Adobe CS2 application performance problems, other issues (#3)

We continue to report on sluggish performance exhibited by virtually all of Adobe's Creative Suite 2 (CS2) applications, including Illustrator, Photoshop, GoLive and InDesign. The most affected tool in the bunch appears to be Photoshop 9.0, which exhibits significant slow-down for some users when working with routine (not particularly large or complex) images and when opening or saving documents.

Slow launching One of the most prominent performance issues affecting all CS2 components is unusually long launch time.

John Dikmen writes:

"With Photoshop CS2, it takes forever to launch (always) - at least 45 seconds (spends 20 seconds just scanning for plugins). Once it launches everything is usually fine for a while whether or not Bridge is open, then all of a sudden everything in Photoshop just slows down. I have not found what if any particular thing triggers it, but I usually notice it first when I try to Save or Open another file. It eventually will complete the task, but the only fix I have found is to quit Photoshop and relaunch - this so far has worked every time. I have tried purging all caches - no help. I have 2.5 Gig ram on a Dual 2-Gig G5 and a clean 4-Gig Scratch partition, but this sometimes happens even with very small files."

Paul Tomzak adds:

"I find that it takes about 1 min. to open any of the CS 2 suite programs. I have tried all the suggestions fro turning off WSIWYG to you name it and I can't improve the speed of opening the programs. Also I can't print from InDesign or Illustrator CS 2. I have a HP 4M printer using Gimp print as the driver. I have spent hours on the phone with Adobe and no one seems to know how to solve the problem in fact their solution was to kick the situation up to the level 3 group. Thank goodness I have CS 1 still on my computer."

Accessing font menus MacFixIt reader Elfie is one of the many readers who decided to use a previous iteration of Photoshop in light of the new CS2's issues.

Elfie writes:

"Everything slowed down... 30 seconds to choose a type face... Freezes of 30 seconds-1 minute. Saving seemed to take forever. Finally I booted it and went back to Photoshop 7. No freezes. Type comes up at a click. Saving is speedy."

Tool lag Alan Waldman reports significant delays in the execution of some functions:

"It's happened in my office as well. Across the board (8 machines, all at least dual-2ghz 10.3.8; 2 of them dual 2.7ghz, 10.4.2), Photoshop is a SLUG. Symptoms vary: one machine (one of the 2.7's) has unbearable lag in brush draw times: the image redraw follows the cursor by a solid second-2 seconds.

"My own issue is more with the layer palette updating. Making a new layer, or moving layers, often requires some fancy layer-switching to get the palette to refresh. Otherwise, I'm waiting 2-4 seconds to see what I've done. I can still work, which has its own issues: more than once, I've thrown out a wrong layer or folder set because I haven't waited for the refresh, and the layer I drag has moved."

Users going back to CS1 A number of users have reverted to use of the first Creative Suite iteration in light of CS2's poor performance:

One reader writes:

"Our shop is heavy on Illustrator use, we have has so many performance issues, slow opening, saving, slow and delayed functionality and frequent crashes that we are back on CS1. These performance issues are similar on 2 different G5's.

"Needless to say we are very disappointed we ponied up the money for the upgrades."

Deleting Bridge .plist files It appears that in some cases, deleting a certain .plist file associated with the CS2 Bridge component -- named com.adobe.bridge.plist -- from the ~/Library/Preferences folder can result in a significant speed boost. After deleting this file (while Adobe applications are closed) log out then back in, and check for a speed change.

Using disk utilities As previously noted, re-bulding drive directories with a tool like DiskWarrior, or defragmenting with a tool like Drive Genius can have beneficial effects on CS2 application speed.

MacFixIt reader Patrick writes:

"My photoshop CS2 was strangly slow on my 2x2ghz G5, I repaired permissions, and I defragmented the drive with Prosoft Disk Genius ... now Photoshop CS2 opens so fast its scared me."

Removing some RAM? Oddly enough, some users have reported that reducing the amount of installed system memory has a beneficial effect on CS2 applications' speed. Some have suggested that this is due to RAM allocation issues exhibited by the CS2 apps under Mac OS X. We've been unable to confirm such a memory bug with Adobe.

Re-installing applications Re-installing one or all of the CS2 applications can have a temporary speed boosting effect.

Tim D'Avis writes:

"Most of my problems are coming at open/save of files, and not huge files either (I'm a web designer, so these files are at screen resolution). I get the spinning color wheel for minutes if not forever when I try to open and save files from photoshop and now illustrator. I've already reinstalled photoshop once, and the problems went away for a couple days, but they've returned."

• Adobe CS2 (Photoshop, Illustrator) performance problems (#2)
• Adobe CS2 (Photoshop, InDesign) performance problems

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