PC Freezes at random times

[easygoing_connoisseur01AC]

This is a recent problem; coincident with the update of CC2017? Possibly.

I've had many of freezes over the last week or so and I've been banging my head against all sorts of walls. I had not given Photoshop much thought because the freezes happened on a few occasions when Photoshop is not active.

BUT . . . I've figured out that in each instance, whether Photoshop is active or not, I get a huge Photoshop temporary file (on the order of 11-15GB) when I shut down and restart. 

I could maybe see that happening when I am in Photoshop, but not when I'm not even in the program.

The freezes always happen when the system is idle (I step away to do something) and each time, huge Photoshop temporary file.

I've seen people say they reverted back to 2015.5 . . . how do I do that? If I can restore the older file and the freezes stop, I can confirm CC 2017 as the cause. If the freezes continue, I can eliminate CC 2017 as the culprit.

Thank you, ejd

[Akash Sharma]

Hi Ejdalise,

• What is the File location of the Temp File you are referring to? (Ideally it is C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp)
• Ensure that Photoshop Preferences>Performance is set to "Default/Photos" Cache settings.

Also, see Optimize performance Photoshop CC <Edit>

I've seen people say they reverted back to 2015.5 .

Refer How to Find and Install Previous Version of Adobe Apps in CC 2015 | Adobe Customer Care Team

Hope that helps.

Regards,

Akash

[davescm]

As well as posting the information requested by Akash, if you are on Windows 10 can you check what the system reliability monitor shows at the time of the freezes (just type reliability into the search box on the Windows toolbar).

It is not unusual for Photoshop to create a large temp scratch disk file whilst running - but I wonder if it is closing down correctly afterwards.

Dave

[easygoing_connoisseur01AC]

C:\Users\name\AppData\Local\Temp is where the file showed up. It had the Photoshop name followed by a number. The largest one was 1.57GB.

That file does not exist either when working in Photoshop or after I close it (I run CCleaner and I get warnings of such files - how I found it to begin with whenever I restarted the system).

This file would be there following a hard restart after a freeze.

The cache is already set to default.

Just to be clear and to reiterate, except for one time, Photoshop was NOT running when these freezes happen and the file is not there after I close photoshop and before the freeze occurs.

The Event viewer logs show no indication of what caused the freeze (no messages related to anything Adobe)

FYI, I stopped the Creative Cloud App and am now nearly 15 hours without a freeze. I'm theorizing either the CC App or Photoshop App is doing something even when I'm not running the program (i.e. when the computer is idle). In case anyone wonders, lots of virus checking and double-checking before I even wrote the above.

I also renamed the "www-butler" and the "www-universal-search" folders based on some other threads I've read.

The reliability monitor shows nothing other than the instances of Windows being improperly shut down (when I did a hard restart). No other application referenced.

Thank you all for your help and I will report back if I find out anything else.

[ank96304316]

I suggest you launch process monitor and check at each step how much memory is consumed , cpu, and if it this is for the same file or all files behavior.

[easygoing_connoisseur01AC · Accepted solution]

Final update unless or until the issue resurfaces.

About 44 hours without any freezes. I'm still running CC2017.

These are the changes I made:

1) stopped the Creative Cloud App from loading automatically (will periodically manually check for updates)

2) renamed two folders in the  'Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC2017\Required' folder. Added a '~' in front of these two directories:

"www-butler" renamed to "~www-butler"

"www-universal-search" to "~www-universal-search"

3)also renamed the "Space" folder under 'Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC2017\Required\Plugins' to "~Spaces"

The renaming was done based on other posts I read regarding what might freeze Windows 10. The stopping of the CC App was based on me thinking that the large photoshop temporary file might be related to something downloading.

All this is working for me now and I'm happy to not have my system freeze. I can't (and won't) say this will work for others. If I run into any more freezes, I will likely roll back the version. If that happens, I will write an update here, otherwise, my problem is solved and won't add any further updates.

Thank you again,

ejd