Lion Preview high CPU behavior with PDFs

Having same problem on MBA. Kills battery life so bad. Hope there's a fix soon.

Just when I thought I am the only one who has problem with Preview after installing Lion. At least I can still use mine.

I only have problem when I try to open a PDF file through the Menu-->File--->Open and I double click on a folder. If I double click, all files under that folder opens. If I have thousands of files under that folder, Preview will try to open them all causing it to crash.

My Temporary Fix:

1.) I have to carefully single click on each and every folder until I reach the file that I want to open.

or

2.) Use Finder to locate the file that I want to open and double click it directly.

or

3.) I have some existing PDF shortcuts on my desktop. If I double click those it works fine.

Lion's preview is a mess. Crashes, cant handle large PDF's, gets confused. Apple Lion is like dealing with a pc. I wish I had never upgraded to Lion.

I like all the new features of Lion. I have been using it for a week now, and so far I only have problem with

1. Preview

2. TextEdit

3. Xcode 4.1

And I think the problem on this three applications are related. Fix one will fix them all. We just have to wait for the patch or 10.7.2.

Preview freezes for me after I have a few files open and I try to open another.

The spinning beach-ball is not amusing.

Please get onto this Mr. Mac.

~~~~~~~

I am actually having the same issue with big pdf in Snow leopard... It's just sluggish and painfully slow but only with new pdf just downloaded from jstor. The old one, even when they are bigger works just fine... any clue? Thanks a lot!

I had the same problem for the 1st time yesterday (had my macbook air for around 1 month). The battery ran out in 3 hours-ish, fan was going crazy and the computer was REALLY hot. I checked the CPU usage and realized that the Preview was occupying 100% and up (which i didn't even know was possible) CPU. I'm really worried now and hope this will be fixed soon!

Has anyone tried deleting the PDFIndex4.sk file in application support? To do this, you'll need to make the library folder visible by opening Terminal (Applications->utilities->Terminal) and entering the command:

chflags nohidden ~/Library

Then, go to the Preview folder in Application Support (~user/Library/Application Support/Preview) where you should find the PDFIndex4.sk file. Drop that in the trash, open Preview, and see if that helps. It helped me some, but I also had a pdf that for some reason (I suspect it had something to do with the fonts) caused Preview to step on the accelerator and slow down :-D.

If you want to hide the Library folder again:

chflags hidden ~/Library

Personally, I like it visible.

I have the high cpu issue with preview on lion. Easy to reproduce - open some pdf with preview and let it sit for a while - and hour or two. Cpu goes to 80%.

macbook air 11 1st gen 4gig 129 gig 1.5ghz 10.7.1

An hour or two?? It happens withing 10-30 seconds for me.

An hour or two would be almost acceptable, at least you could use it for a while.

click - read some stuff - get a phone call - go do some other stuff - why's the system so slow? - yikes, there goes preview again - kill it.

Not even MS does c**p like this any more. Sheesh.

My only issue with Preview spiking is when I open secure PDFs. For the PDFs that were giving me issues, I would have to get the creator to remove the security, after which I was able to open them without having the high CPU.

My CPU would spike from 100% to 200% CPU depending on the document. This spike would be instantaneous. I would get 180%+ if I tried to view the table of contents or search the documents.

I have been having the same problem since the original Lion update last summer on my MacBook Air. I had hoped that Lion 10.7.2 out last week would fix it, but no joy.

The "high CPU usage" seems to only occur on PDFs that have been OCRed to be searchable and indexable. Plain scanned PDFs seem to work fine. Can anyone else confirm this distinction?

Thanks,

--Bob

Goober,

In my MBP I don't see the problem of CPU spike in Safari. It works fine for me to use this alternative.

--

Vitto