Photoshop uses 50%+ CPU just to move he cursor, anyone else notice?

[RoboCop001]

Hey everyone.

I just posted this problem I'm having on the Adobe forums, but no one seems to be agreeing with me. The best advice I got was "buy lots of batteries", and that shouldn't be necessary.

So I'm here wondering if anyone has this problem other than me? Surely someone must have noticed this...

I'm using Photoshop CS3 on a MBP 2.33GHz. And whenever PS is the active application, the CPU goes up to 50% or greater usage just because I'm moving the cursor around.

I first noticed this when I had dashboard open and PS was the active app. iStat Pro would show the CPU goes up to 50% or more, and it seemed random until I noticed that it was only when I moved the cursor around.

Anyway... does no one else agree that this is a serious bug, especially for laptop owners? I shouldn't have to buy several batteries just to get good battery life when using PS. And yes, I do realize that having more than one battery might be a given in the pro-laptop-user world. But since I don't go out in the field too often, I don't want to spend so much money on batteries.

Please tell me someone else has noticed this? And if there's some kind of fix for it? I've submitted a bug report to Adobe. I wonder if they can do anything about it.

Thanks..

 

[RoboCop001]

Anyone have any ideas?

I mean... come on, this shouldn't be happening. I wasn't even doing that many things in Photoshop today, and the fans went way up. Things that weren't even processor intensive. But since I was moving the mouse around a lot and moving around some text and lines, the fans went way up.

I'm not going insane am I.... this has GOT to be a bug.

Maybe there's no fix, but still. Does any one else even notice this?


..... annyone? Surely someone must believe this to be a bug too?? lol

 

[apfhex]

Do you have some sort of life-updating pallet open? I usually have the Info pallet open (shows color values, X Y coords, etc.) — I monitored CS2 CPU usage with just moving the cursor around and saw about 15%. The number went to 6% when I closed the Info pallet. Mind you this is running in Rosetta as well. It might be that there's a bug in the CS3 version, but I don't have that available to test.

 

[RoboCop001]

Do you have some sort of life-updating pallet open? I usually have the Info pallet open (shows color values, X Y coords, etc.) — I monitored CS2 CPU usage with just moving the cursor around and saw about 15%. The number went to 6% when I closed the Info pallet. Mind you this is running in Rosetta as well. It might be that there's a bug in the CS3 version, but I don't have that available to test.

Thanks for the reply. Other than the Info pallet, I can't think of any other live-updating pallets. But I did try closing Info to see if it changed anything, but it did not.

I guess it probably is a bug. It would be great if there was a fix. Especially when I'm running off battery power.

 

[berggren.anders]

Hey everyone.
So I'm here wondering if anyone has this problem other than me? Surely someone must have noticed this...

Yes, I do. Anyone that uses Photoshop on Mac can confirm this. For example, open Activity Monitor, switch to Photoshop, create a new document, and hold down the mouse button with for example the selection tool.

Result? 50-100% CPU usage.

Photoshop probably contains a lot of old, legacy code. The user interface is a real CPU hog. The programmers cannot be proud of this, and I wouldn't be surprised if the next version (CS5?) addresses this. They are going to rewrite in Cocoa, I heard.

 

[RoboCop001]

Yes, I do. Anyone that uses Photoshop on Mac can confirm this. For example, open Activity Monitor, switch to Photoshop, create a new document, and hold down the mouse button with for example the selection tool.

Result? 50-100% CPU usage.

Photoshop probably contains a lot of old, legacy code. The user interface is a real CPU hog. The programmers cannot be proud of this, and I wouldn't be surprised if the next version (CS5?) addresses this. They are going to rewrite in Cocoa, I heard.

I really hope they fix it in CS5. I'm guessing the problem remains in CS4?

If they're rewriting for Cocoa then I hope they are smart enough to get rid of this bug instead of lazying out and somehow keeping it there lol it drives me nuts!

Thanks for the reply.

 

[TXBDan]

I use PS CS4 quite a lot on my 2.4ghz early '08 MBP w/ 4gigs of ram.

I just confirmed that it does indeed bump the CPU to about 50% when i hold the mouse down.

Who cares, though? It performs great. I almost always have a VMware session and LightRoom 2 running. I often need to pop open PS CS4 and everything always runs great.