Brad Melendy

So I’ve been working with Dreamweaver as my primary coding tool since about 2002, back with it was UltraDev, however, things have changed for me with the release of Dreamweaver CS3.  The primary problem is the pure lack of performance and high cpu and memory utilization of CS3.  I’d also like to say that this has been happening to me for more than a year and on three different workstations and two different operating systems.  As an example, I can pretty much count on CS3 running up the CPU while doing nothing at all (see image below).

Why in the world is/has this been happening to me?  Multiple searches around the Internet will reveal others with similiar issues with CS3 as well as in Adobe’s own support forum.  Even so, Adobe has not identified this as a bug with Dreamweaver. There was one KB article that indicated antivirus might be slowing the product down as it scans the multitude of javascript files that Dreamweaver relies upon to do its work, however, excluding .js files from the resident scanner in AVG didn’t make any difference.  Also, why would this be a problem for CS3 and NOT for version 8 if that were truly the cause?

To make matters more strange, I can run Dreamweaver 8 perfectly on all three of my workstations without any issues, it is only CS3 that runs like molasis.  I’ve got two WinXP Pro workstations and a Windows Vista workstation and CS3 runs like a dog on each of them.  I should say that it runs in bursts of about 30 seconds where it is great, then bad, then great and then bad.  It makes the product entirely unusable.

So the end result for me is that I’m trying to make Eclipse work but I really like Dreamweaver.  But with only being able to use version 8, it makes it hard to continue down the Dreamweaver path.  I’m responsible for certifying new software for use by my team of five developers, and after a year of having CS3, we are all still using Dreamweaver 8.  I hate to make this into a huge gripe session but I’m just very let down by Adobe and it likely has cost them some regular Dreamweaver users.  The only thing that is keeping me from switching to CFEclipse is the lack of support for how Dreamweaver manages file check in/out with lock (.lck) files.  However, I’m working on a plugin that will duplicate that functionality and when that is done, it will be, “Goodbye Dreamweaver”.