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?

[rimshotgraphix]

Windows 10, 12 g memory, 64 bit, 3.20 ghz intel processor

this is just one of the many performance issues:

--- when dragging a either a rgb channel or a custom spot color channel to the new layer icon to duplicate the channel, what was instantaneous in cc 2014 now takes 30-45 seconds.

[ChristopherButler]

Would you be able to share a support document that I can use to try to reproduce? Please PM me privately with details. Thanks.

[tomaszbrzoz]

Christopher, there is a summary of my problems with PS CC 2015 video.

Photoshop CC 2015 Lags / Win 10 / HP EliteBook 8770w 32 GB RAM - YouTube

1. Start Photoshop CC 2015.

2. Go to any menu (File in this example).

3. After a moment – 0:12 on the video – PS stops responding, movements of cursor jerky.

4. It lags till 0:33, then starts responding again.

5. Situation repeats several times (like 4-5 times), then PS becames fully operational and fast, no matter what I process / draw / swap / select / mask etc.

Lags are independent of the taks whatsoever (on the video no file is opened or processed, just pure PS start with nothing loaded).

Hardware & Software specs:

HP Elitebook 8770w 32 GM RAM / Win 10 (Polish version)  / Adobe CC installed on 256 GB SSD drive

[ChristopherButler]

Thanks. Good video. That does look like something we would like to track down. There are a number of delayed initialization tasks that get queue up that are timed to execute on the first idle period, but usually they are all done within 5 seconds and most folks don't notice them.  Does the lag happen every time Photoshop launches, or just after a system restart? And does it repeat later in the session? And is the cursor jerking around? Or does it track smoothly? An activity that would starve the cursor driver would be occurring at a very low level in the system.

(as before - If anyone near San Jose can reproduce this, we'd like to see it happen in person)

[tomaszbrzoz]

Thank you Christopher for looking into this.

This happens every time I launch PS CC 2015, even during the same Windows session (no Windows restart needed to reproduce these lags).

As I wrote, these lags happens several times in some 30-40 seconds intervals after Photoshop launch. After that the program works smoothly and quickly.

The movement of cursor is jerky, but of course cursor doesn't blink whatsoever - just the movement - it follows the path but with jumps and doesn't highlight all menu option along it. But it is not just the cursor problem - PS CC 2015 stalls when I try to do anything (from the layers manipulation to opening files) when it coincides with these lags.

So in short:

1. I launch the PS CC 2015.

2. Have to survive several ~15 second lags in ~40 sec – 1 minute intervals(*) of smooth operation of the program.

3. Then it starts working perfectly - no more lags no matter what I do.

(*) These I haven't measured exactly – just the impression: start the app - initial [lag] - work - work - [lag] - work work work - [lag] - work - work - [lag] - work - work - work - work - work - work etc... no lags anymore.

And one more thing I've forgotten to add: these lags actually happen not from the moment of launch of PS CC 2015 but from the moment of the first operation in the program, ie. I start PS, then I switch to another app, PS is running in background, then I switch back to PS after some time - it might be 10 minutes for example, and start doing something (like opening the file), and the lags happen. In other words, it doesn't help to leave photoshop running for some time to make all these lags pass away - they start to occur after (during) first operations in the program.  

[ChristopherButler]

Since you have such a nicely reproducible case, do you have time to try some experiments?

I see earlier in this thread that you simplified your localhost file and it seemed to help. Was that a false success? I suspect it might be, since the theory was the problem was triggered only for very large localhost files.

Have you tried some of the earlier thread suggestions?

Specifically:

1) Disconnect from the internet (just unplug)

2) Disable 3rd party plugins (Look for them in your Photoshop system report)

3) Disable some specific plugins (see post 92):

In Photoshop 2015.0.1:

Preferences>Plugins>Enable Generator = OFF

Preferences>Plugins>Allow Extensions to Connect to the Internet = OFF

Preferences>Plugins>Load Extensions Panels  = OFF

Preferences->Technology Previews>Enable Design Space Preview = OFF

These are all temporary changes of course, and the only purpose is to see if we can narrow our focus of where to look. If things get dramatically better with all these things off, then we can enable the above one at a time, starting with internet access, and repeat the tests.

If the problem still occurs with all those things disabled, the next thing to eliminate is various drivers:

1) Display - make sure you are running the latest version

2) Hard Drive - try to reproduce with no additional drives attached; just the boot drive with

3) USB devices - external hard drives, CDROM/DVD burners

And anything else that you can think of that (firewire cards, other PCIe cards, SATA drivers, thunderbolt, etc.)

