Illustrator and InDesign running slow on Windows

Unfortunately I am having the same symptoms for the past 8 months, since I’ve upgraded to Win 11. I have some tips that may help a bit , but not a definitive solution.
I have a similar configuration AMD Ryzen 9 3900X , RTX 3060 64GB Ram.
What you described very thoroughly is what I have been experiencing: The PC works perfectly with 3D tasks, video tasks, After effects, Photoshop, online web apps that use hardware acceleration, but when  it comes to Illustrator, not only Illustrator is slow, it also slows my entire PC.
Everything  suggested on this thread doesn’t work - installing, uninstalling resetting preferences, updating GPU drivers, BIOS, motherboard, nothing.
I’ve gone through troubleshooting through articles, with GPT, with an Adobe expert accessing my PC with a Microsoft expert accessing my PC.

But I do have some few insights, they didn’t solve all my problems, but sometimes they worked (a bit):
1. Indesign – I have a FHD monitor, not 4K – InDesign will not hardware accelerate it -no solution other than buying a 4K monitor.

2. One Adobe expert explained to me that the problem with Indesign and Illustrator is font caching. If you have many fonts installed it will slow down both programs.
He cleared my font cache and  it did work OK, for a few hours….
Clearing font cache is not straight forward, you need to stop some services, and find some locations, and you have to do it in safe mode for windows. I used GPT Gemini and Claude to write a .bat file to do that, but it’s not perfect. It sometimes help a bit.

3. Fonts, I installed FontBase, it’s an app that manages active fonts. So you uninstall fonts from your windows system and move them to a dedicated folder outside windows. Then FontBase can activate and deactivate them when you want. Then I came to another issue where there are hundreds of fonts that are Microsoft fonts, and should not be uninstalled.
I also disabled Adobe’s font syncing . I must say though it was recommended I don’t feel it helped that much.

4. Sometimes using Illustrator Beta worked better than the original Illustrator, I can’t explain why.

To sum it up: I see no clear solution, I think this needs to be solved by Adobe experts, my turning point was upgrading from Win 10 to Win 11, everything went perfectly well except illustrator. I try to avoid Illustrator as much as I can, because reinstalling windows is the only thing I think will help me, and I am not going to do that in the near future.
I hope someon has a “magic” solution for this...

Gidon

Performance issues often happen after an update if the option to import previous settings and preferences was used during the install. Using older settings and preferences that were aligned with the older code of the previous version can cause all kinds of problems. Try resetting preferences for both programs. This will restore the programs to their defaults and should improve performance overall.

To reset preferences in Illustrator:

For Macintosh Users: The User Library folder in which Illustrator’s preferences are stored is hidden by default on most Macintoshes. To access it make sure that Illustrator is closed and click on the desktop to launch a Finder Window (Command-N).With this window in column view follow the path User>Home folder (it’s the folder with an icon that looks like a house—it may have the user’s name rather than “Home”) and click on the Home folder. With the Option Key pressed choose Library from the Finder Go Menu. “Library” will now appear within the Home folder. Within the Library folder find the folder called Preferences and within it find the folder called “Adobe Illustrator <Version #> Settings” (earlier versions of Illustrator might just say “Adobe Illustrator”) and the file called “com.adobe.Illustrator.plist” and delete both that folder and that file. When Illustrator is next launched it will create new preference files and the program will be restored to its defaults.

For Windows Users: You can try the quick way of resetting on a PC which is to hold down Ctrl + Alt + Shift when launching Illustrator and respond affirmatively when asked if you want to reset. There have been some recent reports that the window asking if you want to reset is not popping up but that the prefs are being reset anyway. If this works great but if it doesn’t you may have to manually delete them.

To do so:

On Windows 7 and above the preference files are hidden. To find them go to the Control Panel and open Folder Options and then click the View tab. Then select “Show hidden files and folders” or “Show hidden files, folders or drive options” in Advanced Settings. Then delete (or rename) the folder at the end of this path: C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator [version number]\ Settings\<Language>. Make sure that Illustrator is closed when you do this. When you relaunch the program it will create  new preference files and the program will be at its default settings.

The advantage of manually deleting preference files is that after you’ve reset up the program (make sure that no document window is open) to your liking, you can create copies of your personalized “mint” preference files (make sure that you quit the program before copying them—that finalizes your customization) and use them in the future to replace any corrupt versions you may need to delete.

The above instructions will also work for resetting preferences in InDesign. Simply navigate to the corresponding InDesign folders and files instead of the Illustrator files.

I’m having the same issue - since the last updates all adobe software is running painfully slow, becoming unresponsive regularly. It’s a nightmare. High spec machine, everything was running smoothly previously.

Have you tried installing a different build of Illustrator or InDesign to see if there is any performance difference? The public beta of both apps is available, as are previous builds going back one full version.

Hello ​@Francesco33386231x1p6 

I’m sorry to hear about your experience. Would you mind trying to run Illustrator under a different administrator account (Windows) and checking if it helps? Also, try performing a clean reinstallation of the GPU(s) drivers (Intel / NVIDIA / AMD) and setting the Graphics Preference to High-Performance for Illustrator (https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/faqs/GPU-110.html) and let us know how it goes.

Looking forward to hearing from you.
Anubhav