the advantage of that is....