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Anonymous
April 1, 2020
Question

Resource Hog?

  • April 1, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 2316 views

G'Day. I have been having all kinds of poor performance issues in all of my Adobe products of late (I use Bridge, Illustrator and Photoshop, CC 2020, all current updates as of Apr 1, 2020). I have traced the issues back to Bridge. When it's not running, everything works fine. To troubleshoot, I started Activity Monitor and that for a period while watching Bridge. Bridge was taking as much as 400% of my CPU resources, and not infrequently. I read the help articles on how to improve Bridge performance, cleared the local cache and optimized the cache. I then restarted Bridge, selected the folders I normally use and let the cache rebuild completely. Then I took the focus off Bridge and simply monitored the Activity Monitor without touching Bridge or any of the files that fell within the folders I had built the cache with. What I found was the CPU% for Bridge went up and down like a yo-yo constantly, rising frequently to 100% and greater, then dropping off to somewhere near 0.5 to 2%, and repeating once again. I had no other Adobe software (except for CC, which is always running) open. It would maintain this 100+% level for several seconds to minutes before falling again.

 

Further, and possibly related, at a later date I attempted to rename a folder in Bridge. When I hit <RETURN>, the folder name remained at "untitled". I waited for about 2 minutes and figured it simply hadn't taken, so repeated the process. Same result, and this time I waited 5 minutes. Still no change. Finally I went into Finder and changed it there, which gave me an instant result. Several minutes after that, Bridge came back with an error message saying that the name I wanted to use was already in use and to select a different one. This suggested to me that it was reading the first attempt to change it and after "thinking about it" for about a half hour following the second attempt, it recognized that the change had already been made. This is also not a first-time event for this and one reason I stopped using Bridge for anything other than browser activities.

 

Lastly, when I went to shut it down, it literally took about 10 minutes to close. Literally. As it was trying to close, I was watching the Activity Monitor and Bridge was showing as about 100 to 200% pretty consistently. I never got a "program unresponsive" message during the shutdown so that combined with the Activity Monitor suggests that the program is doing *something*. The question is, what and why?

 

I would like some direction on how to fix this issue please. As it is now, I only open Bridge when I have absolutely no other choice. Otherwise the program is useless to me, even as a browser. Below is a link to my key Preferences settings screenshot. Hopefully someone can tell me that I have something set incorrectly (although there should be no "incorrect" setting in these sections - if there are, why would they be there?). 

 

https://glenndavy.myportfolio.com/issues

 

My system is:  iMac Late 2015 27" 5K Retina, 32 GB RAM (verified as working), 2.3 TB free space on my HD, and I mostly operate Bridge off my Wacom Cintiq 24 Pro, although that's had no effect I can tell on Bridge's performance. In Activity Monitor, Bridge shows as using a fairly consistent 3.2 GB of RAM, so there's lots of overhead there.

 

Hopefully Adobe has some suggestions so that I can go back to using Bridge. Thank you.

 

Glenn

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1 reply

gary_sc
Community Expert
gary_scCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 1, 2020

Hi Glen,

 

First off, other than your Wacom Cintiq (I have a Wacom Intuos), we have very similar machines and I'm not experiencing ANYTHING like you are. So there's something in/with your system that might be an issue. BTW, you didn't say what your OS was/is? What is it? I'm on Mojave.

 

You do say one thing that I wish to check: you state you have 2.3 TB of free space on your hard drive. Is that an internal or external HD. Mine is a 1 TB SSD internal but I keep all of my images on a 4 TB external drive. Bridge uses your internal HD for it's caching so if the drive you speak of is external, that may make a difference. Otherwise...

 

I would try several things: first off I'd go to Tools (menu) -> Manage Cache. then select Clean Up Cache (Purge all local cache files).

 

Try that, did it help?

 

If not, or in addtion, go to Preferences -> Cache, and check all boxes (this will not be immediate fix, more for future activities).

 

Finally, go to (https://www.northernsoftworks.com/catalinacachecleaner.html) and download their Cache Cleaner. (it has a 15 day free trial, I did that once some 12-14 years ago and have been using it ever since). After opening it up, selet the Cache Cleaning tab and select Medium Cleaning and then check Clean All Users Caches. (While it's open, you might also want to run the Maintenance tab and run "All."

 

Let us know if any of this helps.

A
Anonymous
April 1, 2020

Hi Gary,

Many thanks for your helpful reply. Yes, I did forget to mention I'm on Catalina (latest) and the HD's I'm working off are internal (Fusion 3TB drives). Bridge is the only program I'm having this issue with so I'm comfortable in saying that the drives themselves are working fine. I will double check where my cache is in Preferences but I'm pretty certain it's on the internal drive. 

 

On the cache, I did purge the cache as mentioned, as well as optimized the cache, all from the Preferences menu. To be sure though, I just did it through the Tools menu, but I suspect that's the same control set as you see in the Preferences > Cache Management window, which I did yesterday. If it is the same, then while it helped some, the issues I reported on were post that operation.

 

As you can see from the screenshot, all the boxes you mentioned were checked prior to recording the data from the Activity Monitor. 

 

Thanks for the link to the cache cleaner product. I'm sure it's pretty good, but with respect, I don't feel like I should have to run another piece of software to get my Adobe products to perform as they should. I do have Clean My Mac X which does free up space for me, and cleans out the cache. As I say, all my other products (PS, IL, ID, Word, Excel, etc., etc.) run fine. It's only Bridge that is having the issues, so it appears to be something specific to that. It might be it works somewhat different on Catalina as opposed to Mojave as that seems to be the main difference between our rigs. 

 

Thanks again for the help Gary. Much appreciated.

 

Glenn

A
Anonymous
April 1, 2020

So Gary, I'm wondering something here. This morning I've been working in Illustrator with some pretty small documents. I did clear the cache from the Tools menu as you suggested so I don't know if that's having any impact or not, considering I did that yesterday from the Preferences menu, but so far Bridge has been behaving itself. Now when I'm working in Photoshop, I'm often working with very large files, frequently 10+GB's. Would the size of the files one is working on at the time, even though Bridge has read them into the cache and is now idle, make any difference in this situation? I'm trying to narrow down exactly when the issue is arising as right now it seems to be working ok. 

 

Thanks again,

 

Glenn

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