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SimmZ367713
Participating Frequently
December 4, 2019
Question

VERY poor performance InDesign 2020 (15.0.1) for MacOS (both Catalina, Mojave, High-Sierra)

  • December 4, 2019
  • 4 replies
  • 2233 views

We are a commercial user and I have a dozen of recent and high performance iMac 5K and iMac PRO that are affected with VERY poor performance since they upgraded to InDesign 2020 (current is 15.0.1). The performance are highly problematic because they are causing severe delay in our company production. The performance is so poor that on each move/command we do in InDesign 2020 (such as copy/paste, move an object, etc.) the B.B.O.D. (beach ball of death) appears and spin for like 1 to 2 seconds, but on EACH command we do inside InDesign. Could you imagine the overall extra delay when you a working on a 40 pages job???

 

As the IT manager, I already performed all possible troubleshooting steps. I even just build a 100% fresh iMac (5K), with a clean install of Catalina, then a clean install of InDesign 2020 and the performance are still problematic!

 

This performance problem is not related to MacOS version, nor to a specific iMac machine, since we are experience the same problem on different computers model and on both High-Sierra, Mojave and Catalina OS as well as on my 100% fresh installed test computer, so this is not related to any add-on, plug-ins, preference or anything because the computer is 100% fresh with nothing else installed than Adobe InDesign and other Adobe apps.

 

We are not experiencing any performance issues in Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere or others Adobe app.

 

Anyone else experience this performance issue (I am pretty sure than yes) and any workaround?

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    4 replies

    J
    jeffhalmos
    Inspiring
    April 8, 2020

    I've had to flipp my 4K 32" and 2k 32" monitors so that the 2K is my working monitor. Now InDesign behaves as expected. Both connected via DisplayPort, so my guess is the app hasn't been optimized for high rez. Pathetic.

      Nicholas Petropoulos
      Nicholas Petropoulos
      Inspiring
      April 8, 2020

      Agreed. My CC apps are flying once again. Could not believe the difference in speed when I stumbled upon the solution.

        J
        jeffhalmos
        Inspiring
        April 9, 2020

        5 hours with 3 Adobe tech taking over my Mac, deleting and not restoring preferences, removing files from my System and Utility folders, trying everything is sight. And nothing.

         

        You have to get this to Adobe. They need to know because there are others that don't even know they're having this issue.

        Nicholas Petropoulos
        Nicholas Petropoulos
        Inspiring
        April 7, 2020

        Hi. It may be too late but I've just discovered that if you change the colour PREFS from LG UltraFine to Apple RGB in the display settings, all works brilliant. Was pulling what little hair I had until I just worked it out. Pass this on please.

          J
          jeffhalmos
          Inspiring
          December 5, 2019

          As for workarounds, The usual is to ditch completely the InDesign prefs. Somewhere on this forum are the instructions on what and how to delete. Dunno why in 2019 a text file can bring down a monster app like InDesign.

          S
          SimmZ367713Author
          Participating Frequently
          December 6, 2019

          Hi Jeff, well trashing the prefs could have been an option, however one of the (all) affected workstation is a fully clean (new) installation from both MacOS and Adobe CC with no preferences except for the default and it's still affected by the very poor performance.

           

          I did some further research to explain why InDesign is so slow and I saw some misc things that changed into how it handles linked images. Apparently one reason of the poor performance is when InDesign is charging in the background some of the linked images to the local cache when you use "high resolution screen performance". I don't know why, but according to the progress bar in the lower portion of the application window, it look like if it's downloading the linked images several time when you move something or change page. Because for no reason, the progress bar shows that it's loading a linked image several times. If those liked imagse are just a bit large files (such as a high resolution TIFF of a few hundreds MBs), it slow down A LOT the entire application. I don't remember seeing this behavior in InDesign 2019...

          J
          jeffhalmos
          Inspiring
          December 5, 2019

          Absolutely. Complete horror with 15.0 and 15.0.1. In some cases, bolding a font can not only cause a moments delay, but often the entire text block goes blank. Catalina on a 12 Core Mac Pro 2010 with 48 GB RAM, 8 GB video RAM, and an m.2 SSD. Version 14.x didn't have these issues.

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