Illustrator 2025 Killing my macbook memory

[Jon35782536l6j9]

Adobe Illustrator 2025 is demolishing my memory and I can't figure out why. I have a fairly new macbook pro (M3 Pro). I've also recently updated to macOS Sequoia 15.1.1. I typically work off of files on my desktop. 

I am currently working in a single file that only has a few small artboards and it takes a long time to perform any action, even type a letter on to the screen. My macActivity Monitor shows that AI '25 is taking up 4.23 GB. I had been using Illsutrator 2024 with no isssues up until a week or 2 ago. I used to be able to have many large files open at once w/ no issues and now all of a sudden I can barely work out of 1 small file.

This is drastically affecting my work performance. Please help??

[Anubhav M]

Hello @Jon35782536l6j9,

I'm sorry to hear about the trouble you're having with Illustrator. Would you mind trying to reset Illustrator's preferences as described in this article (https://adobe.ly/41EFKue) and checking if it helps?

Disclaimer: Please note that renaming preferences folders will remove all the custom settings, and Illustrator will launch with default settings. You can also save a backup of the folders, the location of which is mentioned above.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Anubhav

[Jon35782536l6j9]

No improvements after resetting preferences. Its using 4GB with 2 very small files open (see attached screenshot)

[Bill Silbert]

Is your Illustrator updated to the latest version of CC 2025—29.1? If not then try updating both that and Sequoia (to v15.2). 

[Jon35782536l6j9]

both are up to date with the latest

[Conrad_C]

In this case memory usage may not be the direct cause. 4GB doesn’t seem extreme. It might be a strain on a Mac with just 8GB Unified Memory, but I suspect your M3 Pro has much more memory than that. Also, the Memory column reports total memory usage, which means real memory + compressed memory + memory in swap. It’s more useful to enable the other memory columns (View > Columns) to get a better picture of what’s actually being used where. In my example below, Real Mem is what Illustrator is actually using on the memory chips, and that’s not a lot. The rest is cached or compressed.

Sure, the amount of memory the app is using may be more than the storage size of the files that are open, but that’s normal. Any creative app is going to preallocate blocks of memory so that you don’t have to wait for those to load while you’re using it. In my screen shot, do you see Affinity Designer? That’s a vector app like Illustrator, using almost 1GB of memory…and I have no documents open in it. Like Illustrator, it has put some data into memory in advance to optimize performance.

Also, your screen shot doesn’t show the Memory Pressure graph. If the Memory Pressure graph is green, memory is unlikely to be the cause of the slowdown because the Mac is easily handling all memory requests. If Memory Pressure is orange or red on your Mac, then you can realistically suspect that memory might be a factor in a slowdown. 

So these are some ways that you cannot reliably pin a slowdown on memory by looking only at the Memory column. That’s not enough information.

To troubleshoot poor performance, it’s better to start with the CPU tab of Activity Monitor. When Illustrator is slow, is CPU usage unusually high? Remember that on Macs, 100% CPU equals one core fully used, so if the M3 Pro has 12 CPU cores then 1200% would be all CPU cores pushed to their limit, and 150% would be hardly any strain at all.

[Jon35782536l6j9]

Lastly, please pardon what may be a dumb question: Is there a way to easily tell whether or not the content of a specific open file is causing the issues? For instance, maybe an Illustrator file uses some very detailed, layered textures or a Figma file is using many pages and a giant artboard? I'd like to gain more understanding around whether or not the way I am building files and UI/art could be improved from a performances best practices standpoint.

TIA!