Inspiring

Answered

AI 2024 very slow

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
October 26, 2023
8 replies
9389 views

Using a macbookpro, OS 12.5, M1 chip, 16GB memory

I am now working on an illustrated book. About 45 pages (artboards) in all. Each page has an illustration that fills the artboard. Each original artwork (in psd format) is about 30Mb but they are linked into the AI file, not embedded. Everything worked smoothly and quickly under AI 2023 but after AI automatically upgraded to 2024, I often get the spinning color wheel when I try to navigate among the artboards. To open the file takes 60 seconds, and to save the file take several minutes.

Can anyone suggest how I can speed things up?

Is there a way to revert to using AI 2023? I don’t find version 2023 in my Applications folder anymore. Just 2024

Performance

Correct answer Monika Gause

Illustrator still needs to compute and display the linked artwork.

16 GB of RAM is not sufficient for that. If you want to do that kind of stuff, you need to get a more powerful computer.

Unique1234567890

Participant

Hi

Illustrator is written using a decades old codebase, that only works with 1 CPU thread.

Adobe is aware just how slow illustrator is, and they have a couple of surveys going on here https://survey.adobe.com/jfe/form/SV_cGbDwd2k1gfpIOO and here https://survey.adobe.com/jfe/form/SV_czQpFnmd3PWAreS regarding the lack of speed.

Adobe feel there is a lack of uptake on these surveys, but the counter argument to that, is they are incredibly hard to find.

Adobe have announced some multi-thread speed ups here https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-desktop-feature-requests/suggestions/20423296-make-illustrator-multi-threaded-on-cpu#{toggle_previous_statuses} in the new beta.

D

default9s18vla6ldf4

Participant

I first used illustrator on a B&W mac 2SE in 1992 so its not my first upgarde Rodeo

after I found the 23 version still in my CC apps I reverted to this and its running sweet on my 3.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4 ram
AI 2024 is slow and Hangie. slow to startup and havent seen the spinning beach ball of death so much for years
it's Adobe's problem. Comm. experts should hold hardware criticism, till the software has an upgrade for this upgrade. It's not the first time a new release has damaged small business and honesty would be a useful marketing tool. think about using it. small business suffers loss when subscribed services stop working but the sub. payments keep going out.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

You have just 16 GB of RAM on your not very powerful i5.

That was a pretty good machine about 6 years ago - but even then 16 GB of RAM was not a lot.

justphotograms

Inspiring

Someone here is running it on a RTX 4070 (which is incredibly powerful) and plenty of both Ram and VRam and have had the same problem. Sometimes you have to wait the .5 verison of the same release in order to work it smoothly. Guys at Adobe can tell us whatever story they want, but sometimes is not about how powerful is your machine, but how you fix your bugs!

S

Sheares25945595fcx8

Participant

SLOW AS HELL!!

My Specs:
Windows 11 Pro
i7-13700K 3.40 GHz
64.0 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5 running at 6000MHz
Geforce RTX 4070 12GB

4 -2TB NVME dives one for OS, three for backups and work files.

2 27-inch monitors

People stop making excuses because It's been worsening over the last few years.

A

Ap385651931z04

Participant

Couldn't agree more! It's terrible! Don't blame the hardware on user-side.

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @Ap385651931z04,

We understand that encountering technical issues can be frustrating. Would you mind trying the suggestions shared in this help article (https://adobe.ly/4cCH1oa) and letting us know if it helps?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,

Anubhav

S

Sherwyn35096958xm97

Participant

I have 32gb ram, M2 Pro chip and it still lags heaps. So frustrating!

Monika Gause

Community Expert

@Sherwyn35096958xm97 schrieb:

I have 32gb ram, M2 Pro chip and it still lags heaps. So frustrating!

Do you have the Magnet app installed? Or Rectangle? ProofPoint?

justphotograms

Inspiring

I reverted back to the previous version. Never had a problem with that and still not having any!
AI 2024 is ridiculously slow and laggy.
Personally it is one of the worst versions of Illustrators I have ever worked with.
Also agree that it's Adobe's problem. It's not the first time that a new release comes out with tons of problems.
New realeases are like this. That's why I usualy wait 3-4 Months before downloading the new ones.

Park Street Printers

Known Participant

I believe you are correct, at least in my experience. I have noticed severe performance loss in AI 2024 across systems, from a 16GB M1 iMac, to a 32GB i7 970Pro 6GB 1060, to my my 128GB TR 3955WX 24GB 3090ti 8x 2TB FireCuda 530 RAID10. They all have about the same performance for complex files. It isn't a hardware issue at your point, or at mine. It is a lack of optimization of Illustrator. It still runs on a single CPU cores for most things, for crying out loud, which is especially crappy for my TR 3955wx, because it isn't the fastest for single core tasks.

Kurt Gold

Community Expert

In my experience it is rather nonsense to overall claim that 16 GB RAM is not sufficient in that case. It should be sufficient.

More important may be what kind of graphic board you are using.

Of course, I may be wrong, but I don't think so.

dijonaise

Known Participant

Designer with 30+ years of experience here. I agree that you should use InDesign for anything over 2 pages. It's just so much easier to manage all those pages. Also InDesign is engineered to work with the prepress systems at the printing plant. InDesign automatically creates low-weight previews of all the placed art and streamlines working on multiple pages. In addition, InDesign's Master pages, page numbering, indexing features can't be replicated in Illustrator.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

16 GB is just not a lot of memory. For linking AI files into another file, you might want to look at InDesign. It's better at handling this.

To install previous versions, please check out: https://helpx.adobe.com/download-install/using/install-previous-version.html

M

mpkadobeAuthor

Inspiring

I have used InDesign previously to layout books that are text based and many pages long (over 200 pages). However, since this book is art based and only a few pages I am trying AI.

At first, I embedded the artwork and then switched to linking the artwork (PSD files) because it was supposed to make the AI file lighter and faster. Is that true? Should an AI file with linked artwork instead of embedded artwork be lighter and faster?

Monika Gause

Community Expert

Often this is a pretty difficult and ambiguous topic. Without taking a look at the actual files it may just be some speculation about the true reasons why Illustrator's performance is slow or speedy.

In my experience, even in the most recent Illustrator versions there are countless situations that may unexpectedly cause it to run at a very slow crawl, almost no matter how much RAM you are using. For instance, it is quite easy to set up an Illustrator file that contains a rather huge number of rather simple symbol instances. The physical size of the file may be just about 300 kb or 500 kb, but actually working with that file (moving, scaling, rotating etc. the symbol instances) is often unacceptably slow.

I'm not entitled to explain why it is so. But it occurs, and one may have to be careful to think it's just a matter of how much RAM is available.

@Kurt Gold schrieb:

some speculation about the true reasons why Illustrator's performance is slow or speedy.

You carefully manoevered around the two huge images in bespoke file.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded