Scrolling through PDF files is slow using Adobe Reader on MY MACBOOK pro with retina

[Imadch222]

Scrolling through PDF file using Adobe reader on my MACBOOK pro is very slow and stuters. That is even for small files. MAC preview and Adobe pro do not have this issue. It is only Adobe ready.

Please advice.

[Bart McLeod]

@Meenakshi Negi If you are still interested, I can share a screen with you, so that you can see what happens. I am on a MacBook Pro with i9 8core and 32Gb of ram and still, with the "original" settings, scrolling is undoable. Not even slow, just plain undoable. When changing the resolution to 110, it works as expected. This is 8 years after the original post.

[Friedrichter]

I can totally confirm @Bart McLeod. I'm also using Acrobat Pro DC on a 16 Inch Macbook with the same specs. Scrolling through larger PDFs with lots of comments (>300) is painfully, yet undoable slow – that is why I came here. Even scaling the window lags so badly, while every other program runs as smoothly as it should be. This behavior of Acrobat is unacceptable.  

MacOS 11.5.2
MBP: 16", 2.3 GHz 8 Core, 32Gb Ram, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 Gb
 

[Friedrichter]

… also changing the resolution does not work. 

[Bart McLeod]

You may want to experiment with different resolutions, you have a different screen size, maybe it matters.

[Jan26408125n9l2]

Bart, has anyone come up with anything useful yet?  It's now October 2022 and I have an equally horrible situation with Macbook Pro and big annotated pdfs in Adobe – as I am an editor it is really bad news!

[Bart McLeod]

I followed one of the tips to change te rendering settings, would have to open it to see which one exactly, it helped somewhat

Verstuurd vanaf mijn iPhone

[Bart McLeod]

This is the setting I changed. I think it still improves the scrolling speed if it is lower than the system setting (127), but on the M1 chip, the speed was somewhat doable anyway, so it was set to 127. I changed it to 100 now and I think scrolling is better now.

[Friedrichter]

@Meenakshi Negi  Okay, the problem is much worse than I thought. I reinstalled the whole creative suite and monitored the lagging issue. I noticed, that it takes quite a while until the lag shows up (about 2 minutes of work inside the document). First everything seems normal – fast scrolling, fast reaction; then acrobat starts 1. to get slower and slower until it is nearly unusable, 2. highlighted text starts to bug/tear.
Note, that this problem until now occurred only in documents with a lot of comments (in my case >200). I tried several custom resolutions, down to unreadable, and also deactivating the mentioned quality features won't do the trick.

What happens next is (worse!), that also InDesign gets slower and slower. Keyboard typing gets quite a hefty lag until you can watch the glyphs appear piece by piece. This strange behavior lasts until you close acrobat. And believe me, normally it's no problem to run multiple extreme resource-hungry applications in parallel. 
 

An interesting point is, that according to "Activity Monitor" there are no severe spikes in CPU and RAM usage at this point. Yes, scrolling through the pdf puts some pressure on the CPU but nothing worth mentioning I think. 

The PDF I use is a 110ppi PDF with a size of roughly 6 Mb. It contains nearly no pictures – mostly it consists of plain text. It has got around 400 comments/annotations/highlights. 

All of this is totally recreatable (always). If you are interested in any form of video documentation or screen share feel free to get in touch. 

Specs:

• acrobat: 2021.007.20099 (license to kill my workflow – obviously) 
  
• macOS: 11.6.1 
  
• 16 Inch Mbp with 2.3 8-Core Intel Core i9
  
• 32 GB Ram
  
• AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB
• second monitor attached

[Jan26408125n9l2]

This is such a big problem!  I'm a copyeditor, and deal with big pdfs of academic books. I can barely use Adobe for the latest one, despite an almost new macbook Pro. No one seems able to resolve this. Why?