Slow performance when using both Illustrator and Photoshop 2026 on an M1 Mac

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I have a Mac M1 Pro with 32GB Ram and 1 TB SSD (300 GB available) and Tahoe 26.5. When I open Illustrator and Photoshop at the same time, the CPU ramps up almost to the max and the fans turn on. Working in either apps becomes very sluggish and unresponsive, even with small and simple files. When I pair Photoshop with any other Adobe app, the problem doesn’t occur, only in combination with Illustrator. So the latter seems to be the culprit.
This is very frustrating, because I need to keep several apps open for my kind of projects.
Can anyone help me here please?

E

elgasaCorrect answer

Inspiring

Although this isn’t a fundamental solution, I’ve found a workaround other than ‘Full-screen mode with menu’, so I’m reporting it here.

This workaround can be applied to all the affected applications—Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver. Even if you have all four running simultaneously, the GPU usage will drop to 0% if you leave them idle.

[How to do it]

Go to Menu > Window > and deselect ‘Application Frame’.

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Tina_Irvine

Community Expert

Hi @sputnik6,

Illustrator and Photoshop both require a lot of processing power. Do your best to max out space on your drive before running both apps simultaneously. Also, close down anything else that’s running (email, browsers...). Hopefully this helps. You can also run your Mac’s Activity Monitor to see what’s eating up the most power.

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sputnik6Author

Known Participant

Hi @Tina_Irvine, thank you for the tips.
Using the Activity Monitor, I could see that the WindowServer is racing up like crazy when both apps are open (see my separate answer above).
I hope to find a clue why this is happening…

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