Illustrator not addressing ram before paging to disk on windows 10

Question

Hello! I have a problem specifically when using Illustrator CC, updated to 2020, on Windows 10 on a Razer Blade base model. When dealing with a file in which I was importing images of 100-200 MB each, Illustrator became unusable and hung after getting to the fifth or sixth image. On checking the system monitor, what appears to be happening is that after addressing about 1.2GB of RAM, Illustrator starts paging everything out to disk. Given that the RB base model only has a 128GB, very slow SSD for its system partition, that starts filling up quickly, and responsiveness is horrible. I don't want to set the scratch disk to the spinning HDD in this thing because that will be even slower. I ran a test between Illustrator and Photoshop, opening images one after another to see how RAM utilization stacks up. Photoshop seems able to address all of the laptop's memory. Illustrator hits that same 1.2GB cap and starts paging to disk. Is there any way to fix this behavior and force Illustrator to address all of the system's available RAM? This laptop has 16GB - it should be fine!

Many thanks!!!!

Mylenium · Answer

Comparing PS and AI is not really helpful. Apples and oranges, you know. The rest could be anything. A 200 MB image is already quite large and if by that you mean a compressed format like JPEG or PNG its decompressed data can easily exceed gigabytes in which case swapping to disk would be inevitable. There are tons of other things, but suffice it to say that perhaps you are confusing AI's way of previewing vs. its underlying data handling of pixel-based imagery. That is to say what you see is likely quite normal and intended by design for your own safety. In any case it's impossible to say much more than this speculation without some concrete info on the image files, document sizes and settings and so on.

Mylenium

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