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Question

Elements 2021 high cpu and disk usage - computer unusable

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
December 28, 2020
6 replies
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I just upgraded from PS Elements 15 to Elements 2021 (and Premier as well). The upgrade went smooth. But the first time I went into the Organizer, my system became swamped with high disk and CPU usage.

My wireless mouse and keyboard became useless. My system clock froze. I couldn't do CTRL+ALT+DEL or shut down the computer with the power button. Total takeover of my system that I didn't know Windows 10 Pro would allow.

In 30 years of using PC's I have never seen an application totally take over a computer like this. I could just hear the disk drives hammering away for up to an hour before the computer would finally shut down. But the next time I opened the Organizer, the problem started again. When I looked in Task Manager I saw the organizer had racked up huge numbers in page faults (in the millions if I recall), despite the 16GB of RAM I have (which the product specs call for by the way).

I have about 32,000 photos and videos on my system. I'm assuming it is the facial recognition feature that is causing this disaster. I've let it run overnight the last several nights, but I don't think it's done yet, because all I have to do is open Organizer again and my PC is useless.

At one point my computer because usable again (I think I had turned off the FR feature), and I was able to go in and looks at the stacks of faces and starting naming people in the "unknown" category. But later the problem started again.

Why could Adobe design software that acts this way? Is my only option to let it run like this for days and hope I don't get a drive failure? Any other ideas?

I've been a Photoshop elements user for 25 years and this is just not acceptible. I spent a lot of money building this PC mostly for handling Photoshop and Premiere elements (not to mention the $$ for the upgrade). My system was working just fine on version 15. The upgrade has been a big mistake so far.

My build:

ASUS TUF A370-PLUS GAMING mobo.

Intel i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz

16GB G.Skill DDR4 3200 RAM (I just ordered 16GB more to see if that helps)

Samsung 960 EVO SSD for O/S and Apps.

(2) 4TB Internal hard drives (WD Red) in RAID-1 (for Photoshop catalog and data)

This topic has been closed for replies.

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default8vznqus8bkqp

Participant

I have had similar problems on my 5k iMac. I generally have to uninstall Elements when I'm not using it or it chomps away at the disc all day long even when the program isn't running. I can hear the disc spinning constantly. It's a great program but it behaves like a virus. This is not a new problem.

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Emre5E82

Participant

Any time I import close to 1K pictures Elements Browser crashes entire Win 10 OS under memory pressure. There is a memory leak and it is shame Adobe did not catch this bug.

I turned off face recognition, tagging , folder watching, and any other analysis feature , doesn't make any differece.

this the version

Core Version: 19.0 (20210126.m.155261)

S

stradivarius1312

Participating Frequently

I have the same problem as mentioned in this thread. Never had a problem before, memory usage was high but acceptable.

I have not used the program for the last 3-4 months. I launched PSE this morning to add new photos. I have a fairly powerful PC (6-core, 32 GB RAM). The PSE Organizer gobbles all my RAM and goes quickly in virtual memory, all without doing nothing special. I then have to quickly kill the program or the computer just shuts down, out of resources.

I tried to deactivate Media Analysis, also uninstalled / reinstalled both PSE PRE, that did not solve anything.

I am using Windows 10 Professional, and I have all the latest updates installed.

Please Adobe, resolve this quickly. This is clearly unacceptable.

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stradivarius1312

Participating Frequently

I solved my memory problem by creating a new catalog and importing my pictures back . PE Organizer is currently analysing faces (about 8K of 40K photos processed) and system memory usage is steady at 14 GB (on a 32 GB system)

Fortunately I did not spend too much time editing items in my old catalog.

So the problem seems to be related to a corrupted catalog.

It would be nice if Adobe would provide an external tool to validate a catalog, without having to go through all these problems.

J

Jon in IndianaAuthor

Participating Frequently

After walking away from this for 6 weeks (software PTSD I think), I decided to tackle it again. I fired up Photoshop Elements 21 again and within a couple of minutes it had consumed almost all of my 32GB of RAM, and then a crash report appeared. I filled it out and submitted it, then decided to uninstall everything and re-install (PSE 21, Premiere Elements 21, PSE 15, PE 15, in that order). Rebooting after each one. Next I logged into my Adobe account and downloaded and installed PSE 21 and PE 21. That went OK. The first time I opened Organizer it went "busy" for maybe 90 seconds, but then it became calm and normal. I had Task Manager open on another screen and observed there was only a little increase in memory usage - about 5GB - not the runaway I had before. What a relief! I noticed on the forum website that they announced version 21.1 had recently been released. I confirmed that is what I downloaded this time. I feel like they realized a real problem and rushed out a fix. I feel like a victim in this mess, but I've used PC's for 40 years and know to expect the bad with the good. And certainly no compensation for my trouble. I'm out $90 for RAM I didn't need, and countless hours fighting with the problem. At least the software seems to be working now, so next I need to do a backup of my catalog. In foresight, I won't be paying for any future upgrades in the first month they're out. If at all.

J

Jon in IndianaAuthor

Participating Frequently

The saga continues. I purchased an additional 16GB of RAM, bringing my total to 32GB. Didn't help. I expanded my Windows swap space to 48GB, spread across two drives on seperate RAID arrays. Didn't help. Just changed the sound as now I have multiple hard drives pounding away. The program is on a memory run-away. I tried lowering the priority of the organizer program from "Normal" to "Low" in Task Manager (when it would give me the mouse back for only a couple seconds at a time). Barely made a difference. I had started Task Manager on another screen before I started PSE, and I watched as the program took 100% of my RAM. Then Peak Working Set showed almost 28GB of memory in use. Page faults over 110 million. That's before Task Manager stopped updating because my PC was swamped. I should mention all I did was open organizer, check that the Facial Recognition and other features were UNCHECKED, and then let it sit. The program took off and ate up all the resources it could get, none-the-less. Not so much CPU time but memory consumption leading to massive swapping. I am of the opinion this software is faulty and has a serious memory leak or something. I'm going to see if I can open a ticket with Adobe and get some help. This product is unusable to me right now. I wanted to pull off some photos for my father's obituary, but I cannot. To add insult to injury, they keep popping up the little advertisement for their holiday 33% discount, which got me in this trouble to start with. I'll keep you posted.

J

Jon in IndianaAuthor

Participating Frequently

Update... I decided to let the process run overnight. This morning my computer was asleep, so I woke it up and found the Organizer was responsive again. But a dialog box displayed saying "Adobe Creative Cloud is needed to resolve this problem. However it is missing or damaged. Please download and install a new copy of the Creative Cloud from 'http://www.adobe.com/go/adobecreativecloudapp". A "Quit" and a "Repair" button is available. I clicked Repair. It displayed it was downloading Creative Cloud Desktop. (I already had this installed, so I don't know what the problem is.) It eventually opened the Creative Cloud dialog page. I have never used Creative Cloud and don't know why I need it -- I just want PSE to catalog my home photos and videos. I don't need these fancy upgrades. Again, I may have wasted my money buying (and trusting) this upgrade. Next I get a dialog about backing up the catalog structure. I click Start Backup. "Checking database for errors" followed by "Preparing the catalog". It has been sitting there for over an hour. Task Manager shows the program is "Not responding", but I see it consuming a steady 8% of CPU and the I/O counts are slowly going up. So maybe it is doing something. Or just stuck in a loop. My system is usable at the moment (as I type this) but I'm not doing anything with the catalog since it is stuck, so I'll let it sit for the day. I don't hear any hard disk activity, and my HDD LED is flashing only lightly. So maybe the program is doing something. Too bad it doesn't tell me any details. TM shows Memory Private Working Set (physical memory in use) at 4.4GB, Peak Working Set 27.6GB, CPU Time 3:19:27, Page Faults 174.5 million (and no longer increasing), I/O reads 1.5 million and increasing slowly, I/O Writes 22.6K and increasing very slowly, I/O Other 588K and increasing steadily about 1000 every 40 seconds. I was an idiot not to run a backup before installing this upgrade. And for buying it in the first place I guess. "Bleeding edge" can be painful.

J

Jon in IndianaAuthor

Participating Frequently

Should have added I have no idea what "problem" the software was telling me I had. It doesn't say. This has appeared twice now. I can only assume the application is getting tripped up over itself and thinks there's a problem that doesn't exist.

Also, I tried to open a chat session with Adobe support last night. Nobody answered after 45 minutes, so I gave up. Being that it was New Years Eve, maybe they're short staffed. I'll try again in a day or so. Or call the toll-free number they gave me.

MichelBParis

Legend

@Jon in Indiana

What can I say about your issues?

I have various versions of PSE including the 2021 versions on two computers, one with minimal system requirements and another under those requirements (only 6 GB RAM). No SSD. Your config is a very high end one and should be much faster than mine. My normal computer is reasonably fast, but I don't use any automatic features nor face recognition. The smaller one is really slow, but never freezes. I have nearly 100 000 files in my catalog.

On the other hand, if you browse this forum, you'll find many posts about complaints of slowness of the organizer for face recognition, automatic tagging or creations, but never something like what you are describing. There must be something specific to your hardware or software. I have had several issues with other safety softwares like Avast or Acronis slowing the computer severely. Hardware is not all. Also, do you store your media and catalog on the SSD or the RAID-1 ?

C

caryw90052380

Participant

I have the same issue with Bridge for desktop. Absolutely crushes the CPU. Not as familiar with Bridge, so I have to think the program is doing some sort of preview building for it to be under that much stress, but not sure. I went into camera raw settings and changed the performance to use the discrete GPU. It seems to help some, but not always. Very annoying. This has been an issue with several releases.

MichelBParis

Legend

@caryw90052380

Bridge is not used by default with Elements, so you should rather ask in the Bridge user to user forum.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/bridge/bd-p/bridge?page=1&sort=latest_replies&filter=all

Indeed you can use the free version of the Creative Cloud with Elements (it does work well with PSE2021) but few PSE users really know Bridge enough to help you here.

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