13 Background Processes, 360MB, general bloat. Why?

[sicklebrick]

It's a new machine with only Premiere installed. do you think this is maybe getting a little excessive, Adobe? I'm already resorting to uninstalling and reinstalling Acrobat whenever I need it just so I don't have to deal with the constant nagging.

Note: None of them really matter, safe enough to kill via task manager/script. (e.g. taskkill /IM AGSService.exe /F)

Process	Size
AdobeUpdateService.exe	2,036k
AGSService.exe	5,300k
CreativeCloud.exe	53,908k
--Adobe CEF Helper.exe	83,432k
--AdobeIPCBroker.exe	4,628k
--Adobe Desktop Service.exe	83,876k
CoreSync.exe	16,384k
CCXProcess.exe	436k
--node.exe	44,700k
----conhost.exe	4,884k
CCLibrary	488k
--node.exe	52,668k
----conhost.exea	4,880

More than a third of a billion bytes - with no Adobe products running. Let's be clear here, that's more memory than a several year old Win7 install uses on idle, with NVidia/Intel drivers running - and that's when one of them doesn't act up and start chewing up an entire CPU core or few GB of RAM.

I'm not using the creative cloud, so that's a bust. I'm not running any Adobe product processes, so there's no need for the InterProcess Communication Broker to be running, what is CoreSync syncing and why does the memory use fluctuate? After years of massively bloated and inflated .exe files, has Adobe decided it's time to branch into bloated scripts with node.js? I feel everything Adobe is slowly getting bigger & bigger, and using more memory/hdd space, disproportionate to the number of new features we're seeing and it's frustrating.

I wouldn't mind so much if Adobe justified *why* they've deemed so many distinct resources to be necessary, even by way of a small description of each process, but I'm honestly very uncomfortable with this level of blatant bloat, especially in light of the increased security concerns, and from a company with an incredibly poor history of writing safe software (See the hundreds of documented flash exploits) and keeping user data safe (we all had fun in 2013, didn't we).

Part of me hopes I'm just being a grumpy old ludite but I tried a copy of Photoshop 6 (not Photoshop CS6) out of curiosity. From 2001, it's something like a 40mb install. It starts nearly instantly, doesn't have the skinned UI and has been compatible with all but about 2 .PSD files I've needed. It happily reads illustrator files, I can macro massive numbers of files, many plugins including NVidia's DXT plugin and Valve's VTF plugins  still work, the UI is responsive and It's so lightweight and fuss free that I ended up using it for the last 4 years, making me feel like I've been completely duped by using later releases.

I get that the product is wide ranging, so some new features are awesome to some folks, and some new features (like OpenGL acceleration) are super pointless, but are we really seeing a 40mb (Photoshop 6) to 1GB (Photoshop CS4) to 3.1GB (Photoshop CC 2017) improvement?

[Jeffrey_A_Wright]

Moving this discussion to the Adobe Creative Cloud forum.

[Kevin-Monahan · Accepted solution]

Hi Sicklebrick,

• do you think this is maybe getting a little excessive, Adobe?
• has Adobe decided it's time to branch into bloated scripts with node.js?
• I'm honestly very uncomfortable with this level of blatant bloat
• are we really seeing a 40mb (Photoshop 6) to 1GB (Photoshop CS4) to 3.1GB (Photoshop CC 2017) improvement?

These are questions that we in technical support are not set up to answer. My suggestion would be, to sum up these observations and send them to the product team(s) in the form of a bug report. They will take note and read your summary, at a minimum.

Thanks,
Kevin

[futuremotion]

I would still be using Photoshop and Illustrator CS5 if I could find a way to license them legally. That was the last release where the interface actually felt responsive and UI lag was mostly kept to a minimum - or at least to an acceptable level. No creative cloud required. There was some bloat, but nothing close to what the Creative Cloud monstrosity has grown to become.

I'm primarily doing application development right now and I am forced to use Photoshop / Illustrator to mock up concepts for user interfaces and websites because no alternative exists that have the scope and features that Adobe software offers.

On the flipside I think there could be a viable market opportunity for any software development company that can create a lean and responsive UI design and vector editing suite of applications with minimal dependancies and a focus on optimization.

[Jeff Bellune]

GIMP?

[futuremotion]

Gimp - and what the development team is doing with it is nothing short of amazing for open source software. But unfortunately it still lacks the full range of features that Adobe offers and that I depend upon. I also have Photoshop and Illustrator keyboard shortcuts and the UI layout embedded in my brain, so switching would be a pretty tall order. It's been awhile since I've tried it though, so maybe I'll give it another shot.