Q: Annoying slowness of Preview after Yosemite upgrade

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!! You saved my sanity!!

This works perfectly. So we just have to go to back to PDFkit 2.9.2 and everything is perfect! Wow, the whole system is faster with this. Yosemite finally works! Great!

Now we really have to spread the word – could you post this in every thread about Yosemite-PDF-slugishness? Actually one can get PDFKit 2.9.2 easily from a TimeMachine backup made prior to the 16th October 2014. So your trick is actually pretty easy.

Apple should include PDF-Kit 2.9.2 in 10.10.3…

Again, thank you soooo much!!!

You're welcome. But before we get too exited, remember that this involves tinkering with the guts of the OS. It is unsupported. It is certainly possible that this fix will break something else, either now or down the road. Hopefully Apple will fix the performance of PDFkit 3.0 before that becomes an issue.

There are a bunch of threads on this. Too many for me to look at. But you have my permission to cross-post my solution if you like.

Yep. Works. As you said... hopefully it doesn't "break" anything else in the OS. I've submitted feedback and spoken to Apple about this issue. If we're lucky enough people will contact them so they get a real fix!

Now if someone could help me figure out why my iOS 8 devices all crash when I try to access Settings>General>Keyboard>Shortcuts.

IT WORKS!! IT WORKS!! IT WORKS!!!!!

LOL.

Thank you so much for the solution. It's been driving me mad, and it's so great to finally be able to use Preview again!

Many thanks indeed.

Okay, I knew there would be glitches. I found one. Since reverting to the old PDFKit, annotating with a signature places the signature upside down in SOME document. Not all, just some. But the same documents worked in the past. Actually, I don't know for sure that this problem also doesn't occur with PDFKit 3.1 since I don't think I've placed a signature since upgrading to Yosemite before today.

Workaround: record another upside down signature so when it pastes, it comes out right side up.

I've read the PDF annotation is a whole other story: http://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/2jjajx/yosemite_crippled_pdf_annotation_wit h_preview_any/

Has anyone with Yosemite opened up Activity monitor (Utilities menu) And monitored CPU when you open preview and a large PDF file?

In Snow leopard PDFKIT 2.5.5  - When I open a 140mb file on my system with 60 pages -- it scrolls find - but I do see it takes over 1GB of CPU during the process.   I have 4GB of memory and was running only Preview - so it had plenty of memory without any paging activity.

As Yosemite only uses VM as some sort of last resort --- reviewing what is happening with Activity monitor while is is running - may show what is going on.

I never open on line PDF files - I always download them -- so that may also cause problems with Yosemite.

The common ground of the troublesome PDF's thusfar, is that they are rendered with 'Mac OS X 10.10.x Quartz PDFContext' (from Powerpoint, but I would point my finger to the PDFContext thingy).

Thank you very much for your post, Richard! It worked for me too. Just replaced the PDFKit.framework file from one I had backed up in TimeMachine and it is working like a charm!

Best,

Andre

Thanks Richard, it does help...but it is not as fluent as Mavericks. Meanwhile, it is still not that satisfactory...

• It is fluent when scroll the PDF with the whole texts, but it does not work well when the PDF contains graphs, annotation, equations. I do not know whether I am the special case...
• Preview app still occupies large amount of CPU time, which makes macbook hot.

I asked a lot of macbook users including my friends, majority of them said that they did not meet the PDF slowness question. Therefore, I do not know whether we are the only lucky people to meet this annoying bug...

p.s. my computer is Retina Macbook Pro Mid-2014 with 8 gb memory and i5 CPU.

I think we might have similar problems!

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All,

I have a slow Adobe Reader and a slow Preview Reader.  Same symptoms as everyone else.  Takes a few seconds to scroll sometime longer.  I have Yosemite 10.10.2.  No virus software loaded.  I have a Full gig of headroom in memory with 8 Gig capacity.  I brought the activity monitor up and closed applications until there was 1 Gig of headroom in memory, all green.  It made no difference to performance.  I had a 84 page 40Mbyte doc with notes in it and I also opened a 2.2 Mbyte pdf that was five pages and no notes.  The performance was essentially the same.  I noticed in the Activity monitor that memory for Preview jumps from around 200 MB to as much as 1.1 Gig when I click on a page.  It varies from 750Mbyte to 1.1 Gig and then settles back down to around 200 Mbyte when the image is rendered.  That seems to be an awful lot of memory to process a simple 5 page document.

Adobe is much better than Preview but still terrible.  What follows is some benchmark data that showed Preview degraded considerable with the 84 Pg pdf doc.   in Adobe it is a lot faster and more consistent at 2-4 sec to render a page (this is for the 84 pg document).  In Preview it sometimes just hangs for up to 30 seconds and then redisplays (this is on the 5 page document).   I noticed the CPU usage went from 24% to 75% when I "clicked" on a page in Adobe. 

When I opened the 84 pg doc in Preview the CPU went to 97% (AS shown on the Activity monitor for the "process" preview).  That seems ridiculous but there it was.  Oh it crashed while I was writing this when it was trying to open the 84 pg doc.   When I reopened the 84 pg doc with Preview this time it started in the 90% range for CPU usage and jumped to 208% for a few seconds and then fell back to 91%.  I clicked on a different page and observed it went to 319% CPU (as shown in the Activity Monitor for Preview) for a few seconds.  I clcked again on a different page and it went to 400% CPU and simultaneously the CPU load window for the user showed at 93%.

This is "new" MacBook Pro 13" I purchased last fall but manufactured in Mid 2012 with a 2.5 Ghz CPU, Intel Icore 5, 8 Gig of 1600 Mhz DDR3 memory.  It has a hybrid disk drive with 500 Gig conventional and 500 Gig Flash.  There is 600 Gig of empty space. Not a Retina display.  I have a 27" Mac 1020 monitor and when I display it there the behavior is the same.  My belief is the testing shows this is not a screen resolution problem.  In summary nothing is being stressed out on the hardware except the CPU which points directly to a software issue (CPU was idling before I opened Preview and idles back down to 7% or so after a minute or less).

This machine runs fine on all the other applications.

Any ideas out there?  It seems the issue is with rendering pdfs in Yosemite and may not be an issue with the apps themselves.

Hi!

You can try a free pdf reader named PDFNut, and it is available in the App Store. This works definitely well in my machine, and scroll as fluently as Mavericks, regardless of containing how many pictures and equations in a PDF. Btw, it does not cause heat issue and battery drain. This software saves my computer.

Hope this helps

Thanks but it didn't work.  Still think it is in the OS.  Downloaded and ran PDFNut on the same file and the symptoms were the same.