The reason I am looking at these is because of the cursor jumping behavior; it seems like something on your system with the ability to do a high-priority interrupt is taking control and locking up. Briefly. Operating system events (e.g Mouse-moved) do not seem to even be getting to Photoshop, as evidenced by the fact that your enabled menu items do not even highlight as the curser tracks (jumps) over them.

We'll want to identify the drivers that are actively running on your system and try and temporarily disable them, if we can. Or as many as we can. Running the tests in Windows Safe-mode should be a good way to do this.

I know I'm rehashing items that were previously touched on in this thread, but I don't know if you've looked into them yet. And my instincts based on what I saw in your video are leading me in that direction.

(Also, for reference, a wiki page we maintain with most of the things that have bitten people in the past: http://blogs.adobe.com/crawlspace/2012/07/photoshop-basic-troubleshooting-steps-to-fix-most-issues.h...  Most of these suggestions probably don't apply of course, but it's still useful to review.)

Finally, do you have any other applications running in addition to Photoshop, like a web browser, e.g. Google Chrome, or or background processes, e.g. antivirus? If so, what are they?

Thanks

[tomaszbrzoz]

Localhost issue: the file was not large, it had some IPs inside - it helped a bit as only initial lags persisted. Before I changed localhost file I had had an impression that PS is not usable at all - lags didn't vanish after the initial period. Now they're only present during initial interval. F.ex. yesterday, after several initial lags, I was able to complete multilayer 300 dpi 1 page press ad smoothly and quickly. Not a single lag occurred after this painful period of several initial stalls.

1. Plane mode on / no internet connection > doesn't help.

2. No 3rd party plugins installed, just pure PS CC 2015.

3. Everything you mention is/was off during making yesterday's video.

So I can assure you that I am / I was running quite pure version of PS CC 2015 with all the possible sources of instability turned off.

Also, I have no external HDD drive. I unplugged Logitech T620 Mouse and used Synaptics Touchpad - the same situation. I switched off Touchpad and used TouchStyk only - same thing.

Photoshop CC 2015 stalls in the very same way also in the absence of Chrome.

Antivirus: Norton 260 Premier.

The thing is that now matter what I do, no matter what I switch of/on or run or use, the situation from my yesterday's video reproduces every time I launch Photoshop and try to perform some basic menu operations. The reproducibility is perfect - lags alwas of the same character, in the same moments, within the same intervals.

Seems that it is the intrinsic "feature" of the PS CC 2015. The rest of the apps like Illustator and Indesign CC 2015 work perfectly well. No lags, perfect smoothness and responsiveness.

And yes - I know the troubleshooting article you mention - unfortunately it didn't help my case.

Thank you for looking into this. Hope it helps.

[War Unicorn]

tomaszbrzoz wrote:

Localhost issue: the file was not large, it had some IPs inside - it helped a bit as only initial lags persisted. Before I changed localhost file I had had an impression that PS is not usable at all - lags didn't vanish after the initial period. Now they're only present during initial interval. F.ex. yesterday, after several initial lags, I was able to complete multilayer 300 dpi 1 page press ad smoothly and quickly. Not a single lag occurred after this painful period of several initial stalls.

1. Plane mode on / no internet connection > doesn't help.

2. No 3rd party plugins installed, just pure PS CC 2015.

3. Everything you mention is/was off during making yesterday's video.

So I can assure you that I am / I was running quite pure version of PS CC 2015 with all the possible sources of instability turned off.

Also, I have no external HDD drive. I unplugged Logitech T620 Mouse and used Synaptics Touchpad - the same situation. I switched off Touchpad and used TouchStyk only - same thing.

Photoshop CC 2015 stalls in the very same way also in the absence of Chrome.

Antivirus: Norton 260 Premier.

The thing is that now matter what I do, no matter what I switch of/on or run or use, the situation from my yesterday's video reproduces every time I launch Photoshop and try to perform some basic menu operations. The reproducibility is perfect - lags alwas of the same character, in the same moments, within the same intervals.

Seems that it is the intrinsic "feature" of the PS CC 2015. The rest of the apps like Illustator and Indesign CC 2015 work perfectly well. No lags, perfect smoothness and responsiveness.

And yes - I know the troubleshooting article you mention - unfortunately it didn't help my case.

Thank you for looking into this. Hope it helps.

Just Norton 260? No full circle, 360 with that one? 

