Adobe CS2 (Photoshop, InDesign) performance problems
In growing numbers, users are reporting issues with performance from Adobe's Creative Suite 2 (CS2) applications, including Photoshop 8 and InDesign.
MacFixIt reader Tom's case is typical:
"I have installed CS2 twice now and followed Adobe's intricate installation process to the letter the second time, but no difference. I still have CS1 installed and CS2 is consistently 20-30% slower than CS1, independent of which application you open first, what other applications you have open, or whether you have Bridge open or not. The only CS2 app that works perfectly is Acrobat 7 which as Adobe tech support say "is not really part of the CS2 suite" and runs independent of the CS2 environment and shared archives etc.
"Having spoken to Adobe tech support, they say they cannot acknowledge that there is a problem as the policy is that they cannot admit any problems. Great! However, they suspect that the CS2 sub-system (Bridge etc.) would be at fault, if indeed there is a fault...
"They say that Level 3 tech support monitors the Adobe forums and will be aware of the problem, and their advice is to keep updating until Level 3 tech support finds a fix."
Posters to Adobe's Discussion boards corroborate performance problems.
David Johnson writes:
"I installed a clean install of Studio CS2 and have been pulling my hair out at the same problems. I am running with 4 gigs of RAM and had no problems with CS on a dual 2.0. I upgraded machines and installed CS2 and the only real problem I have is delays. The speed itself is very impressive when CS2 is running full speed.. however at random times while working...for example if I've been working within my image for some time and I move to change layers...upon clicking on the new layer I get the spinning rainbow wheel for sometimes up to a full minute."
Some users have reported that turning off the WYSIWYG font preview option results in a noticeable speed increase, while others have had success re-building disk directories with a tool like DiskWarrior.
If you are experiencing similar slow-down problems with Adobe CS2 applications, please let us know.
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knows what all else all over your disk. If you've ever done a copy or clone of your
disk with hidden and invisible files visible you see hundreds of these
little files go by. There's no way to track all of them. It seems to me very
possible that incremental versions of Photoshop (which I have had since Version
1.0) are trying to look at old and possibly incomplete or corrupted settings. I am
getting ready to try a clean install of the operating system and CS2 just to start
from ground zero on all this stuff. I wish there were a comprehensive uninstaller
for all this garbage.
Acrobat DOES NOT WORK PERFECTLY. There is a known, consistent and very
bothersome problem where embedded movie files will not play with the current
version of Quicktime.
I would like to see more discussion of this on MaxFixIt. I've had to redo many
existing PDF documents to change from embedded movie to Open File in
QuickTime itself. This is time consuming and not as elegant as having these
sound movies embedded.
delays and slowdowns. Each install (12 different systems) displayed slightly
different install dialogues during the install, which leads me to believe the
various users' fonts, cache files, applications, and user settings all seem to
affect the CS2 install. Adobe's tech support documents state that doing an
install of CS2 from a disk image is the best, most expedient way to do the
install. This method however failed to do a complete install. I had to uninstall
(again according the the very, very lengthy Adobe sanctioned uninstall
directions) and reinstall from the DVDs. I've tried troubleshooting everything
in the book, including removing all peripherals, running Diskwarrior, Yasu,
archive and install, etc, etc. etc. Users still experience slowdowns in every
case. One user running a dual 1.42 G4 with 2.5GB DRAM cannot even run
Photoshop CS2 without receiving a Adobe system error message (uninstall
and reinstall has not been attempted due to production schedule) so
Photoshop CS1 is running there, and running well. I feel like I'm in
purgatory... waiting...waiting for the application and for Adobe to figure it
out. May our clients and service bureaus have mercy.
- by rgardner September 1, 2005 8:29 AM PDT
- I don't know if this is the real issue here -- but I've noticed that if I have
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(5 Comments)ANYTHING less than 6GB of free hard drive space available, CS2 programs slow
to a dead crawl -- sometimes almost unusable. And it seems to do better if that
number is closer to the 10GB mark. This is on a small-ish 55GB hard drive, so I
know I should have at least 5GB free all of the time anyway, but sometimes,
that's just practically impossible.