Interface is Slow and Laggy

@jakemorris1115C0C 

Removing corrupt fonts isn't crazy.  It's just good system maintenance.

@nubnubbud 

Have you been running After Effects on the same hardware for more than a decade?  It's great to hear that you’ve kept your machine out of e-waste, but faster performance is a direct result of faster hardware.

Top of the line 2012 workstations were great for full resolution 1920-by-1080 motion design.  Bumping it up to 3840-by-2260 back then very likely required taking advantage of lowering the resolution and skipping frames during previews. 

No, the After Effects team should not pull a Final Cut Pto and develope something new. They should definitely continue performance improvements that allow for viewing a Preview in a downstream Comp while making edits in an upstream Comp. Something CS6 didn't offer. 

oh yeah, it definitely made it faster... but made the UI worse. in CS6 (which I use) it spent resources rendering the frames in order, but in newer versions there will be chunks of frames completed before the one that's next, slowing preview drastically, and increasing instability. in a 4k test, CS6 got 11-16fps, with most being very close to 13, while the same file in AE22 was between 6-18fps, with occasional hitches of 2-9 seconds without a frame (.5-.1 fps). I couldn't care less about it being faster if it won't even render a preview at a stable framerate.
multi-frame rendering doesn't feel it's very well done, or if it is, it feels like a hack. it's not multithreaded at all. Rather, it's giving one frame to each core. shich is nice, but not multithreading in a useful way at the core counts and powers available to most consumers or professionals.It would be excellent if done for GPU, as that's what they're designed for, but it can't even use all of my GPU as it is, and most effects don't use GPU at all, let alone 16 bit. 
so, yeah, multi-frame rendering is all well and good. but if it truly was 5 whole years of work like they make it seem- wouldn't a new program that could handle modern hardware have been a better and more appreciated use of these developers' time?

After Effects has gone through a major rewrite under the hood for performance and Multu-frame Rendering is 100% worth taking advantage of.  Just update third party plugins and addons so they don't drag AE down with them.

it's likely updating hardware will make it worse, actually. after effects was made begore multi-core processing was a thing, before GPU's were really a thing, and well before RAM was higher than a couple gigs at most. it's basically been patched so hard that you may as well be emulating the UI. Windows does have some pretty nasty restrictions, too. it's suffering from many of the same issues, which is why you can still find the windows NT options and expose its API if you go down a rabbit hole.

Well, in 1995 After Effects was Mac only.  I genuinely miss the free floating windows.  It was extremely easy to tile nested Comps not to mention putting each and every last panel exactly where you wantrd it.

Just adding my two cents to this never-ending issue..

• Even on a brand new, clean and completely driver-updated ryzen 5800X3D/RTX3090ti machine the timeline-hitching issue when working with more than a few keyframes is just as bad as on my previous 6 year old device.

• It infuriates me that i can sit down on my secondary workhorse (M1 Macbook pro), and the timeline and scrubbing is smooth as butter, in the same keyframe-riddled projects.

And maybe... Just maybe, it could be because apple's ui api's offer smoother ui-rendering than windows' ui api's - but could we please just get some sort of insight into why it's been years without an update on the issue?

* Sidenote - i know from a colleague and friend of mine that windows has some gnarly ui restrictions that are a pain to work with. He was looking at davinci resolve when trying to avoid some of windows' insane restrictions, as they've managed to make a smooth and responsive ui by limiting application-to-windows ui interactions. I would be perfectly fine with a less flexible after effects, if it meant better performance - but i also highly doubt a program that's managed to stay the same since 1995 would undergo big changes like that.

Yep. It's so bad I gave up and bought a Mac again. 

What I have found is that if there are layers that have a lot of key frames visible, this slows down the timeline redraw massively. Scrolling vertically in the timeline with key frames visible give 1-2 fps redraw and is very laggy.