In all seriousness, just for balance, there was a nasty Ilustrator CC 2015 bug when using the Shaper Tool to, say, draw a circle. Caused a crash. Turns out it was NVIDIA's video driver that was the culprit (which has since been rectified with the latest driver release).

How many having the problem of sluggishness are on a laptop or a desktop?

[D Fosse]

This reminds me of a very famous thread titled "Photoshop CS4 is a disaster". It accumulated over 1000 posts before it slowly died out.

Now, this was the introduction of OpenGL, and nobody had anticipated the massive bugginess of video drivers. It didn't become clear until people started to notice that subsequent driver versions magically cleared some problems, all the time introducing new ones. And so it went on. You were lucky if you could find one driver version that didn't crash and burn, and you held on to it for dear life.

And Photoshop engineers, notably Chris Cox, saying "we just can't reproduce. We have a zillion video cards up on the test bench, and we can't reproduce".

In the end, some workarounds were found, and other problems were fixed by AMD and NVidia. But it took years before the dust settled.

[phill35969229]

I am having the exactly the same issues as tomaszbrzoz. PS CC 2015 is only marginally usable. This inexcusable for high-end software. All other software is running normally. System is Windows 7 x64, 32 GB RAM, I7, a combo of 512 GB Samsung SSD and 4 TB hard drive, current with all MS updates. I have tried the suggested solutions offered on this forum with no improvements. System using Symantec's NIS and Malwarebytes--both current. System is using Nvidia's Quadro 2000D for video. FYI: On windows 7 systems (unlike other Windows systems), the Hosts file has all entries commented out including the 127.0.0.1 localhost. MS has a note that says "localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself". Now if there is problem with the DNS, what then?

[tomaszbrzoz]

ChristopherButler > small update: please don't be mislead by jerkiness of cursor movement. If it happens that the lag coincides with opening the file, the cursor movement is smooth, but I cannot choose the file by clicking it and the file icons load terribly slowly. So this is the general slowing down of Photoshop not just the cursor movement.

[ChristopherButler]

The cursor jerkiness is a huge red flag, actually. So let's not let go of that just yet. In my mind, whatever is causing that has a high probability of being the source of the troubles.

But I'm baffled. I really wish I could reproduce the behavior you are seeing.

Did you get a chance to try rebooting into safe mode (internet disabled) and run the tests?

Do you have another machine, e.g. Mac or sufficiently different PC, you can try this on?

(The fact that it occurs on just some machines in some environments is important - There's something different between a laggy environment and a normal environment that we do not understand. Reducing those differences might flush the problem out.)

I find my mind wandering back to fonts as a possible cause. It's a long shot, but every application handles them subtly differently, including PS CC 2014 and PS CC 2015. Have you done trouble shooting there? Running the test with only a basic set of fonts enabled?

(and for others reading this thread - anyone near San Jose who is also experiencing this problem and is willing to host a visit from use for a few hours, please let us know. Adam can coordinate a visit. We'd like to see this problem hands-on.)

[tomaszbrzoz]

ChristopherButler‌ - I will try to run PS CC 2015 on different machine ASAP. FYI - I spent today the whole day working with PS CC 2015 - excellent performance & responsiveness during all these working hours, huge files being processed, not a single lag & stall BUT ONLY AFTER these annoying several severe lags just after launching the program.

[ondrej zeman]

Hi Tomas, finally someone with EXACTLY the same problem that I am having in PS CC 2015. Everything that you say, happends on my computer as well. WIN 7 64bit (Czech), Intel Xeon W3540 @ 2.93 GHz, 12 GB RAM. Hopefully we can find a solution to this really annoying bug (not really fun to explain to a customer sitting next to you why you can't use Photoshop for the first ~1 minute after launch).

[jbm007]

Intel Xeon W3540 @ 2.93 GHz, 12 GB RAM.

I have a dual CPU Xeon 2687 v2 @ 3.4 Ghz system and have the same problem.

PS remains unresponsive for the first 30-40 seconds.

Not sure its  PS or OS issue.

Several other programs I use exhibit the same startup scenario.

Have complained about this since PS 2014.

[jacograaff]

PS CC2014 no problem

PX CC2015 - start, no file open - all visible icons responsive. Rollover icons they immediately highlight.

open a file - even the smallest - ui unrepsonsive 2+ second delay before icon, layer, dialogue highlight or menu item highlight.

When I click even before icon, etc.. highlighted the action is immediate - just the UI has delayed response when hovering which makes it difficult to navigate and and use.

Close file - PS still open, Icon fast again

None of the tests, disables, etc.. helped.

