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Anonymous
February 12, 2018
Question

Adobe Creative cloud causing huge battery drain issues!

  • February 12, 2018
  • 19 replies
  • 33071 views

I had been looking to get Adobe XD and so installed it to my surface book 2. Since then I noticed that I had a huge battery drain occurring even when the laptop was in sleep mode! I literally went from 100% down to 76% in the space of a morning without ever even opening the lid of the laptop. Luckily this is a brand new surface book 2 and I could track exactly when the battery drain started happening as I haven't installed much at all yet.

I literally ran the trial of XD while having a coffee and learning session on Sunday and my battery, which typically lasts all day, was in power saving mode after just 3 hours! Given that XD doesn't use the 1050 gpu and nothing else was being used this is insane! Needless to say I uninstalled Creative cloud and XD but, lo and behold the problem persisted. This had me baffled until I found out that un-installing creative cloud does not in fact un-install the drivers and services that were installed with creative cloud. This includes the actual culprit, which is the updating and software verification service. For whatever reason (given that my system is showing relatively low cpu usage) this service was literally draining 1% of my battery every few minutes! Giving a laptop with two batteries an expected life of just 4 hours! Whether in use or not!

I have since manually nuked the service and lo and behold my battery is now back to normal. I can't see how Adobe don't now about their services doing this and when I look at the forums I find many many Mac users complaining about exactly the same issues with the services that Adobe CC installs on their macs. Needless to say I am not going to be using any Adobe products until they sort out this nonsense. I mean for one thing why would a service be draining a battery to begin with? What the heck is it doing given that it seems to be running completely independently of the software it's supposed to be interacting with i.e. Creative cloud!

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    19 replies

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    A
    Andy5E9A
    Participant
    October 22, 2020

    I've noticed this for a while. I have a MacBook Pro 2020 and the battery is going down 20% in about 15mins with only using Indesign!!  this is crazy! 

    E
    eunicorn3000
    Participant
    November 4, 2020

    Same issue here! It wasnt as bad last year when I first bought my new Macbook Pro and it's gotten worse in the last two months. Ridiculous. Shame on you Adobe.

    A
    aniket.dumbare@gmail.com
    Participant
    June 12, 2020

    Surprisingly the issue persists even in 2020. At least 2 years since it was reported and Adobe unable to find root cause?

    B
    Brett Belcher
    Participant
    July 28, 2020

    The battery drain with InDesign is has basically made my laptop MacBook Pro and MacBook Air useless without a power cord. Even when sleeping 100% the battery is drained. I was able to see the battery drain in Activity Monitor. These two porcesses are hogging resources and only active when InDesign is open. When I close down InDesign, these go away and the laptop temperature goes down.

    H
    Hensher
    Participant
    March 31, 2020

    I too am having this issue. 48% of my battery usage is from Creative Cloud alone.

      K
      kevinm20150349
      Participant
      March 18, 2020

      same problem here. process coresync is at min 90-95% cpu all the time. I tried to reinstall everything or did another tips from this forum/adobe help sites. crazy- same problem is still happening for years now...

      C
      Colin C
      Participant
      December 15, 2019

      Has adobe done anything with this???

       

      Have there been any updates? Creative Cloud is unusable with these conditions. 

       

      We need to be able to download the software independently without the need for creative cloud

      M
      mmd@sccadv.com
      Participant
      January 7, 2020

      I disabled the sync setting in CC and am not running any programs and my battery drained 50% in 30min! Only started happening after updating Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Bridge & Lightroom yesterday.

      Moving from meeting to meeting with charger in tow is unreasonable. Adobe has to address this.

        jaredv90310564
        jaredv90310564
        Participant
        September 17, 2019

        I just bought a new 2019 Macbook Pro and find the battery has been going down really really fast since installing Adobe and using Premiere Pro. I mean I understand its a hefty program and so is video editing, but I'm just surprised at how fast the battery is draining. Perhaps what your describing is the issue still.

          dhemaidan
          dhemaidan
          Participant
          September 20, 2019
          I just got a 2019 mac and am having the same issue. Please help.
          A
          austind80127334
          Participant
          October 17, 2019
          same thing with the 2019 Microsoft surface book
          afodc
          afodc
          Participant
          September 17, 2018

          So is this problem resolved yet? I'd like to install CS on my Windows laptop but based on the feedback here and elsewhere online I am thinking that's a poor idea if battery life matters to me and I don't want to spend a lot of time removing CS manually like the original poster.

          David__B
          Adobe Employee
          David__B
          Adobe Employee
          February 27, 2018

          Hi Peter,

          Sorry to hear about your difficulties. I've seen some reports of this in the past but typically the reason for this is that file sync is running in the background. If you would be willing to reinstall the Creative Cloud app and test I'd be happy to share the issue with engineering if it's something you can reproduce. I'd want to ensure file sync is turned off if you're not using it and we would need to confirm it's the Creative Cloud app from a process like described here: http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-tip-hunt-down-battery-draining-apps/

          Windows 10 tip: Hunt down battery-draining apps | ZDNet

          You can shut file sync off from the Creative Cloud preferences (turned on in my case)

          Best,

          - Dave

          A
          Anonymous
          April 11, 2018

          Didn't seem to help! Only removing the service seems to help. I have my wifi set to disabled when the laptop sleeps too. So the service doesn't even seem to care if it's actually connected to anything in the first place!

          Hopefully this helps your dev team narrow the issue. The service just seems to act like some rogue process that ignores any kind of sane behaviour. Once it's installed it just runs forever unless killed and drains battery. I think i mentioned in my original post that it doesn't even uninstall when you remove creative cloud!

          niyaj68894007
          niyaj68894007
          Participant
          June 29, 2018

          I've had the same problem with significant battery drainage from using Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe After Effects CS6 and Adobe After Effects CC 2017-2018. I want to start back using adobe products so how did you remove the service and lo like you mentioned in the post?

            N
            Adobe Employee
            Nina_Ramos_Harrison
            Adobe Employee
            February 23, 2018

            Greetings:

            ​

            ​Sincere apologies for the delayed reply on this post.

            My team and I are investigating and will follow up with any findings.

            ​

            ​Cheers!

            ​Nina

            ​XD Community Quality Manager

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