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Why Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 are so slow on my MacBook Pro early 2011?

First of all sorry for my english


I recently installed Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 and they tend to lag even on just during normal work operations like zooming, opening a file, selecting a tool, browsing menus etc etc.


Cpu, Ram and Gpu usage are normal, I mean when I use these software there's at list 85% of free Cpu, 1GB of Ram still available, and 80% of free GPU. And I got 30GB left on my hardrive which is little but I believe is enough.


So I cannot believe this slow performance is due hardware limitations. There must be some driver issue or something else.


Anyone knows why CS6 is so slow?


Software version:

Photoshop CS6 13.0.1

Illustrator CS6 13.0.0



My Specs:

Os: Snow Leopard 10.6.8

Cpu: Intel Core i7 2.3 GHz

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 8 MB

4GB ram

AMD Radeon HD 6750M

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Nov 11, 2012 5:44 PM

Reply
47 replies

Nov 12, 2012 2:51 PM in response to sig

I don't want to be offensive, but your answer looks just simplistic.


When Photoshop and Illustrator are open I still have 1GB of free ram, 20GB of free space on my hardrive, the CPU usage is just at 10%, and the GPU usage is rougly at 20%.


Now, how can the porblem of lagginess be due hardware limits?


In the last years I've used CS2,3,4 and CS5 and never experienced such laggyness during the transition from one version to the new one.


I mean, have you at least had some similar bad CS6 user experience to mine so that you know what you are talking about? Have you at least got a CS6 product instaleld on your mac?


or you just think that every problem is due low ram?

Nov 12, 2012 4:03 PM in response to idunnoisok

One of the leading contributors to the Apple Communities just told you in the simplest terms what the issues are with CS6 running poorly on your Mac. It would be appropriate to acknowledge his insight instead of blowing him off . You see those 7 little dots below sig's avatar? The almost 32,000 points? It took a lot to earn them, both expertise and participation.


Your Mac just doesn't have what it takes to run CS6 well. You should really have at least 8GB RAM for CS6 and for all practical purposes your Mac is out of hard drive space. Your profile doesn't show the overall size of your hard drive, but you need to keep at least 20% or 100GB free at all times, whichever is greater, in order to not to experience slowdowns with apps like CS6, Final Cut (any of the pro apps). OS X and your apps need that free space to run.

Jan 3, 2013 11:20 AM in response to idunnoisok

Dots and points. What a joke. Don't waste your time here asking for help. I have year old Macpro (8GB RAM, 1TB storage running Mountain Lion) and I'm having the same issue. Illustrator CS6 becomes more and more sluggish as you use it and I usually have to quit/forcequit and restart. I don't have the issue running an older version of Illustrator. There's probably a memory leak in CS6 so it sounds like an ADOBE issue and they're going to have to fix it with an update.


<Edited By Host>

Jan 3, 2013 12:38 PM in response to gimpymw

Hi, thanks for your reply my friend.

I recently bought 16 gigs of owc ram.

Fortunately my Macbook pro early 2011 supports 16 gigs.

I haven't yet tested it deeply but Photoshop Cs6 seems to run really faster now, but it takes lots of ram.

The file project I tested on Photoshop takes 5GB of ram while opened, 5GB! while before I tried to work on it with just 4GB of ram available on my Mbp!


So apparently the issue was really due little available ram.


The slugginess should come when the ram memory begin to swap on the hardrive memory. When I had 4GB of ram, and I use to work on Illutrator and Photoshop at the same time my swap memory would reach 3GB and my pc began to slow down.


If you got some app like Istat, while you are working on Cs6, try to see if your ram memory is going to swap. If so that should be the reason of the slugginess. And even 8GB could not be enough. That's irritating but probably true.


Cheers

Jan 3, 2013 1:06 PM in response to idunnoisok

I'm glad that helped you but you were working with an extremely large photoshop file which would explain why you were having issues. I rarely see anything over 1GB with raster files and Photshop doesn't seem to be a problem for me. My issue is still just with Illustrator. When I run it alone I find it bogs down over time. Adobe's specs for Illustrator CS6 are 2G RAM minimum 8GB recommended. I shouldn't be having any trouble and I shouldn't have to buy more RAM. A google search showed me that many people were having similar issues. I just did an update to Illustrator 16.2.0 and I'm going to see if performance has improved.

