Preview.app causing system sluggishness/lag

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Level 1

19 points

Preview.app causing system sluggishness/lag

I am running OS X Yosemite 10.10 on a Mid-2012 13-inch Macbook Air, with a 1.8Ghz Core i5 and 4GB memory.

Preview.app appears to be severely and aversely affecting system performance, causing consistent system sluggishness/lag (particularly with respect to drawing UI animations such as moving windows, Mission Control, etc.) after 1-3 hours of heavy use of Preview.app.

In particular, as part of my daily workflow, I actively use Preview.app with 5-15 PDFs open (each having 10-50 pages) and perform frequent annotations on the PDFs. Most of the PDFs are image based and OCRd (USPTO patent publications, mostly).

As I work, my system slowly becomes more and more sluggish to the point that it is nearly unusable. The sluggishness is particularly noticeable with respect to drawing core elements, such as drawing and moving windows, using Mission Control, switching desktops, etc. When the system is sluggish, I am not noticing an unusual system load (e.g., no process is consuming excessive CPU cycles, and the system is not swapping excessively). While it appears that Preview.app is using a relatively large amount of memory (e.g., ~1 GB) and causes the sluggishness, quitting Preview.app does not appear to resolve the sluggishness--that takes a system restart.

I am not sure whether the problem is caused merely from Preview.app running with several PDFs open, or wether it is caused by annotating the PDFs.

I have tried performing the same type of workload using an alternate PDF viewer (Skim, http://skim-app.sourceforge.net) and system performance does not degrade. In addition, this problem did not exist in Mavericks under the same usage scenarios with Preview.app.

Is anybody else seeing similar behavior?

MacBook Air, OS X Yosemite (10.10), Mid 2012; 1.8GHz i5; 4GB Memory

Posted on Oct 20, 2014 4:12 PM

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Answer 1

KirkCoo Author

Level 1

19 points

Oct 29, 2014 10:45 AM in response to KirkCoo

Some further results, which lead me to believe there is a problem in one or more of Preview, the GPU drivers, or the WindowServer.

I have already performed the steps (e.g., reset SMC and PRAM) outlined in https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6623697. Additionally, I should note that I installed Yosemite from scratch, but restored my data from a Time Machine backup. During the restore, and to try to be as "clean" as possible, I opted to not bring in settings or "all other files and folders".

I did an experiment yesterday. I had used my MBA for two full days running all sorts of applications (Safari, Firefox, MS Word, Numbers, VMWare View, iTunes, Mail, Calendar, etc.), while avoiding Preview, with everything being smooth and responsive. Then, at the end of the day yesterday, I opened and started reading/annotating around 5 PDFs in Preview. Almost immediately, all system animations became laggy. The lag persisted even when closing out of all running windowed apps.

Here is a snapshot of the system at that point:

Etrecheck:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4124cyyzzi...check.rtf?dl=0

Activity Monitor (CPU):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m0ktnbykkk...%20PM.png?dl=0

Activity Monitor (Memory, sorted by Real Memory):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sakmx8g7wr...%20PM.png?dl=0

Activity Monitor (Memory, sorted by Memory):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/423wci0154...%20PM.png?dl=0

By all accounts, the system is idle. However, animations (e.g., switching desktops, etc.) are terribly laggy. Again, everything was smooth for two days prior to firing up Preview.

Since the system appears idle, and the lag persists after Preview.app (and everything else)is close, I suspect that the GPU drivers or WindowServer have a problem that Preview brings out.

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Answer 2

Oct 30, 2014 3:51 AM in response to KirkCoo

Just dropped here to give my +1. I can confirm the behaviour described. Tested on my MBA mid 2013, MBP Retina Late 2013 and my 27" iMAC 2013.

It seems to be a critical bug in kernel or kernel extensions, considering that can be reproduced on different hardware.

I can add that other apps that rely on the OS pdf rendering platform trigger the same behaviour.

Discussions reporting a similar issue:

Preview is very slow after Yosemite upgrade.

Slow PDF Viewing in Yosemite

Annoying slowness of Preview after Yosemite upgrade

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Answer 3

KirkCoo Author

Level 1

19 points

Oct 30, 2014 4:25 PM in response to Marcelo NS

A possible resolution. I have been participating in a thread (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=20260309) at the MacRumors forums, and it was suggested (http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=20251224&postcount=86) to:

Delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist

Delete ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.windowserver*.plist

Shutdown OSX

Startup, immediately press and hold the P and R keys while holding down the option (⌥) and command (⌘) keys before the gray boot screen appears, which resets the PRAM

I had previously reset the PRAM, so deleting the window server plists was new for me (even though I did a clean install of Yosemite, these may have been brought back in with my Time Machine restore).

I did this, and I have had promising results. I just fired up Preview with 15+ PDFs (along with almost all of the ~15 applications in my dock). I did a lot of scrolling and annotating in Preview. Sure, thing slowed down a bit with all this open (Preview itself still performed rather poorly compared to Mavericks, but it was usable), but my system did not get into its normal laggy state that persists even when I close everything.

We'll see how things stack up with some more long-term use (*fingers crossed*).

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Answer 4

Nov 18, 2014 3:50 PM in response to KirkCoo

Just updated to 10.10.1 sadly they did´t fix the issue, lame. Apple is going down after Steve left.

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Answer 5

magiaros

Level 1

0 points

Dec 14, 2014 7:06 PM in response to Marcelo NS

"angry birds" and "cut the rope" are working perfectly on Yosemite hence apple has made a great job

i cannot read my medical pdf files however apple has different priorities due to the fact that MacBooks are professional tools...

i have tried preview 7 on yosemite however i have the same issue

when i open large pdf files i run out of ram(10 mb available) and preview stops responding

my retina macbook has 8gb ram and 256 gb hdd late 2012

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Answer 6

magiaros

Level 1

0 points

Dec 25, 2014 9:55 AM in response to magiaros

i fixed the issue returning to mavericks

the issue was only with large pdf files over 400 mb.i had no issue with small pdf files

with mavericks i cannot use iCloud drive and my iPhone cannot connect with retina MBP

i have decreased my storage plan from 200 to 20 gb because i cannot use this extra gb without cloud drive.Dropbox is still working.Thanks god dropbox is not developed from apple

i liked yosemite however i must read my medical pdf files (some pdf files are more than 1,5 gb)

i am going to wait for this issue to be solved and then install yosemite.

With mavericks i never had issue with pdf files even with some pdf files larger than 3 gb(i merged some medical pdf books and created a large pdf file) preview and search are super fast!

i am disappointed nevertheless i hope that apple will address this issue.

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Answer 7

KirkCoo Author

Level 1

19 points

Feb 9, 2015 3:52 PM in response to magiaros

Band-Aid (and potentially risky) solution: Replace the Yosemite PDFKit with the Mavericks version.

Re: Annoying slowness of Preview after Yosemite upgrade

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