Acrobat Reader DC version: 21.7.20091.59174 Crashing / High CPU

[Clive5FB4]

Hi team,
We have been running a Citrix farm of ~10 hosts with Adobe Acrobat DC 10 (reader) for years now but this week the update 21.7.20091.59174 has caused us all manner of issues.  We are seeing thousands of app crashes similar to this on all hosts:

Faulting application name: AcroCEF.exe, version: 21.7.20091.59174

And we are also seeing other issues such as the inability to save pdfs (it just opens a blank grey screen).

We've tried clearing out user profiles, I've tried to roll back but it auto-updates again.  The issue definitely started with this new client when it auto-updated on Wednesday.
Any help would be much appreciated.

Clive

Moving from Using the Community (which is about the forums) to the correct forum... Mod
To ask in the forum for your program please start at https://community.adobe.com/

[defaultd7f3k5y9mbcb]

any news on this, I am seeing the same issue?

[AmbooS]

Hello,

We apologize for the inconvenience caused. We are investigating the issue you have started facing with the latest Acrobat update. Would like some more information from you -

Could you please check what is the folder path shown in "CEF_DIR" key at the following registry -
(if you have Adobe Reader) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\DC\Installer or
(if you have Adobe Acrobat) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\Installer?

and if that folder path actually exists on your machine?

To check the above registry, please go to Start->type "regedit" and press <ENTER> key. This will open registry editor. 

Thanks for your patience,
-amboo

[defaultd7f3k5y9mbcb]

hello the path is - C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\

[Clive5FB4]

Hi Amboo,

We've moved all our affected hosts on to the 32-bit version of the client now so this path might not be what it was before:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\

For reference we had to disable the Adobe AutoUpdate Service and also the Adobe AutoUpdate scheduled task to stop the hosts moving back to the 64-bit Acrobat Reader client.

We were wondering, could this issue be caused by compatibility with Microsoft Office, as we are running 32-bit Office on these servers?

Regards
Clive

[Nick-A70]

I have the same problem on a Citrix Application Server, is there any update to a fix?

[defaultfi2e1yio0rja]

Is there any updates to this? Having the same issue.

On launching adobe AcroCEF.exe has 5 - 6 instances running, flicking from running to suspended. This is causing errors in the event log and CPU usage to spike to 100%.

These are two seperate entries in envent viewer, the first is Information the 2nd is and Error.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fault bucket 1323129905997143412, type 4
Event Name: APPCRASH
Response: Not available
Cab Id: 0

Problem signature:
P1: AcroCEF.exe
P2: 21.7.20091.59174
P3: 61397db1
P4: ntdll.dll
P5: 10.0.14393.4530
P6: 60e33cac
P7: c0000005
P8: 0000000000022a40
P9:
P10:

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Faulting application name: AcroCEF.exe, version: 21.7.20091.59174, time stamp: 0x61397db1
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.14393.4530, time stamp: 0x60e33cac
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000022a40
Faulting process id: 0x2a2c
Faulting application start time: 0x01d7af91b409eb34
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\acrocef_3\AcroCEF.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll

Is this due to a windows update and adobe update? 

[Sunil_Soni]

Hello @defaultfi2e1yio0rja  @Nick-A70  @defaultd7f3k5y9mbcb  ,

Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

AcroCEF is responsible for multiple components and internal processing so we should not delete/rename AcroCEF/acrocef_1 folders, it will cause you loss of functiaonlities. As AcroCEF is taking care of multiple things, there could be differnet issues with different setup/environment. We have identified few of them and fixed.

We need your help in identifying issue at your setup which requires live debugging session with you.

Please write back directly to susoni@adobe.com with reference to this thread for quick turnaround.

-Regards

Acrobat Team

[Sunil_Soni]

Hello everyone,

We have identified few issues, fixed them and released a patch.

I would appreciate if your team applies latest patch via "Check for updates" from "Help" menu in Reader(or Acrobat) and update us if it fixes your issue.

