Photoshop CC 2015 is so slow it is unusable on my system

[DG. David Escalante]

I have no idea what is wrong here but this version of PS its horribly slow.

Here is a video i just captured about this issue:

http://cl.ly/2W0P381A1G1y/60fps-PSCC2015-slow.mp4

There is not difference with GPU enabled, there is no difference if I have or not rules enabled. I never experienced something like with with CC 2014.

MacPro with 12 cores and 64GB RAM

Its there something I could do to fix this?

[ChristopherButler]

Thanks; Roll-back is currently available via the Creative Cloud application. It's standard across the Creative Suite.

Install a previous version of any Creative Cloud application

[Guest]

Sure thanks, though I was aware of the ability of CC to roll back versions by uninstall & install, something I've used already in fact.  As for reverting to previous updates, that's not directly built into CC Desktop.  I know it is also possible to get hold of some previous updates - once you can find out if & how.

Perhaps I should have been more clear.  What I had in mind here was a single click roll-back to the previous update as quickly as possible, rather than having to run through a process that can bring its own extra problems & delays.  At best this includes uninstalling, downloading and installing the whole CC app again, not helped whenever Adobe's websites and/or the internet are running slowly.

There have been many reports of problems encountered when uninstalling/installing the CC apps.  Sometimes such problems can arise or be compounded due to users' lack of knowledge.

It's not made abundantly clear to users whether and how they can install previous versions, nor for instance that installing a 2015 app upgrade will remove their 2014 version by default.  So often the user isn't initially aware this will happen, nor whether or how older versions can be restored, until they've spent valuable time attempting to find out and step through it all (I've been there!).

For updates reversion, if the apps simply provided the user with a single in-your-face 'Undo last update' action it would avoid any confusion by the users and scope for the revert process to take any longer than it should.  Presumably such reversions could be done entirely from local files that were automatically backed up by the updater, and could require restoring only the parts that have been changed.  The simpler and quicker the better for the user.

[ChristopherButler]

I think having a more obvious "roll-back version" user experience in the Creative Cloud Application is a fine suggestion for the feedback forum. You can also add your comments with regards to version granularity. In general, I would not expect anything faster than a full uninstall followed by a full install of the desired prior version. It's just not safe to do partial roll-backs. But I could imagine it being done as a single-step process.

Please do log it here:

Photoshop Family Customer Community

(When such ideas appear from me, it actually has less weight, so I encourage you to log it!)

[Guest]

Thank you for your suggestion and the link.  I've now posted on there regarding the roll-back off apps revision updates.

Please see http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/painless-fast-roll-back-of-app-revision-update...

[jacograaff]

I will have to roll back as well - the newest Photoshop release 2015.1  has an extremely unresponsive, laggy UI - it is completely unusable and frustrating. The first time in 23 years of using photoshopp that I am dreading opening the application. I have had issues with After Effects (undo stopped working) as well as Premiere of this release cycle - the combined loss of time and frustration with Adobe's current state of their software is causing me to seriously rethink my loyalty to the applications I have worked with for so many years.

[jacograaff]

I rolled back to 2015.0.0 - but the laggy UI is still there - before upgrading to 2015.1 it was not laggy - I have:

I followed all the recommended and alternative optimisation settings in preferences that I could find in this post (undo history, minimal fonts,etc...) - to no avail...

This is costing me a whole productive day only on Photoshop (apart from the time I lost on the After Effects broken update and the Premiere issues I have and will have to try and document, come to terms with)

I am not a happy customer

[jacograaff]

I re-installed CC2014 Photoshop and have a working version of Photoshop again - Rolling over the buttons and clicking on dialogues is responsive and not laggy. With CC2015.1 I had to mentally steel myself not to continuously click to get a reaction and count 1,2,3 before I see an icon even highlight...

Really sad because I was keen to use some of the newer tools specifically for a new ui design and wanted a raster workflow end to end.

As the Manager of my department and main influencer on purchases I will have a debate with my team on rethinking our long-term commitment with Adobe.

I am now a captive audience through subscription and do not appreciate being spammed with add-on services by Adobe that is purely new revenue streams to boost their short-term profit goals that they obviously are using my subscription money to develop and purchase from 3rd parties with instead of building first-class international grade productivity software.

I will seriously consider supporting competitors that focus on building the tools I need for my trade.

I simply do not have the time to debug Photoshop and other Adobe tools every-time there is a release. The time will be better spend testing alternative applications.

[jacograaff]

I ran the update on another PC with exactly the same specs as mine - only difference is - I am still on win7 and this one has win8, the icons and ui response is good.

