Illustrator is *so slow* when dealing with multiple linked raster images

Question

I'm creating some vinyl graphics for a wall - basically a collage of a load of tour posters. There are 72 in all, totalling 2.5GB. They're all linked rather than embedded.

When opening or saving, Illustrator locks up for about 4-5 minutes. Autosaving locks it up for a minute or so. Why is this? The specs of the machine are:

Illustrator CC 2019

Windows 10 ver 1803 build 17134.345 (64-bit)

Intel i7-6700K @ 4GHz (4C 8T)

64GB RAM

2x Samsung 960 EVO M.2 SSDs (I'm using two swap files, one on each of these, and I'm working off the D drive here rather than the network)

GeForce GTX 980 GPU

After Effects happily uses 40+GB of memory and sails along without a hiccup. But Illo doesn't seem to use more than a few GB - in fact it's often using less than Firefox. I've been through this page (Improve Illustrator performance on Windows) and followed the steps on it, without much improvement.

Is there any way I can get it to save everything more quickly? I don't really want to turn autosave off, although I've set it to happen every 5 minutes rather than every 2.

d0nut247 · Accepted Answer

first turn 'off' 'Create PDF Compatible File' when you go to save the document,

this will then speed up auto saves and incremental saves you make,

if you really need pdf compatibility you just need to re-save it at the end of all your work with that check box back on.

that will speed things up dramatically.

next step if you are working on a lot of edits to the layout is use proxy images, annoyingly Ai doesn't manage this for you well. unless you want to use old fashioned eps images which will automatically use a low res proxy for you.

So I tend to make a folder for low res placeholder image versions of anything im placing in to the doc just using screen res png versions of files while i'm working on layouts, and then update the images when prepping for print at the end of the whole development and sign off with client.

NoMagnolia · Answer

Another update... I went through and embedded all the artwork, then saved. This took 2m45s and resulted in a 933MB file.

I then "saved as" and unticked "use compression". This resulted in a 4.5GB file, but took only 1m 12sec.

I'm now going to unembed everything again and see if that speeds things up. I'm still not clear on why the file size was around 470MB with all the artwork linked: surely the only thing that ought to be in the AI file in this case is a description of each piece of linked artwork, and maybe a thumbnail?

Illustrator is so slow when dealing with multiple linked raster images

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