Photoshop Beachball & Mac Mayhem

[Tolon]

It's been a wild ride since updating to Big Sur in September. This ceasless game of digital whack-a-mole is apparently how I will spend the bulk of my waking hours until the end of time. Another day, another mystery, another forum. Repeat. 

The issue du jour is PhotoShop (v23.1, but present in other versions). I fire it up, everything runs fine for about 5 minutes, and then the beachballs start. It's unclear from Activity Monitor what the culprit is. There doesn't appear to be any unusually high CPU or memory load for either Photoshop or CC (although PhotoShop will go in and out of 'not responding'). But it's clear some process is kicking in and when it does the whole system starts to sputter. Even after quitting PS the poor performance lingers until I reboot the desktop. Sometimes CC prompts me to 'repair,' sometimes it doesn't. It doesn't normally crash so there's no report. All I know is it worked fine a few weeks ago, some updates from Apple and Adobe come down the pike, and now it doesn't. 

It appears that only Photoshop triggers the metdown. And not the app itself, but something in the handshake between PS and Creative Cloud, or Creative Cloud and Mac. I've uninstalled/reinstanlled various versions of PS - even previous versions that used to work exhibit the same behavior now. I've 'repaired' and reinstalled CC, tried running PS with CC quit, with WiFi turned off - basically anything I can think of at this point.

I'm running the latest updates on an iMac Late 2015 4GHz Quad-Core i7, with 32GB memory, and an AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4 GB graphics card (Monterey v12.1). No spring chicken, but capable nonetheless. Furthermore I had to basically burn everything down a few months ago and start over with a new MacOS install and a fresh Admin Home User. It's a pretty lean machine at the moment.

Any advice from the Adobe-sphere? Anyone experiencing similar symptoms? 

[Lumigraphics]

What matters is that in the end, you are happy.