How to remove Adobe core services

To sum up this whole thread and its responses …

Yes, the Adobe Creative Cloud product does have a number of background processes running that support the Adobe and other applications (for example, Creative Cloud file space and Adobe Fonts are accessible to all applications, not just Adobe applications). When these services are not in active use either by Adobe or non-Adobe applications, they remain in the background using minimal CPU and/or real memory resources as previously explained to you.

Quite frankly, you have not in any way demonstrated that these background processes are in fact interfering with the performance of even the ability to run other applications. In fact, based on the screen shot you provided all the applications (including the Adobe background applications) that were running at the time used only 1.3GB of your system's 4GB total. One thing that most users don't understand is that the operating system, whether it be MacOS or Windows, uses otherwise unallocated memory for buffers to improve disk and network i/o performance. Thus out of the 4GB of real memory you have only 1.3GB is used by applications and the remainder is used by the operating system (MacOS) and its buffers.

In terms of CPU utilization, you have demonstrated absolutely nothing.

Ironically, based on your screen shot, two windows of your Safari web browser are using more memory than all those background Adobe Creative Cloud processes. If you really believe that manually closing “a bunch of Adobe processes to free up memory and CPU capacity” either is necessary to run other applications or improves their performance, I will contend that you are deluding yourself. Sorry!

Well, you managed (rightfully, I guess) to waive two replies from respectively an engineer and Adobe's principle scientist 😉

I'm almost terrified to bring up a third reply, but here it comes.

Adobe's current set of online services and authentications require a lot of background processes, not directly related to a main Adobe CC application. These processes keep an eye on who you are and what your licenses are, they sync your Creative Cloud folder (to sync files, if necessary) and offer system wide services for that, they also keep your Adobe CC fonts alive, and everything needs to work, even when there's no online connection or a user actively signed in. You might say, it's a system within a system, and that's not a bad thing. It's a lot, compared to that startup Stickies app you have running.

For the most part, you need not to worry, because most of the claimed memory is virtually alotted (as Dov expained), so not really taking up much memory or processing power when inactive. I have sometimes seen a casual process going overboard, and making my Mac whirl profoundly. But these are glitches, which can always occur with any fragile and delicately integrated processes.

If you're really keen on starting with a clean slate, then try this official Adobe tool:

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/cc-cleaner-tool-installation-problems.html

Another thing to remember is that both MacOS and Windows are virtual memory operating systems.

Even though a process / task may take up a particular amount of memory, when inactive, blocks of not-recently-accessed memory is “paged out” to disk (if any modifications were made to those memory blocks) and said blocks are made available to other applications to actively use. Thus, the sum of all your applications' memory usage may be 16GB of virtual memory when in fact the system has only 4GB of physical memory.

That having been said, once you start actively running many applications in parallel, you get a situation in which these virtual memory paging operations start dramatically slowing down your system and you should consider adding physical memory. Although the minimum requirement as stated by Adobe is 4GB of memory for InDesign and the software will run in such an environment (albeit with possibly poor performance), 16GB is what is recommended for professional use of this product.

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. All the services you see under the Activity Monitor are the core services like licensing and syncronization. You may quit the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app to close these services.
Another thing is, you have 4GB of total memory which is less than what is recommended for most of the recent apps. My recommendation would be to increase the memory as per the app requirement.

Hope it helps.

Regards,

Ashutosh