[jollyjoyjoy]

I recently upgraded to CC 2015 (from 2014) and had the same problem - laggy UI and random freezes when working with any kind of document (using windows 10). What I did was to set photoshop.exe's process priority to High in task manager. Seemed to have worked - not getting any random freezes anymore.

Then I just followed the guide here CPU Priority Shortcut for a Program - Create in Windows to automatically set Photoshop's priority to high whenever I open the program. Hope this helps you guys.

[jacograaff]

Did not work for me

[tomaszbrzoz]

Hi Christopher, just to inform you: my PS CC 2015 was extremely laggy, in fact unsuable - the lags happened randomly during work and lasted several seconds. I started to read this thread and what I've done is I edited c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts which was small and entirely commented out by #'s. Now its one and only uncommented line reads:

127.0.0.1       localhost

And PS CC 2015 works like a dream to my great happiness.

I have HP Elitebook 8770w / 32GB RAM / i7 / Windows 10 (fully updated).

Thank you all for looking at this big issue.

[billhinkson]

Please try and unload fonts or try a default font set. I passed this off first time I read it thinking that there was no way that a font was causing issues. Once I went down to a minimal font load, eliminating a corrupt or possibly non functioning font, things were back to speedy normal.

[ChristopherButler]

Thanks, yes, that's one of the steps in Jeff's list:

http://blogs.adobe.com/crawlspace/2012/07/photoshop-basic-troubleshooting-steps-to-fix-most-issues.h...

[Shadowspark]

Hi Christopher,

Thanks for the response.  I really sympathize with your dilemma.

But my comment was not meant to imply that it's easy to fix issues like this in general, just that some of the troubleshooting, debugging etc. shouldn't be beyond the scope of Adobe's resources. 

A huge company like Adobe has a responsibility to paying customers to stop releasing buggy updates and then expecting those same customers to assist in fixing the issues. 

That's the Open Source model and people participate willingly because the software is free & they're part of the development process.  But with Adobe products, at the moment, I'm paying for the pleasure of testing & troubleshooting updates.

If Adobe need assistance with testing, it would be advisable to release Beta versions for all apps and offer customers the option to sign up voluntarily to test them out, provide feedback, etc. prior to full release.  (like they did with Edge Animate)

At the moment, Adobe customers just never know what the next update is going to bring. 

And while I'm a huge fan of the Creative Cloud it has also brought 1000% more troubleshooting time with it (versus the old CD Creative Suite days!). 

For a very small business like mine these issues & the troubleshooting time involved equate to significant lost revenue.

In terms of configurations, I know of 2 other small businesses that, like mine, are using Adobe software almost exclusively.  They are experiencing similar issues. 

There is very little else on these machines as they were intended for editing & design with Adobe software. Configuration really should not be an issue in these cases, especially where PS CC 2014 worked without the major lag issues like the ones we're currently experiencing.

I do think that Adobe may need to rethink the frequency of it's app updates.  Fewer and better tested releases would be much more appreciated.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm just hoping that Adobe starts to look at this ongoing issue from the point of view of its small business customers who are losing money when productivity is affected.

Best regards,

Sarah

[ChristopherButler]

Thanks.

I'd love to give you the answer "we'll get right on that", , but that's a strategic decision well beyond my responsibilities.

The concept of an "Open Beta" is not new, but that sounds like what you are reaching for. I'll invite you to provide this feedback on this site:

Photoshop Family Customer Community

(that's different from here, which is nominally a user-to-user forum)

The feedback forums are reviewed more actively by product managers who can influence future allocation of resources and engineering focus. They have to balance a number of competing factors: features, quality, time to market, and available resources. And this is done in a changing landscape of OS upgrades and external market pressures. These people (not me) figure these things out as their full-time job.

[Bill Sprague]

Sarah Wall wrote:

..... while I'm a huge fan of the Creative Cloud

I too am a fan.  But, I've never made a nickle with anything that relates to the photography that I've been doing for 60 years. 

An article this morning in Reuters reports the Creative Cloud is a roaring success with 800,000 new customers in the last three months alone.  (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-adobe-systems-results-idUSKBN0TT2WF20151211#vog41oDwHjG4W7ye.97 )  It suggests that about half are like you in that they are professionals.  The other half must be us rank amateurs. 

I think you have the right point that Adobe is missing an opportunity not using the Beta release concept.  Of the half of us that are intrigued and not earning a living, some have the time, skills and interest to do the Beta testing.  

This is a Photoshop discussion.  Recently a Lightroom release made headlines by rolling out a surprise overall to the Import process.  A Beta would have avoided that embarrassment as well.

