text insanely slow to render

This post by Fede0D4D on this link solved all my text-rendering problems. Give it a try:
„I was having the same problem. M1 Mac. I fixed it by going to the Font Book app, right click in the font and choosing "resolve duplicates". Now everything is fast again!“

I might be late for the party, but I am almost sure what the problem is because I had the same issue before. IT'S THE FONT.

Case:

I installed a new font from a demo version. After being approved by the client, I bought the font and installed the complete version, so I needed to change all fonts. (Also, I use Overlord to import from AI to AE to keep design format) This is important because it was part of the problem.

Solution(s):

-Try using a bolder or lighter version of the font (After this, you could clear your ram and cache for an extra clean, and then try to go back to the desired font style)

-Retype the whole text in Arial and then change it to the desired font (You could also try this step backward, play a little bit with it)

-Last resource: Create shapes from text

Hope this helps!

Note: Latest versions of After Effects (I'm on 22.2) have the render time pane. When the solution worked, it went from 35ms to 1ms.

I know this is an old post, but I just wanted to say this: I was close to pulling hairs with AE. I had a very basic comp, animating only a shape and static text. It was worse than my 10 year old PC. But it was the font I was using. For some reason it was slowing everything down to unworkable levels. I changed the font accross all my comps and it was fine. 

The font in question was a 'print' style eroded font, so perhaps it had a lot of nodes/points for AE to render?

I just had a very similar experience and managed to solve it!

I was animating one line of text and it was causing my system to run very slow and renders were painfully slow too. Turns out, it was a new font that I installed on Windows, HOWEVER I installed the same font multiple times by accident!

I presumed that when installing fonts, Windows would say 'you already have this installed', but it didn't. So it had been on my system in 3 different places and must have been confusing the Adobe applications.

So I checked through the fonts in settings, and it was there - the same font duplicated 3 times. Clicked uninstall twice and running much better now!

I just encountered this problem in a very strange way. I was given a lower-thirds project file (which I cannot confirm what version it was created in, but it had to be converted to CC2020 upon opening). Super simple project, only a name and a title, two lines. My AE was craaaawling. Everything was lagging, not just editing the text, but also switching tools, drop-down menus, everything. I tried switching gpu on and off, no effect. I tried, typing in new text, no effect. I was stumped.

Until... out of desperation, I decided to re-make the provided animation from scratch. Same project, but new comp. I add my new text, same font. Works perfectly! But if I copy the text layer from the old comp into the new comp, it all freezes up again! Weird, right? So whatever problem is occuring in this case, I do know that it's not the computer/gpu, it's not the font itself, it's not the project, and it's not the comp itself. Changing the text doesn't help (as in typing in new text), but here's what does fix it: If I change the font of the text (must change fonts of all culprit text layers), everything works again! And if I then change the fonts back to their original font, it still works! I'm no programmer, but it would appear that there is some sort of issue with the layer retaining a bad linkage or reference to the font file. And so changing the font breaks that link and forces it to update the layer to the correct "path".

Anyway, that was my experience. Not sure if that is the same problem as others, but maybe it can provide some clues to the underlying issue.

I was having similar issues - it was extremely painful working with a surprisingly few number of Text layers in a simple scene with simple transform keyframes and no effects / no motion blur.  I ran a test on the same scene, but changed all the fonts to an Adobe font and the responsiveness went through the roof.  I then tried closing AE, then un-installing and re-installing the original font from the scene, and now AE is running much smoother.  If anybody is having similar issues, you. might try un-installing/re-installing the font to see if it does the trick.

Same scenario for me, it is now September 2020 with a machine that normally eats After Effects for breakfast.. Like 3D scenes almost preview in real time on this thing, text however, well I suppose that is too much to ask for... C'mon adobe.

Can confirm: text layers cause horrible lag After Effects. When I switch from cc2020 to cc2019, I don't have this problem anymore. 

Mac os 10.15.5

AE 17.1.1

Same issue here, Type rendering is ridiculously slow, other machines with same specs have no issues, just my machine. 
I have not debugged it and I'm not sure if that makes sense technically, but I was thinking maybe it could be a third-party font manager issue somehow. Do you have something installed, maybe even a few of them and creating some conflicts?

Win 10, AE 2020

I've been struggling with exactly the same problem for weeks.  I've a load of ongoing projects with tons of animated text.  These are short films for banking products so then need updating constantly.  The problem does seem to lie with where the text was coppied from and what data it brought with it.   There's a script available from here for $39

https://aescripts.com/pt_textedit/ 

Basiaclly it allows you to edit all the text layers in a project simultaneously.  So just by changing the font across the entire project the changing it back again you can solve the issue.