After Effects Progressively Slowing Down - macOS

[RockMotionLC]

I've been struggling with this issue, and I wonder if someone has any thoughts. I've worked with Ae for over a decade, and I've seen how, after buying a new iMac or MacPro, things feel crazy fast. However, as the weeks go by, Ae starts slowing down. Of course, caches grow in size, and you could argue that's the issue, but that doesn't seem the case. See below some actions I've taken... and the laggy Ae and Pr persists.

1. Empty caches at ~/Library/Caches/

2. Empty caches at /Library/Caches/

3. PRAM reset at — Hold Option, Command, P, and R for 20 secs right after you power the machine on.

4. Run all project files on SSD drive (Done that for years using 2-4TB SSD drives with no less than 50% free space)

5. Keep all caches on a dedicated SSD drive(Done that for years using 2-4TB SSD drives with no less than 50% free space)

6. I have 128GB ram, and I have Ae allocated at 60GB to allow enough juice, for both Ae.

I've uninstalled Ae a few times and reinstall, and that seems to work. However, not sure we're expected to uninstall/reinstall Ae every 2-4 weeks.

This is not about blaming Adobe, but there's a pattern here. I bought a nice machine, and weeks later performance goes down, and down, and down. Months later, both Ae and Pr become simply buggy and unreliable.

I hope someone has any thoughts!

Thank you in advance.

[RockMotionLC]

Sorry about the typos. I should have double-checked before posting.
My apologies!

[Mylenium]

Have you actually checked your disk utility? OS X may simply be producing a ton of file versions/ shadow copies and restore info even for cache files. I'm not a Mac guy, but this seems to be a recurring theme ever since they forced people into AFS+. Such extensive data generation would bog down even the fastest SSDs and based on my limited experience and understanding of the underlying encryption it seems logical that uninstalling and reinstalling stuff would invalidate older data and kind of magically free up performance. That may also explain why the programs get less stable after a while with the internal prefetch caches and some on-the-fly compiled binary data getting tainted or such. Of course just smart-assy guesses based on what I read, but maybe it's worth looking into...

Mylenium

[RockMotionLC]

Hi Mylenium—That's a good point, but wouldn't you see a significant chage in data consumption on the SSD drive?

This is the SSD I have assigned to Caches.

I just upgraded to the newest Ae, and it's runing great. I downgraded before hoping that would solve the issue—and it did! For a few weeks (lol)

[Mylenium]

As I understand it, these are hidden pseudo-partitions that you never even get to see or listed unless you hack around the terminal, so it may not show up elsewhere, either. The utility would either report the full theoretical capacity or the already clipped value. This would not be unsimilar to Windows system restore partitions. Again, I have no deeper knowledge of this since I haven't had access to a Mac in ages, but maybe throwing it out there can inspire you to dig deeper and find a solution based on my vague hints.

Mylenium

[RockMotionLC]

Agreed! I'm going to do further research in this direction.
I'll probably format the drive and see if I notice an improvement.

Thank you, Mylenium!