illustrator running slow. Saying not enough memory when there is enough on system

Hello @tanaeb15893663,

We understand how frustrating it can be to experience performance issues in Illustrator. Would you mind performing a clean reinstallation of the GPU drivers (Intel / NVIDIA / AMD) and setting the Graphics Preference to High-Performance for Illustrator (https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/gpu-110) and checking if it helps?

Also, try the suggestions shared in this help article (https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/kb/not-enough-memory-illustrator-cc.html) and share your observations.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,

Anubhav

You asked, "what's going on here." It sounds like the computer system is simply too old and not powerful enough to handle the processing load Adobe Illustrator is demanding of it. The Core i5-8400 is a mid-range CPU and was released in 2017. The NVidia GeForce 1060 was not a top-tier GPU when it was released in 2016.

16GB of RAM is another problem. Even in a brand new PC equipped with a better Core i7 CPU and a higher end graphics board 16GB of system memory just isn't enough anymore for a Windows PC to be effective at doing graphics work. IMHO, 32GB of RAM should be the minimum starting point for a newly purchased system; 64GB would be more of a recommended level.

Do you have any other applications running at the same time as Illustrator? If you're able to shut down any other open applications and not so necessary background processes it might provide a little more overhead for Illustrator to use. Still, we're talking about what looks like a mid-range computer system when it was new in the 2017 time frame. Even a high end system may start showing its age by the 6 year mark.

16 GB of RAM is not enough memory for some operations. It's just the recommended minimum. What are you trying to do?