Jan 3, 2013 1:20 PM in response to idunnoisok

idunnoisok wrote:


I recently installed Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 and they tend to lag even on just during normal work operations like zooming, opening a file, selecting a tool, browsing menus etc etc.


... And I got 30GB left on my hardrive which is little but I believe is enough.


So I cannot believe this slow performance is due hardware limitations. There must be some driver issue or something else.


Anyone knows why CS6 is so slow?


Software version:

Photoshop CS6 13.0.1

Illustrator CS6 13.0.0



My Specs:

Os: Snow Leopard 10.6.8

Cpu: Intel Core i7 2.3 GHz

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 8 MB

4GB ram

AMD Radeon HD 6750M


My experience is that Photoshop can demand and use prodigious amounts of memory and disk space, much more than one might expect from the size of the files being worked on. While I don't have direct experience with CS6, my daughter uses CS4 on a Macbook Air with 4 GB memory and she had 100 GB free (on a 250 GB solid state drive). CS4 is less demanding than CS6, and in fact with the SSD, it runs pretty well, even with just 4 GB memory (the solid state drive is basically like memory, in fact, in some ways). However after running Photoshop on some projects for a while, we noticed she had only 60 GB free disk space. After restarting her Mac, she had 100 GB free again. Photoshop CS4 was using up 40 GB of disk space! And this was simply editting some (multiple) photos from a digital camera. Photoshop not only has its own memory management processes, but it also pages to disk and uses disk space as "scratch space" in its own fashion. I think that it is inadvisable to run Photoshop with less than 100 GB free disk space, and that's with CS4, not even CS6. And if you don't have a solid state drive, the throughput might slow down immensely unless you have a lot of memory (I think someone else pointed this out already).


Bottom line -- based on what I have seen with CS4, 4 GB memory is too low by at least a factor of x2 (16 GB memory would be even better), and I'd say a minimum of 100 GB free disk space is a must as well. I saw CS4 using more than 40 GB of "scratch disk space" and you are using CS6, which must use significantly more resources than CS4, and you indicate only 30 GB free space. That seems too low to me. I think other Adobe major software packages are similarly demanding, unlike any other software I have seen or used. For instance, I think you would have no trouble running MS-Office software (which is also known for using computer resources, but not anywhere as much as Adobe software).


One thing you can do is when you notice things slowing down, not only quit all other software except for CS6, but also in the Finder, under the Go menu, enter


/private/var


under Go To Folder ...


and then look in the folder called


vm


If you see swapfiles, add up the total space they are taking, and also the space taken by the sleepimage file. These are working to decrease the amount of free space you have and they can quickly grow to tens of GB when Photoshop and other Adobe softwares are running.


Since it sounds like you have now upgraded your RAM, that should help, but you may find that the swapfiles and sleepimage files are taking even more disk apce faster and I think 100 GB free space is needed to avoid further slowdowns.

Feb 28, 2013 5:57 AM in response to sig

I Totally DISAGREE with the APPLE GUYS here!!!


I have a new mac pro 2012 December -

2 x 2.4 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon

28 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC

Software OS X 10.8.2 (12C60)

Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB



AND TRUST ME WHEN EVER I START PHOTOSHOP CS 6 OR ILLUSTRATOR THE MACHINE GOES SLOW. I EVEN TRIED UPDATING CS6


EVEN FILES LIKE 350 KB AND 72 DPI RESOLUTION GO SOOOOOOO SLOW.


TO CLEAR YOUR DOUBTS PHOTOSHOP CS 6 RUNS QUIET FAST ON WINDOWS LAPTOP TOO!!! BUT STRUGGLES ON THIS PROFESSIONAL STUDIO MACHINE.


EITHER YOU SHOULD RECALL YOUR MACS OR SUGGEST.



CAN YOU GUYS GIVE A LOGICAL RATIONALE NOW????

Mar 4, 2013 1:42 AM in response to Eustace Mendis

Hello Eustace,


Ive tried working on 8 Bit color mode and on files which are as low as 100 X 80 px - 72 DPI.

Still photoshop cs6 takes at least takes 5-7 minutes to read the memory and allow me to work.


PS CS6 and Mac Pro compatibility is almost taking it back to the Pentium I era, where web files too take time to save, render, etc.


Everyone using PS CS6/CS5 on MAC PRO is complaining. I think Apple better think of a resolve rather than asking users to look into help files. After all MAC PRO is supposed to be a professional studio system.

Why Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 are so slow on my MacBook Pro early 2011?

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