It is hard to tell who really steers the strategy at a big corporation.   I doubt they have the time to read, let alone participate in, forums.   Maybe, with a little luck the slower pace of quality will gain some ground over the marketing excitement of rapid feature enhancement.

Bill

[ChristopherButler]

You can certainly make that suggestion to Tom Hogarty. I'm sure he does not want to repeat the experience he had in October.

http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2015/10/lightroom-6-2-release-update-and-apology.html

Again, the feedback forums are a good place to do that. Or you can post on his blog. He reads it.

[Shadowspark]

Hi, thanks Bill! 🙂

I hadn't heard about the Lightroom debacle!  I don't really use Photoshop for photography, my skills in that area wouldn't stand up to scrutiny.  

I mainly use PS for illustration & concept art, etc. so when PS gets buggy it can cause a major problem with artwork deadlines. 

I almost cried when the entire app crashed while I was in the middle of shading a character design today! 😞  And then Illustrator decided to go AWOL too (updated that a few days ago - surprise, surprise!).

I'm still stumped as to why Adobe have really only used the Beta option with Edge Animate in recent years and not rolled it out across the board. 

Like you, I'd definitely participate in testing, but I'd also like to maintain a copy of the most recent stable version of each app on my machine to work with for important projects.

While Creative Cloud is great when it works, Adobe have certainly gotten carried away with the notion of rapid feature enhancement since its arrival!

Here's hoping you're right and that the focus will shift back to quality over quantity.

Take care,

Sarah

[ChristopherButler]

The methods of deployment varies from team to team.

Also, in case you are not aware, you can have multiple copies of Photoshop on your system at the same time. For example, I have 4: CS6, CC2014, CC2015, and pre-release. There's an option to not remove older versions when installing new versions.

I hope that helps.

[Shadowspark]

Thanks for the multiple versions info Christopher

[VallejoIII]

So I have been having problems with InDesign CC taking forever to open. And then once open and I try to click on File in the top menu it takes another 1-3 minutes to open.

I noticed that the Welcome screen was also taking forever to load.

So I switched off my WiFi then opened InDesign and it took just seconds.

This leads me to believe that my internet connection is doing something and when Adobe (Adobe Servers) comes out with a software update my computer (27" iMac) is attempting to download the update in the background (Creative Cloud).

[stevea5572082]

Open your Activity Monitor and see if the lags are happening when large amounts of data are being read/ written to the HD.  I had to upgrade my Hard Drive to a SSD and it solved almost all the problems.  Still laggy with the larger files but saves don't take an eternity and less random beach balls when you're not doing anything.  I still get the 'Problem with the Generator' message but hopefully turning of Enable Generator in the preferences will fix that.

[Chris_m]

The only, but major, performance issue I have with Photoshop CC 2015 (both June and November releases) is the new export panel. It takes at least 10 seconds, sometimes more, to open and the performance, e.g. when changing JPEG quality is far from realtime. The old "Save for Web..." export dialogue opens immediately and changes to JPEG quality etc. work instantly.

[Google_Gagga]

im a tech. and tried to solve a client's computer who was also complaining about severe lag.

i did extensive troubleshooting to try and pinpoint the problem.

after hours of testing.. i was able to narrow it down to the HOSTS file.

my customer's HOSTS file was approximately 2 MB in size.

i looked through PS's application directory and noticed a file: dnssd.dll

i google the manufacturer and discovered it belongs to Bonjour.

from what i can gather, dnssd.dll is a dns module.

the problem occurs because dnssd.dll ignores the Operating System's "DNS Service".

if the HOSTS file is larger than 1MB, it causes severe lag, cpu throttling, etc.

the only solution that seems to work is to decrease the HOSTS file, or completely remove it.

i made a post about this but Adobe has thus far ignored it.

Photoshop CC 2015 conflicts with large HOSTS file: CPU THROTTLING, LAG

if you're experiencing these symptoms, check the HOSTS file...

hope that helps.

[ChristopherButler]

That seems very interesting. Thanks for that.

Can folks who are affected check their HOSTS file size? I'd like to know if that's a common theme.

If there is pattern of large HOSTS files for affected users, we would like to look at some of them see if we can figure out what might be adding things there. Adobe does not modify the HOSTS file, nor do we do anything directly with it. All our server access goes through OS interfaces.

In general HOSTS files should be very small. Malware has been known to use these as an attack surface, using it to redirect web traffic. I'm not saying that's what is going on, but it's something to be aware of.

For reference, the HOSTS file on:

My Mac (/private/etc/hosts) is only 214 bytes.

My Win machine (C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts) is < 1k.

These are plain text files.