If your issue is not fixed, feel free to reach out to me directly at susoni@adobe.com for debugging session.

-Regards

Acrobat Team

[biosVIRUS_004.20.6.9]

I've been following this thread as well as another thread relating to this issue since it cropped up within our organization (AcroCEF.exe - High CPU and RAM usage causing compu... - Adobe Support Community - 12397353). I can confirm that with a test client PC we are not seeing any resolution with this problem (AcroCEF consistently crashing) when the new patch is installed. However, we do not see the crash occurring if we disable the proxy setup script on the same PC (a resolution identified in the aforementioned related thread). We do have to keep the proxy enabled, so this isn't a fix for us at the moment.

Any ideas?

[Sunil_Soni]

Hi @biosVIRUS_004.20.6.9 

Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Can we connect over susoni@adobe.com for quick session and work towards resolution of your issue ?

-Regards

Adobe Acrobat team

[biosVIRUS_004.20.6.9]

Sure, sending you an email now to coordinate.

[A. Bagaglia]

Hi, I'm the discoverer of the proxy script peoblem, did they find you a solution? thanx

[biosVIRUS_004.20.6.9]

Comment deleted 5 times:

No, no solution has been found still. I was provided an internal patch build on 10/6/2021 and it did not resolve our issues. I notified Sunil that day and also sent a follow up email on 10/11/2021, but have yet to receive a response. Moreover, we found recently that version 21.007.20099 is out (21.007.20099 Planned update, Oct 12, 2021 — Acrobat & Acrobat Reader DC Release Notes (adobe.com)), and after testing unfortunately are not seeing any better results. We still suffer from the AcroCEF crashing issue, and we are also having an issue (since 21.007.20091) of PDFs opening very slowly through Outlook only (they open fine it seems from other sources such as a user's local download folder on their Windows profile).

In the end, still no fix in almost 30 days and I see no annotation of either issue within the known issues page: Known issues | Adobe Acrobat DC, Reader DC

[biosVIRUS_004.20.6.9]

Without revealing too much, I wanted to post that we've resolved the issue within my organization. We took a look at the proxy and noticed that *.acrobat.com addresses were trying to be contacted quite a bit at the time of the error. After some tweaks were made, we were able to get the AcroCEF issue to not showcase itself anymore. We did take a look at the PAC file and even recreated it, but the issue remained. We noticed that the problem persisted even when a regular proxy address was set and no PAC was used. Our issue was isolated to the proxy that we have configured at my organization, and some changes to the configuration concerning *.acrobat.com resolved it for us. I still think something with Creative Cloud or Acrobat changed and caused this for us as a whole, as this was never an issue with us prior to 21.007.20091 being released.

[Richma2z01m]

We've also just started seeing this issue on 21.007.20099 and 2021.007.20091.

Has anyone had any luck with resolution beyond the proxy .pac file modifications? What were you required to add? Was it just *.acrobat.com or were there further addresses?

I've had a look through the article below and obviously don't want to whitelist everything as a temporary workaround.

Adobe Creative Cloud Network Endpoints

[Clive5FB4]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to update you all on this issue from our perspective.  As mentioned earlier we tried the October Microsoft update and also the Adobe updates but alone they didn't resolve the issue.

We have now resolved the issue and are back running x64 bit Adobe (alongside x32 bit Office).  It was a combination of those updates and also the following registry key which we apply via Group Policy that resolved the issue for us.  This registry key whitelists the Adobe processes from Citrix so that it doesn't hook it's dll's on the running processes which seems to be what causes the high CPU issue. 

Open the relevant Group Policy (applying to your Citrix servers) and use it to modify the registry key HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CtxUvi\UviProcessExcludes and add ';AcroCEF.exe;RdrCEF.exe;Acrobat.exe' to the end

Adobe support helped us identify this solution.

Thanks all

Clive