EXCESSIVE battery/power usage (and sometimes CPU)...CC is a glutton

Forum|Forum|8 months ago
January 9, 2026
2 replies
275 views

I'm not necessarily looking for a fix as much as voicing my frustration and desire for more attention being placed on performance (essential) rather than AI or other "nice to have" features.

I'm running a Macbook Pro with M2 Pro chip and 32GB RAM. Not a bleeding edge beast but a machine that should be more than sufficient for running creative apps effeciently. It seems to perform well with every other app or service, including running multiple virtualized servers (simultaneously via Docker), along with email, Slack, Clickup, Dropbox, Google Drive, and probably 50 to 100 Chrome tabs, all at the same time. However, Creative Cloud app and the Creative Cloud Content Manager service use over 52% of all battery/power over, on average, over any 12 hour period. The other important thing to note is that CC uses a ton of power, and sometimes excessive CPU, even when Adobe apps arent't being used.

I began to wonder why I can't get more than a couple hours usage on battery power, and now I know. Quit CC plus all related background processes, and all of a sudden it's like I have a new machine.

A couple suggestions/hopes:

It would be nice to have a really easy/obvious option to disable cloud features, and have more control there. If it exists, I am not aware.
Focus on reducing power usage, CPU load, etc when an app is not actively being used.

Creative Cloud Version 6.8.0.821
MacOS Tahoe 26.2
Apple M2 Pro late 2023, 32GB RAM

P

Pjesker

Participant

I had a very similar problem on macOS: Creative Cloud Content Manager continuously used roughly one CPU core, even with no Adobe apps installed. Reinstalling Creative Cloud did not help.

Here is what worked for me:

Quit Creative Cloud and stop its Adobe background processes in Activity Monitor. Start with Creative Cloud Core Service / Adobe Desktop Service, which my logs showed was relaunching Content Manager. Stop Content Manager too, and check that neither has restarted. Make sure no installation or update is running.
In Finder, press Cmd+Shift+G and enter:
~/Library/Group Containers/
Rename JQ525L2MZD.com.adobe.GrowthSDK to JQ525L2MZD.com.adobe.GrowthSDK.backup. Keep the backup; don’t overwrite an existing one. The prefix is Adobe’s developer Team ID, so the name is likely the same on other Macs. If that exact folder is missing, don’t rename another folder.
Restart the Mac, open Creative Cloud, and check CPU usage after about 10 minutes.

Content Manager dropped to approximately 0.1–0.2% CPU. I then installed Photoshop and After Effects and tested Libraries and export through Media Encoder. Those worked without the excessive load returning during my tests.

This folder is separate from the CCX Welcome cache, which I had already reset without success.

This is a workaround that helped on my machine, not a confirmed universal fix. It may reset locally stored content or settings associated with GrowthSDK, so keep the backup until you’ve confirmed your apps work correctly. The underlying cause is still unknown.