Acrobat DC very slow and unresponsive, spinning beach ball when using interface

Since I installed Acrobat DC, I dread opening PDFs with it as it is very unresponsive and slow. Everything takes ages. One click: several seconds of spinning beach ball, next click: the same.

The bigger the file, the slower the app. Today I opened a 2.1 MB file with 90 pages (business cards, text plus vector based logo, 2c: black and one spot colour, no backgrounds) and standard operations such as changing the display settings, showing thumbnails, rearranging pages and deleting pages took me about 15 minutes in contrast to 2. I cannot work with this tool an a professional basis anymore. 😞

I hoped that an update would patch this but i seems that there have not been many updates to Acrobat DC showing up in my Creative Cloud panel. 😞

Some time ago I uninstalled it and reinstalled it from the cloud but no changes at all. Still slow, still unresponsive performance.

I really hate the new version. First you had to uninstall the old one which worked fine, instead of being able to use both versions as with other Adobe applications. Then the interface had been redesigned YET AGAIN. Zooming seems way more complicated as the normal shortcuts as in other Adobe apps (drawing zoom in window with magnifier) don't work anymore.

Then this horrible "optimize for reading" message kept popping up, stuck in the foreground and prevented changes from being saved. (That has changed now and ist working though this 90s era "optimize for reading" window still appears on a regular basis.) That was horrible and nerve-racking.

But it got worse with the freezing and the spinning beach ball whenever I try to interact with the interface.

I searched the web but not much is found on this issue. There were some ideas in this forum (deleting the "read out loud" plugin, deactivating privacy and security settings etc.) but no changes.

I made Acrobat Reader my PDF default and it is way faster but of course it is much less capable. Even better (because less bloated) is Apple’s Preview that is really fast and works instantly with the same files.

All the other Adobe apps I installed on my system work completely fine (Adobe CS6 and the latest Adobe CC 2015); InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Muse, Bridge.

I suspect that the app tries to connect with some server or to do all kinds of interaction with the hard drive and therefore slows down immensely. Or maybe support or display operations like rendering? In Activity Monitor it is often marked as "does not respond".

  • OS X El Capitan 10.11.6

  • iMac 27 inch, End of 2012

  • 1.12 TB Fusion Drive

  • RAM 16 GB

  • Adobe Acrobat DC 15.016.20039

  • Adobe CC licence