I use Parallels to run Windows on my MacBook Pro 5,1
I boot from my SSD 64GB and have my Parallels image on the SSD.
It runs super fast! It takes 14 seconds to boot up Win 7.
Your information is very good for RAM and CPU, but I don't see anything amiss and things look quite balanced. Yes, there is one program that's busy and not responding, so you could kill that to rule it out as something that's slowing down Photoshop.
My hunch is you will need to examine storage to find the slow down.
My reasoning is Photoshop does a good job of pre-allocating disk space for swap of it's own (so it doesn't even swap to the OS swap) as well as pre-allocating all the RAM it thinks it will need. Even without seeing the normal RAM and CPU charts you posted, it's unlikely your Mac is paging virtual memory to disk based on the stats you posted from a snapshot in time.
Open terminal app from /Applications/Utilities and run two commands to list the attached drives (so you know which is disk0, disk1 etc...) and another to monitor the actual input and output for the drive.
df | grep disk
iostat 30
The second command will run continuously until you press control+c or close the terminal app or window.
My guess is you will see that there is continuous load on one or more disks and quitting the programs that are causing the disk to be busy will make Photoshop more snappy. You've already ruled out high CPU load and memory contention (the pressure would be yellow or red if that were to slow down Photoshop) so the next likely candidate is that the system is waiting for the storage.
The other suggestions to try killing other applications are good ones, but you will be more successful if you can measure the exact slow item and then change things and re-measure later.
Here is a sample of what you might see on an idle system:
Mac:~ me$ iostat 30
disk0 disk1 cpu load average
KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s us sy id 1m 5m 15m
36.80 20 0.71 24.99 0 0.00 6 3 91 1.34 1.61 1.65
32.00 0 0.01 0.00 0 0.00 1 1 97 1.32 1.60 1.65
0.00 0 0.00 0.00 0 0.00 1 2 97 1.37 1.61 1.65
4.00 0 0.00 0.00 0 0.00 1 2 97 1.31 1.58 1.64
28.57 1 0.04 0.00 0 0.00 4 3 93 1.48 1.61 1.65
9.85 3 0.02 0.00 0 0.00 2 1 97 1.44 1.60 1.65
Here is what first a minute of activity on the internal SSD then idle, then a minute of activity on the Time Machine drive and idle, and finally Time Machine running with both drives having equivalent activity (read from one = write to another):
Mac:~ me$ iostat 30
disk0 disk1 cpu load average
KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s us sy id 1m 5m 15m
36.95 20 0.71 42.93 0 0.00 6 3 91 1.99 1.90 1.75
8.1 1266 10.09 8.00 0 0.00 8 12 81 1.94 1.89 1.75
10.18 774 7.69 0.00 0 0.00 22 9 69 1.64 1.82 1.73
18.42 125 2.25 0.00 0 0.00 11 4 86 1.50 1.77 1.71
32.27 21 0.67 0.00 0 0.00 6 2 92 1.40 1.73 1.70
12.29 48 0.57 6.78 223 1.47 23 8 70 1.74 1.78 1.72
20.30 14 0.28 9.61 53 0.50 2 3 95 1.39 1.69 1.69
17.73 5 0.08 14.75 0 0.01 11 2 87 1.23 1.62 1.66
32.30 23 0.73 0.00 0 0.00 4 2 94 1.50 1.67 1.68
13.14 3 0.04 0.00 0 0.00 6 1 92 1.45 1.64 1.66
21.07 24 0.50 6.12 0 0.00 9 3 88 2.23 1.80 1.72
40.77 197 7.86 37.93 202 7.47 13 10 77 2.27 1.83 1.73
Best Answer
This seems like a lot of work to me since your swap rates are easily measured and generally not at all the bottleneck that needs alleviating on OS X systems I've managed.
Losing swap will be highly destructive to data integrity so you should have your system backed up regularly and able to be restored and files reconstructed if they become corrupt during a write operation. There are several guides here on how to move swap elsewhere, but I would say it's categorically a bad idea.
If you can post back what your exact hardware model is, perhaps there are better ways to accelerate your workload. I would post about 15 minutes of
vm_stat 60and a picture of your Activity Monitor memory when the system is fullly loaded and stable running your desired workload.My initial thoughts are that you should install your OS onto the SSD and have the home folder on the normal "boot drive" rather than messing with swap. Apps will run properly, you can remove just about all installed apps from /Volumes/SSD/Applications and let the Library there and core OS have the entire space for swap and OS. Moving some highly used data files there might make the most sense as well. Again, these are educated guesses and without knowing the CPU / RAM / internals of your specific Mac, there might be better solutions as well.