What is CEF Helper on a Mac?

Report · Jan 30, 2019

I have MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6. There are times when my iMac becomes slow and unresponsive, and I hear the internal hard drive spinning for no apparent reason. If I open Activity Monitor, often I see that there are several processes named "CEF Reader," and some of them are using a high percentage of CPU time. This situation just occurred while I was running Microsoft Word and also the presentation software creator Prezi Next. Those were the only two applications running. When I quit Microsoft Word and then quit Prezi Next, the slowdown went away, the hard drive stopped spinning, and the CEF Reader processes disappeared from Activity Monitor.

I can't find any information online about CEF Reader that doesn't refer to Adobe Creative Cloud, but I don't have that application. I do have some old versions of Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader 9, and Adobe Digital Editions, but I have not used any of those recently. I can't swear that I haven't looked at some PDF document or other while using Google Chrome, but that's about as close as I've come to having "anything Adobe" going on since I last rebooted my computer yesterday. So I'm stumped: what could be activating multiple CEF Helper processes which then use a high percentage of CPU, but which go away when I quit Microsoft Word and Prezi Next?

If I assume that Word and/or Prezi Next can indeed trigger the CEF Helper process -- multiple instances thereof -- what would be the explanation for these non-Adobe applications firing up Adobe helper processes? It isn't making any sense to me.

BTW, I'm asking this question in the Acrobat Reader community because I don't know where else to ask it.

Report · Jan 30, 2019

Additional information: I just opened the same document that I was working on earlier in Microsoft Word, and no CEF Helper processes showed up in Activity Monitor. But when I fired up Prezi Next and initiated new editing sessions on the two presentations I was working on, Activity Monitor reported four CEF Helper processes, of which only two seem to be using CPU time. Right now, the amount of CPU time they are using is small. However, there seem to be (see my original post) times when the amount of CPU time the CEF Helper processes are using gets high, and my computer becomes unresponsive and my internal hard drive keeps spinning. Can anyone explain why Prezi Next triggers (multiple) CEF Helper processes, and why those processes sometimes gobble up lots of CPU?