Flash CS4 for Mac is slow as fudge?

[mp3sattack]

i was hoping to convince my boss to move to CS4, then tried Flash CS4... what a dissapointment, things like select and deselect take a long time and is stupid that simple things like those take so long, something i could have done in 10 minutes, it has taken me over 30, it's a shame :/

(BTW, i'm in a PC and it surpasses the CS4 requirements)

Goodbye Flash CS4 Trial, i'm staying with CS3

[captkeebz]

Hi everyone,

Late to the party, I know. My entire team of 40+ artists and developers just upgraded to the CS4 suite. We are unfortunately regretting it. We have a mix of professional workstations running XP with mostly quad cores less than two years old. Flash CS4 is almost unusable. Constant crashing, NO SUPPORT FOR WORKING OVER A LAN (which was news to me after working with Flash for 5 years) http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/000/d9bbd9d4.html, mysterious font issues and many other miscellaneous issues, and EXTREME slowness. Unfortunate, as I have been a heavy advocate for Flash in that past, and have spend those 5 years learning all about its intricacies. We work with tens of thousands of FLAs in a tight production environment and we just need a tool that works. Flash CS4 is not adequate, sorry to pile on. If you don't have a specific need to use Flash, I would recommend avoiding this release in lieu of alternatives.

[captkeebz]

I also find is very suspicious that no links to any Adobe sites are showing up in Google while I'm researching this very serious issue. I have to wonder if they're actively trying to suppress complaints. C'mon Adobe, the Flash platform was becoming increasingly difficult for me to justify to my management, this debacle isn't helping.

[Mark2k]

I just upgraded to a 2.93 Core2Duo with 4 gig of DDR3 Ram and a 7200rpm HD and, while performance is better, some stuff is insanely slow on CS4 that was manageable on my 2.33ghz 2gig machine under CS3. That is uber sad.

[Strizbiz]

Just thought I'd throw in my 2 cents for anyone thinking about upgrading from CS3, Id SERIOUSLY advise you not to. If you are on any type of time constraint
this is one to stay away from. It has some cool new features but they are not worth the trade off unless you want to work slower than working in CS3.
I ended loosing a client because of how slow the project was taking because of the "Spinning wheel" I kept getting and I had to start another project over in CS3.
I even tried the latest update. I really just dont have time to "try" different solutions when the work needs to get done. I am using a Mac Dual 2.0 G5 with 5 gigs of ram, which I would assume should be able to handle it.
Ill be sticking with CS3 from now on no matter what. BTW adobe, an update isnt supposed to slow you down guys. Better luck next version.

[debofly]

Yeah I just made the change from PC to Mac about 2 months ago and did a platform change and upgraded to CS4 and it is slow as christmas on to much. But Im hanging in there since I'm sure it will be resolved.

[rrutter81]

cs4 was slow on my xp laptop....

its pretty decent for my desktop workhorse. quad phenom 3 ghz with 4 gigz of ram / ati card.

[dekvar]

Yeah I just made the change from PC to Mac about 2 months ago and did a platform change and upgraded to CS4 and it is slow as christmas on to much. But Im hanging in there since I'm sure it will be resolved.

Haven't tried CS4 myself and don't plan to after what i've read.

What galls me is this. Adobe (and some other companies) have created whole industries around these applications: Flash, AE, PS, Premiere, Word, etc. etc. Every year or so, they release a "new" version with one or two new features that they actually thought of years ago but deliberately withheld so they'd have an excuse to release future versions ad infinitum (i.e. to milk everybody for more cash). Pretty soon we'll be running Flash XS 9 (really ver. 23) and Photoshop XS9 (really ver. 41). It's absurd. Like many things including people, software peaks, then starts to decline. Obviously CS4 is past that point.

I'm still using Flash 5, which as we all know was the big jump (from v. 4). I've tried MX, 8, CS3. Yah, they have a few goodies, but man, is Flash 5 ever fast on a newer machine. And i do mean faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast!! Have fun with CS4 though.

[kellyimaging]

I am running Flash CS4 on a MacBook Pro, Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.6 GHz, 4GB ram, 800 MHZ buss speed.
AKA - one sweet machine!

Flash CS4 seemed to be running fine. But I am working on a large multi page web site with lots of text. Original page was created in Flash CS3. and components are imported from Illustrator CS4. It is so painfully slow. I'm not animating anything in the time line, it's all done in action script. The only thing in the time line are the pages, navigation points to a different frame for each page.

It's so darn slow that even clicking on a primitive square and trying to move it takes 2-4 seconds. Clicking on text is equally painful.

I'm going to try rebuilding my site from scratch in CS4 - without starting from a CS3 file.

Flash also seemed to be hurting after importing large text blocks from Illustrator.

[jdehaan]

Make sure that you use the CS4 updater - there have been a ton of performance issues fixed:

http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/downloads.html

List of bugs fixed here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/rgalvan/2009/...available.html

[kellyimaging]

I was running Flash 10.0.0
I updated to Flash 10.0.2
And it is running MUCH better
Thanks!

[maralbjo]

I have the same machine as kellyimaging, I also work on CS3 files originally created on a XP system, and I also updated to 10.0.2.

Still slow as a donkey.

[jdehaan]

If you can share your file(s), or provide steps from scratch to reproduce consistently, we can look at what the problem is and try to fix it. We'll also need to know all details about the computer system (RAM, cores, OS version, etc) so we can find a similar system to run the file on. There are many variables and often whatever is causing the slow down is extremely specific.

Thanks,
Jen
Flash team

[maralbjo]

Hello, this sounds promising. I am running Flash CS4 Professional, now v10.0.2 on a MacBook Pro with 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM. My MAC OS X version is 10.5.7.

Another perhaps useful piece of information is that the project runs smooth (as expected) when run via a browser (Firefox), but runs slow when testing the site locally. There are too many files to send over email or this channel, but the project may be viewed on www.tickertarot.com (again; runs smoothly).

Any help appreciated and thanks for making an effort.

[endline]

I have found that ALL cs4 apps on my mac are slow. when AE loads as fast as illustrator we have a problem. It should not take 4 gigs of RAM to run illustrator.
Also, the shape tweeing playback in cs4 seems verry bogged down. maybe i will take a video and post what i am experiencing.

[enpstudios]

Flash CS4 is slow as death on all my PC's.

I can't even open the components panel or it crashes.

[greg33]

I have been using CS4 on my new iMac 27", which is a strong computer, and it absolutely bogs down like its nobody's business for larger movies. To echo other posts, just panning through the timeline, right-clicking a frame, anything really, yields a good 10 second wait. And don't even try selecting multiple frames at once!

[jdehaan]

As I noted above:

Make sure that you use the CS4 updater - there have been a ton of performance issues fixed:

http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/downloads.html

------- And (if that doesn't fix it) -----------
If you can share your file(s), or provide steps from scratch to reproduce consistently, we can look at what the problem is and try to fix it. We'll also need to know all details about the computer system (RAM, cores, OS version, etc) so we can find a similar system to run the file on. There are many variables and often whatever is causing the slow down is extremely specific.

Thanks,