I am running i7-4770 @ 3.5GHz, 8core, GTX 780, 32GB RAM, WIN 7

[ameil]

do you use wacom pen and tab? if you do try to disable windows link in wacom properties under mapping.

[hayungs]

If you disable windows ink, pressure sensitivity will stop working.

[jacograaff]

nope - did not help - reset all wacom settings. ps2015 still unusable

[jbm007]

I am not aware of this laptop supporting a windows 10 install.

Matter of fact there several issues associated with the performance of windows 10 on this laptop.

How are you getting  "hp protect tools" to work under windows 10

The intel chipset for this laptop is not supported under windows 10 properly as well.

Not sure PS 2015 is the culprit here.

[tomaszbrzoz]

Of course HP 8770w is compatible with Win 10 and has full HP Win 10 support; it is a powerful workstation able to handle with every quite requiring task I perform with huge efficiency, HP Protect Tools are long gone, the authorization goes natively through Windows Hello (and fingerprint sensor), all the drivers are fully updated to Win 10 by HP and made available by HP months ago and actually before my upgrade from Win 8.1 to Win 10.

And if the PS 2015 is the ONLY app from CC 2015 bundle (and I am using Indesign, Illustrator, Premiere, Fireworks and of course Acrobat DC) and in fact the ONLY app of all that I use on my laptop that freezes and stalls, it IS the culprit. Please note that it causes problems only during some time intervals after startup then it works with no problem and smoothly and quick. Definitely it is not the fault of the hardware, as you suggest, all the more so because phill35969229‌ Chris2hoch2‌ ondrej zeman‌ and many others reported similar issues in different hardware configurations.

[Bill Sprague]

rimshotgraphix wrote:

......obviously with the juggernaut of performance complaints here and on other billboards, something is up with CC 2015.....

-john

I've read in business journals that the Adobe CC system has millions of customers.  Lets guess at around 4 million.  I don't think I can find 1,000 performance complaints on boards I read.   But lets say it is a big juggernaut of 2,000 performance complaints on and only 2 million customers.  That means that one tenth of one percent are having the issue.  If a 1,000 or 2,000 people having trouble that needs fixing.  But if 99.9% are doing OK with what they are buying from Adobe, it might not be "unconscionable" to take money from them.

I do have sympathy for everyone that has computer issues.  It sucks.  Anger and accusations about ethical practices does help someone down in the trenches doing their best get it done any faster.

[rimshotgraphix]

i disagree with your guesstimate of the amount of customers having problems. Also, If you take a look around the web, Photoshop is not the only CC 2015 product receiving complaints.(something is up)

Also, the fact that cc 2014 works and that cc 2015 does not lead to a conclusion that it is a 'computer problem'

when i made my terse comments, it was not being personal, it was a feedback from a paying customer.

Also, i addressed 'Adobe', not the trench worker you mention.

Knowing today's corporate environments, my guess is that the trench worker was overworked and given unrealistic deadlines; and that same trench worker recommended holding off on the release of cc 2015 because it was not ready.

-john

[jacograaff]

slowness back after holiday...

[jacograaff]

I am now beta-testing Nuke-Studio as a potential replacement of After-effects and Premiere. Sure, it is more expensive, but if I get the quality, productivity and performance I need to service a client-base in an international first-world market, I will be willing to pay for it.

I need to replace Illustrator and Photoshop though. I do not have a high level of loyalty towards Illustrator since I only started to use it heavily after Adobe killed of Freehand for the then inferior Illustrator. Illustrator has become a great tool since, and it will be difficult to find a Vector-tool replacement.

I have been using Photoshop since 1992 and will find it difficult to part company. Since I do a lot of UI work as well and Adobe has started to address current UI-design needs it might also be difficult for me. I do like to stay within one application as much as possible (Nuke-Studio that combines FX and a NLVE in one like Flame), but if I can find a robust raster editor and then use some of the newer ui-design tools it might suffice. The inability to create software that runs consistent on current hardware is having a considerable effect on my productivity.

Dreamweaver I already replaced with PhpStorm.

I am growing tired of:

1. Adobes software's performance issues on current hardware (no excuse, if you cannot develop for existing hardware then stay away),
2. third-world development and bug standards,
3. lack-luster support,
4. unimpressive updates,
5. disregard of existing user-concerns regarding the core productivity tools and features,
6. investment in 3rd party tools to up-sell additional non-essential services to their "cloud-based-captive-audience" to the detriment of development of core productivity tools and
7. general lack-luster indifference and attitude since moving to a subscription based pricing module