ABYSMAL Performance in AE 23

[sritterfeld]

Hey all,

Recently upgraded to 23.2.1, and speed in this version is absolutely abysmal, even with a comp that is not challenging for performance. What's worse, even typing speed for expressions slows down to a crawl - even in an empty project.

Interestingly enough, plugins such as Expressionists are wholly unaffected by this.

The problem is particularly bad when writing expressions, as you can see in the comparison I attached between AE 22.0 and AE 23.2.1 - it's absolutely crazy. That slowdown is also translated to other parts of the app. While turning off layer controls could boost speeds greatly in AE 22, it barely does anything anymore in AE 23 - and the fact that even when having an empty project, getting these issues really makes me wonder what's going wrong here, and makes me think some bug was introduced in AE 23.

Running on latest Win 11, Nvidia Drivers for the RTX 3070 mobile, AMD 5800H and 64GB RAM, with dedicated 200GB NVMe Disk Cache, preferences identical (I checked) for both versions, too. 

[sritterfeld]

Just an addition - I tried the beta channel (that's 23.3.0 (Build 45)) for 64-Bit Win11 Home on OS Build 22621.1344

[sritterfeld]

And (I wish I could edit my answers here) - it works like a charm! The slowdown issues do not occur in the beta version.

[JohnColombo]

Hi @sritterfeld,

Thank you for reporting this issue and thank you for the video example as well. That abysmal performance is certainly not what we're seeing in our AE usage and testing here. We did recently fix a performance slowdown that was introduced into 23.1, but it should have been fixed with 23.2.1 so it is likely you are seeing a different issue.

Knowing that the Beta version doesn't exhibit the same issue is helpful. Do you have any third-party plug-ins or panels installed in the release version that are not installed in the Beta version?

A log file might be helpful as well, in case some After Effects component is erroring or consuming resources in the background. Please follow these steps to enable logging:

1. In After Effects, go to Help > Enable Logging, then close After Effects when prompted.
2. Re-open AE, then create a comp, layer, expression, etc, to reproduce the performance issue.
3. Go to Edit > Preferences > General > Reveal Preferences in Finder
4. In the folder that is revealed, please share the "After Effects Log.txt" that should exist in the "logs" folder.

Please send me the resulting After Effect Log in a direct message, since it does contain things like file paths that shouldn't be made public on a forum like this one.

Thanks for reporting this issue and for any further information you can provide, 

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[JohnColombo]

As an aside: I believe you can only edit posts after you've posted a certain number of posts, which is why you aren't able to edit the ones you've made so far.

[sritterfeld]

That's good to know - I suppose I need to have more issues then 😜

[sritterfeld]

Thanks, will do!

[martinc13962311]

It certainly is what we are seeing. We seem to have gone backward quite drastically with this realease. The constant Nvidia GPU crashes, memory leaking, strobbing mattes, poor playback... I have posted two examples and had no replies.

You really need to disable the auto-update feature in creative cloud. Even if you have previously deactivated it, it reactivates and installs this version!

[sritterfeld]

I suppose you could upload it to a cloud and send the link to John via private message?

[martinc13962311]

Done that. This is a pretty huge flaw to release AE with. The preview just bogs down, purging cash does nothing or just makes the screen go grey. The only thing that fixes it is restarting the computer. This is on multiple windows 10 machines, with all the same specs.

[JohnColombo]

Thank you for sending those logs @sritterfeld. They appear to indicate that a script is attempting to run repeatedly but cannot do so. It didn't appear that you were seeing any errors in the video you shared, so those errors may be getting suppressed.

What scripts and extensions do you have installed? Try closing any scriptUI panels and extensions and see if the UI performance improves. Some extensions run processes in the background even when they aren't open, so closing the panels might not be enough, but we can try to diagnose that after seeing if closing the third-party panels helps at all.

Thanks again,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[sritterfeld]

Hi John,

I indeed don't get any errors, just laggy, bad performance.

I tried reinstalling AE, and removing all custom scripts, but that hasn't changed anything. I do still see extensions, even though I removed them from the Adobe - Program Files - AE 2023 Folder. Not sure why they still show up and if there is a link to be broken (perhaps you can help me there).

[JohnColombo]

Would you mind sending a screenshot of the extensions listed in the Window > Extensions menu?

Extensions, aka CEP panels, are located in the following locations on Windows:

• %appdata%\Adobe\CEP\extensions (this is the user-level location)
• C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\CEP\extensions (this is the system-level location)

Just dragging the extensions folders out of these folders with After Effects closed should remove them, but they can be put back without any preference loss.

Cheers,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[sritterfeld]

Hi John,

Thanks for this. Did another log and sent it to you, as well as an image of my empty extension list. The problem in AE23 persists.

[DANAELENA]

I can confirm, very very bad decrease in performance. i wil use Premiere, until a fix is available.