Why do I get a spinning beach ball on the first file-open?

Forum|Forum|22 hours ago
July 6, 2026
1 reply
16 views

Hi There. I am running the lastest stable version of Illustrator on my M4 Macbook Pro on Tahoe. I have recently started having an issue where I can load Illustrator, no trouble there... but upon opening the first file, or creating a new doc, the file opens, but then I get the spinning ball for about a minutes before it goes away and the panels appear. This only happens on the first file open...not on launch, and not on subsequent file opens. Things I have tried:

removing all fonts,
killing and rebuilding font cache,
trashing and rebuilding preferences,
uninstalling CC and reinstalling, l
logging out and in to CC, with reboots between...

I can work with this, but it's SUPER annoying and doesn't happen on my other Macs. Just this one and just recently... Any ideas? Thanks!

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Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

What kind of hardware does the MacBook Pro have (CPU type, amount of RAM, etc)?

B

Bejamine FreedmanAuthor

Known Participant

Like I said, it’s an M4 Macbook Pro. It has 24GB of RAM… I’m not sure why this would matter, as I mentioned it’s only recently started to happen, so it was working just fine with this CPU and RAM until recently… Do you think this could be pertinent to the issue?

Thanks! - Ben

B

Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

Some Mac notebooks can tend to be equipped with too little RAM. 24GB is a decent amount. Many of MacBooks have 16GB or only 8GB of RAM; I don’t think either of those amounts is enough to run current versions of Adobe applications like Illustrator in an acceptable manner.

I assume your computer is having these issues with Illustrator while no other apps are running in the background, right? I would wonder if there are other system processes interfering with Illustrator. My computers are on the Windows platform; Windows can be pretty bad about various background processes fighting with apps. And the system has to be periodically cleaned of temporary files and other gunk that builds up.

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