Q: Annoying slowness of Preview after Yosemite upgrade

Could you share the PDF's which are problematic?

luukluuk

The file is confidential (have tried many files) but the forum reply below seems to show it is in the OS in the pdf-kit.  I don't know how to go in and modify the pdf-kit but maybe Apple will fix this very soon as it is killing our productivity.

lemon-kunFeb 9, 2015 4:59 PM Re: Annoying slowness of Preview after Yosemite upgrade
Re: Annoying slowness of Preview after Yosemite upgradein response to Richard Oberndorf

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!!!

here is some data from my post on 3/16/15

papasailorMar 16, 2015 2:00 PM Re: Annoying slowness of Preview after Yosemite upgrade
Re: Annoying slowness of Preview after Yosemite upgradein response to VikingOSX

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.

Richard's solution worked for me. I restored PDFKit 2.9.2 from an old Time Machine backup and rebooted. Large PDF files load fast (and scroll smoothly) again.

How can I obtain the PDFKit 2.9.2 if I don't have an old Time Machine backup? Is there any place in which I can download it? Please help me on this one lads, this is really affecting my work performance.

Thank you all in advance.

Thank you so much, Richard! It's a fix I've dreaming of for months!

Since this PDFKit 2.9.2 seems to be the solution, why does not Apple provide a link to it ?

It seems that Apple has given up since a long time ago on computers and software, they are now focused on clouds and music.

Too bad.

Just tried this solution

http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/preview-pdf-annoying-slowness-since-yosemite .1806654/page-2

and it works perfectly. Note that there is on this page a link to the correct PDFKit.

Why can't Apple make this official ?

Thank you!  This worked for me.  Not only was preview slow, but certain linetypes (dashed lines for example) were not rendering but for corners. I couldn't see half my drawings!  But now all is back to the way it was.

Amazing that this is an 8 month problem unaddressed by Apple.

I use Preview everyday and I had never encountered this kind of problem.

Just opened a long pdf with 700 pages of a digitized old book, as well as Motion 5 manual (over a thousand pages). Also have several other documents open. They all scroll without any delays or hiccups.

I wondered if the problems described in this have been fixed in the interim by 10.10.3 - as the thread goes back a long way.

I was using 10.10.3 and the problems were huge. Mosty I am looking at large format architectural drawings-- vector graphics.  That's where I see the problems.  Images or text may be working fine.

Anybody still monitoring this thread?  I attempted to overwrite PDFKit.framework as instructed by Richard Oberndorf.  But it didn't work for me.  I have a MacBook Pro Mid 2009, and upgraded, (foolishly) from Mavericks to Yosemite.  I am having the scrolling and zooming problems with large pdf files.  After upgrading to Mavericks my computer ran much faster and cooler, than under Snow Leopard, but under Yosemite it is slower and running hotter overall.  With large .pdf files it is unusable.  I have to force quit preview or wait for it a very long time to finally respond to the OS. 

I found that I am not able to overwrite the PDFKit.framework file.  I've logged in as root and tried a straight cp -R ..., and a cp -pRL ...  I've also tried a restore from TimeMachine.  But when I check the version using the finder and 2-finger click to 'Get Info' on PDFKit.frameworks, it shows that the version info is 3.1, not 2.9.2 as expected. 

Can anybody help, or run into the same issues?  I'm seriously thinking of going back to Mavericks.  Version 10.10.4 does not fix the issue either.

Thx,

/beeohdee

Oops.  Solved the issue about not being able to overwrite the PDFKit.  Sorry about the misdirection.  User error, but I did install the 2.9.2 version of the PDFKit.  The rest of the issues, however, still remain.  Large .pdf file of a map for the state of Ill-annoyed, 21.2 Mb, takes all day to zoom in or scroll.  And computer is still running hotter and slower in all respects than it was in Mavericks. 

There seem to be other issues, possibly some kind of software conflict.

I suggest two troubleshooting steps, one of them very easy.

Create a new user account, run the machine from this clean account for a bit. Do the same heat and slowness problems persist?

Time for a clean install. Install the current OS in a clean disk or partition and see how it goes - I bet it will run smoothly. Then gradually install your stuff and test for a while.

Often problems are hard to pinpoint because no two installations are the same. We all install lots of stuff over the years. Sometimes an update conflicts with something we installed but forgot about. A clean install often cures this.

Thank-you Luis.  I will work through the steps that you suggest and let you know how it turns out.  That however will take some time, and won't happen very soon. The first test is simple, but a re-install, that is another beast altogether.

I would like to add that the overwrite with 2.9.2 seems to help somewhat, especially if the smooth text and line art option is unclicked in the preference pane for preview.  It took almost 10 minutes to load that 21.2 Mb file, and all the while, preview was not responding to the OS, or more accurately, it was responding very, very intermittently.  Not until after I logged in to this discussion and reported my results, (apparently prematurely), did the file load, and I was able to use preview to scroll and zoom.  But it was not very smooth; still slow and halting, but usable.  Turning off the smooth scrolling helped considerably, but changing that option while that large file was loaded took another 5-10 minutes. 

Thanks again for your quick response.