Adobe Acrobat Pro for new Mac driving over 100% CPU Usage!!! And freezing. Help?

[David3281219568y8]

Greetings. 

I am using a brand new M2 Pro Macbook Pro. I have Acrobat Pro from Adobe Cloud. When I attempt to move PDFs around and resize them, my laptop freezes a lot, I get the pinwheel of death from waiting time. It is so unbelievably slow just to resize an Acrobat window. It's incredibly frustrating and a huge waste of my work day time. I decided to check my Activity Monitor - see attached image. All I did was grab the corner of a PDF and attempt to reduce the window in size by a small amount. While it was hanging, my CPU usage shot up over 100% and it took like 10 - 15 seconds to adjust the window. 

What is going on? What can I do to make this go faster? Is the new Acrobat Pro just broken? Thanks for your advice

[ls_rbls]

Hi @David3281219568y8 ,

Did you mean to say that the Acrobat version that you jave was installed using the Creative Cloud installer?

I can think of two workarounds:

• Install Rosetta2 if you don't have it and see how Acrobat behaves after the Rosetta software is installed

OR,

• If the problem persists after installing Rosetta, uninstall the current version of Acrobat and use the AcroCleaner  tool. Then, install Acrobat using the stand-alone installer version (not through the Creative Cloud app).

[David3281219568y8]

Yes Acrobat Pro installed via Creative Cloud.

I can't do any of that because this is my work laptop and they won't allow any other software to install. 

[nothingforascreennamework]

I don't think this is related to the M2. I'm running on a Mac Pro 2019 (x86), 16-core, 384G RAM and it's unsuable. Same as when I run on my M2 laptop. Acrobat Pro has been slow for quite some time. The latest interations has only gotten worse to the point where it's pretty useless.

[David3281219568y8]

Agreed. I used to love Acrobat. Now I hate it. The experience is terrible in so many ways. From the User Experience to the processor load. It is a tremendous productivity suck. Unfortunate they have a near monopoly on PDF management tools in the Creative field. I would switch if IT permitted it at my company. 

[ls_rbls]

Some apps like Acrobat, were aimed to work well with mac computers that were shipped with Intel processors in the past.

If you haven't try installing Rosetta2 on your M2-powered macOS I'd suggest you give it a try.

See the Apple support guidance below or contact their support to see if they are tracking other apps (different than Acrobat) that also render the user experience as unusable:

• https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211861
• https://machow2.com/rosetta-mac/ ( <<== better guidance here)
• https://www.macobserver.com/tips/how-to/install-rosetta-2-on-apple-silicon-macs-m1-m2-and-m3/ (<<== and here)

[davidf92045712 · Accepted solution]

I had the same terrible experience of severe lag whenever I used the new paid Acrobat app on my Macbook M1. Even resizing the screen would freeze the computer for minutes and scrolling would too. I haven't tried the Rosetta solution suggested by another user. What worked for me was to go back to the prior version 24.003.20121. That version works beautifully! Fast and low memory usage. I won't upgrade again until the new iterations are fixed.

[ls_rbls]

@davidf92045712  Thank you very much for updating this old thread with that solution. I'm sure it may help many.

[davidf92045712]

To go back to the old version is really easy. On Macs, just go to the View menu and select Disable New Acrobat. Problem Solved!!