MacOS – Problematic performance of Adobe CS5.5 suite on OSX (Snow Leopard)

macosperformance

We are running some 17 iMacs ranging from 2008 models to 2010 models, all with 4gb ram. Most are on 10.5, the newest one on 10.6

We upgraded from CS 4 to CS 5.5 last month. We also upgraded from suitcase fusion 2 to 3 because of this. Both apps with the latest updates.

Now I've got some annoyed designers on my hands 😉 The performance is abominable. Just moving a shape sends the CPU into overdrive.

Only one the two cores goes to 100% CPU. Memory is available, no swapping. Disk almost empty. No extreme disk io.

We have implemented all illustrator and indesign performance settings we found on the fora of adobe. This improved the situation somewhat but it's not really workable.

Maybe related, an illustrator file, using only shapes, no fonts, with terrible performance when moving the shape. We tried saving as PDF, from local disk to local disk, 8mb PDF, 1 minute. Opened from our server (Windows, but with AFP sharing via Extreme-Z IP) the PDF is 37mb and it takes 10 minutes.

I'm at a loss so I hope there is some kind of magic bullet 🙂

Best Answer

By now we found the problem. Our Filewave deployment system kept overwriting the .pref files. We removed them from the deployment and the issue was fixed. So far for saving time deploying through Filewave :)