CS4 and CS5 Ultra Slow Performance

Hi E,

Well reminded! I am with a 1,1, first released model, scratch "fake" volume (partition), some 1,5GB RAM and stuff, nothing that would bring performance head to head with new models.

I had the same problem with my MacBook regarding Microsoft Excel. It was extremely slow and I just couldn't stand it. So apparently, the slow down occurred because my default print layout wasn't US Letter. So it's either a page layout problem or a viewing issue (i.e. if you're in a different view, such as draft). My sister found it painfully difficult to use the internet because het anti virus was slowing Rosetta down. So that could be an issue as well.

KXsig wrote:
Well reminded! I am with a 1,1, first released model, scratch "fake" volume (partition)

You might already know this, but the scratch partition might not help that much. The point of a scratch disk is to offload temp files to an entirely different disk mechanism so that you don't have one disk constantly delayed trying to follow the demands of both the app and the OS. When possible use an real external drive for scratch. (And if you already know all this then it's advice for others who think a partition might work.)

Hi N,

What happened was that at the 4th time I installed the OS in a month I decided to make a partition to store some 30GB that I was copying back and forward in every reset, then as the "disk" was there I got the scratch to it, I knew the basis and decided to test this way. And more, before doing that I also used this partition for the CS5 install.

I am having an issue with this setup away from CS5, my searches are not bringing good results from this volume.

What do you say about this setup, would you advice using a single volume? Or take CS5 to share disk with OS? I don't have a clue if this setup could cause any harm. These files that motivated the partition are work files, so usually what happens here is the system at one partition and CS5 apps and working files on another.

Message was edited by: KXsig

KXsig wrote:
usually what happens here is the system at one partition and CS5 apps and working files on another.

I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't think it matters where the app and working files are installed. I was concerned about the Photoshop scratch file. Also, if there is more space on the second partition than on the system partition, that could be a better place for the scratch file, though still not as fast as on an external.

Sad to know there's nothing known for giving me better reason for a new install rather then metadata indexing 😉

I am having the same issue, on a brand new 12-core (dual 6-core 2.66GHz) Mac Pro with 16GB of RAM (and of course running 10.6.4). I have a new install of CS5 Master Suite, and primarily in my explorations with After Effects, it is running painfully slowly, mostly, apparently, around simple interface stuff like scrubbing the timeline.

But this was also very apparent during rendering - a file that took about 20 minutes on my old 32-bit Core 2 Duo Dell with 4GB of RAM and CS4 took about 14 minutes on this new one under CS5 (running with 4 cores each using 2GB of RAM, and plenty of cores and RAM left over for other system stuff)... but I could see that a lot of that was due to HUGE delays in processing time as it rendered, long swaths of spinning beach-ball time. Had it not been for those, it likely would have rendered in about 3-4 minutes.

I only just discovered that there are updates available for almost the entire Adobe suite from my install, so I will install those, restart, and do some additional testing... but I'd love to know if Apple has any direction in fixing this stuff.

Ok, I have installed all available system and Adobe updates as of today (9/22/10), I am now running AE 10.0.1... and I am having the same issues, with AE running very, very slowly. Scrubbing a project is impossible - it sends the system right into beach-ball mode for many seconds; opening a project, which took 7-15 seconds on the Windows side (the old 32-bit Core 2 Duo Dell with 4GB Ram and CS4), takes up to 2:30 on the Mac under CS5!

I tried rendering it with 2 cores with 3GB each (leaving 6GB and 12 cores for other apps), with 3 multiprocessor cores each with 3GB of RAM (leaving 4GB of RAM and 10 cores for other apps), with 7 cores each with 1.5 GB (leaving the minimum RAM and cores for other apps) and with NO multiprocessing on at all. Just for the baseline, the old Dell rendered this same file in 23:49, so all of these results are an improvement over that, but not nearly enough! Those long pauses still occurred - while watching the render, I could see it fly through parts, and then choke for many seconds at a time. Here are the timing results:

Multiprocessing Off: 9:57
2 Cores with 3GB each: 14:01
3 Cores with 3GB each: 9:36
7 Cores with 1.5GB each: 15:12

This all seems pretty friggin' random, though my testing methodology was far from iron-clad, as you can see. But either way, you would think with my system specs more cores would produce better results, not worse. I would have expected the 2 or 3 core configs to produce the best results.

Now, I did some tests with Activity Monitor open, and discovered some interesting things. When rendering with multiprocessing, each core used for rendering shows up as a process called "aeselflink", and at least a few of them are always at the top of the list, if you view activity by % CPU.

What was interesting is that while the render was actually processing (I could see motion in the render preview, as opposed to when it was choked), the CPU usage graph looked as you'd expect, going up and down between 5-50% of the CPU use. But when it stalled out and choked on a frame - or whatever it was doing - the CPU usage in the graph would PIN to the top as completely maxed out, with between 98 and 99% of the usage going to % User.

When those lags happened, the aeselflink processes often showed up as EACH using anywhere from 300% to 900% of the % CPU. Sometimes they were all pinned up there; other times only one or two seemed to demand that much time. Sometimes, however, things choked and the CPU usage graph showed NO activity, plain black idle for many seconds at a time. This doesn't seem to reveal much to me, but maybe smarter people can ge some info from it.

Also, sometimes when starting a render, the aeselflink processes would show up in the Activity monitor normally, not demanding much time, but for a good long time (1-2 minutes) the main AE application process would show up red, saying it was not responding; during this time, the CPU usage graph showed almost no activity at all, just 0-10% User activity.

The horrible lags seemed most pronounced on frames that cross faded, even a very simple crossfade - there was only one of significance in my video, where two videos crossfade over the space of about a second; each FRAME of that crossfade appeared to take about 20-30 seconds to render... or more accurately, each frame would render, and then there would be one of the insane processor lags. No lags this bad or pronounced happened on the Dell side - it was slow all around, but consistent.

Whew. Ok, there's my random smattering of data. I hope this helps give someone in the know a better picture of what's going on here... this is a huge problem if it can't be addressed.

Matt

I had the same problem when I upgraded from my Early 2008 2.8 8 core Mac Pro to the new Mac Pro 2.66 12 core. The older Mac was much faster. I used Migrate to move all my files and apps. After about a week, I was so annoyed with the new Mac that I blanked its Hard Drive and started re-installing. I installed CS5 first and checked the speed of Photoshop and Illustrator - they were now super fast! I then re-installed all my other software and the Mac runs like a dream - way faster than my old 2.8 8 core. I think that something went wrong in the Migrate process. Hope this helps!