Dear Vegas Tech heads,
I just stumbled across something that I know most of you would find disturbing living in NLE optimal performance world.
I recently had to do a PC system refresh by restoring to a prior system HDD image due to a couple wonky system issues that I could not fix manually. I also often use UserBenchmarks to run system performance tests to see how my system is performing. This time around of having to re-install multiple programs on my PC after restoring to an earlier HDD image, I decided to run UserBenchmarks performance tests and bookmark them after installing each suite of program installs.
In regards to Adobe products I use Photoshop CC and Acrobat Pro. Photoshop forces me to install Adobe's Creative Cloud as well although I never use it. After performing these installs, I noticed multiple Adobe services being launched during startup, so I disabled them in the startup menu and then tested to see if Photoshop and Acrobat Pro still launched on my system. All still worked as I needed it, so I thought I was good.
Adobe startup processes disabled
Here's what UserBenchmarks showed me "Prior" to installing the Adobe products which is ok, I've seen this in the past.
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/23465977
AFTER the install of the Adobe products and AFTER disabling the Adobe "Startup" items in task manager, I rebooted my PC and ran another Benchmark performance Test and discovered this new item. A new message of background processes running, chewing up CPU usage.
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/23524279
That got me to looking at background processes which were running using Task Manager. Sure enough there was like 5 Adobe processes running after a fresh boot and having not even run any of the Adobe products on my PC. The stuff is so intrusive that the processes have to be killed in a particular order, because if you kill one process, the one which is still running will relaunch it. I was able to kill those Adobe background processes in task manager once I figured out the proper order and ran another Benchmark test without rebooting. Sure enough, the background CPU usage message went away.
Post Benchmark after killing Adobe processes in Task Manager
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/23524538
It seems Adobe is doing some stealth background startups which got me wondering if others had observed this problem and if there was a solution, where Google search brought me to this discussion on the Adobe forums.
https://community.adobe.com/t5/get-started/serious-why-are-so-many-background-processes-required-when-using-adobe-cloud-apps/m-p/9472881#M402936
You don't need to read that thread, I already did. The summary is that many of their users have noticed this bloatware running in the background without having launched any Adobe products, and they're pissed and looking for a solution and answers from Adobe to shut the sh*t down, where an Adobe rep responded and basically blew them off with a lame response that the stuff needs to be running, where multiple users have conducted similar tests as myself and discovered differently. Even after I kill the stealth processes running in the background using Task Manager, Photoshop and Acrobat Pro still startup and run fine, which is all that I want for the stuff to run when I want to use it, and it to be completely shut down when I'm not.
The problem is present on MAC and Linux systems as well, where a potential solution was provided by a user of using a scheduling assistant on MAC or LINUX during startup to manually shut the background Adobe processes down.
So now that I got all of that background information out of the way, finally to my actual question. I know many of you use Adobe AE as well as Photoshop. Can anyone recommend some potential solutions on the PC to kill Adobe's bloatware processes from running in the background upon startup?
Going into Task Manager and manually killing the processes after each time I boot up is not practical, and not installing Photoshop or Acrobat Pro and using other lesser apps is really not something I want to do at this time.