My God, Adobe, how much memory does an updater need?

Adobe is not my favourite software company. I’ve ranted before about splash screens that cannot be moved or covered. Today I was browsing a PDF file in Safari, which was an excruciatingly slow activity for some reason. But then it got an order of magnitude slower, and I see the infamous “Adobe Updater” icon in the dock.

I try to pop up the Activity Monitor to see what’s up. It takes at least 5 minutes, and it shows Safari and Eclipse, the two main reasons for having this computer here at work, as “Not responding”. It also shows that Adobe Updater has an RSIZE of 1.4GB+, and a VSIZE of 3.0GB+, and both numbers are still growing. I kill the Adobe Updater, and Safari and Eclipse both take a while to finish swapping back in their active parts and start working again.

But 10 minutes or so later, the Adobe Fucking Updater starts again. This time I decided to humour it. I closed Eclipse and Safari and waited. And it didn’t take long for the AFU to take up all the memory I had, and then die. I think it got up to about 3.3Gb of VSIZE. And yet, doing a quick back of the envelope calculating, I’m pretty sure it could have sucked every Adobe software product I have on my disk into memory and still not used 3+Gb.

So what the hell is happening? Why is Adobe Fucking Updater so badly written? Why is it chewing memory like that?

I have a theory that it might have something to do with being behind the corporate web proxy (which also sucks mightily). Or it just might be that Adobe’s programmers are incompetent morons who should all be fired and told to never touch a computer again. Or more likely, both. When I get home tonight, I’ll try updating again and see if it really needs more memory than I’m willing to give it.