Illustrator 25.4 pretends to runs out of memory on my 96 GB RAM workstation

[Chris Germany]

I have a 6mb illustrator file containing A LOT of circles, of which some need to be removed. I can readily select the circles that should be removed by selecting one of them, then using Select > Same > Appearance. However, I cannot delete them because Illustrator will complain "Can't clear the objects. Nearly out of memory. Please save your files immediately. Free up more memory to continue".

However, Illustrator has not even begun to use the available RAM; According to the task manager, it is barely using 5GB (with more than 70GB of free RAM left). Before you ask, Illustrator is of course running as an x64 executable on an x64 system and OS, so there should not be any limitations as to how much RAM can be addressed.

I am using Illustrator 25.4.1 (current as of writing this post, according to Creative Cloud Desktop) on a fully updated Windows 10 Pro x64, 16x Cores CPU, 96 GB RAM workstation, with > 100 GB of space available on the system SSD and likewise on the separate scratch disk SSD. None of the resources are even barely utilized when Illustrator throws the error message above, so I have the impression that it isn't really trying.

As a workaround, I am now deleting the selected circles individually using a javascript loop. But needless to say, that is not optimal, given that Illustrator is clearly misbehaving here. I have reproduced the issue on a different machine, and resetting preferences and graphics card drivers does not resolve this Illustrator software bug.

Any help appreciated! Thank you and kind regards,
Chris

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P.S.: Unfortunately I cannot open a support ticket through Adobe myself because the website and Creative Cloud App keeps reminding me that our site license administrator should be contacted for enterprise issues and I cannot open up a ticket individually. Needless to say that our IT administrator really only manages the licenses and does not have the time to file or follow up on individual support requests like this.

[Ashutosh_Mishra]

Hi Chris,

Sorry to hear about your experience. Do you see this behavior while working on a specific file? Would it be possible for you to share this file(or a sample file) with us for testing? We'll be happy to look into it & assist you.

Regards,

Ashutosh

[Chris Germany]

Dear Ashutosh,

Thank you for taking the time to respond. Please find attached an example document. Note that for reasons unknown, all data points are made up of circles and independent fillings. To reduce load on Illustrator, I sought to fix this duplication by removing the black circles (and then adding a stroke around the grey fillings).

To reproduce the error message, select a single black circle and perform Select > Same > Appearance. Then, hit delete.

Please note that I am not looking for a solution with any particular file. As written above, I can already achieve the desired result using an ESTK script with a loop that deletes the selected items individually. I am looking to fix this bug for the future, so that I do not have to rely on scripts for tasks that should be possible in Illustrator, if it were to use the memory actually available to it.

Kind regards,
Chris

P.S.: I could not upload the original .AI file because the forum complained "The attachment's content type (application/postscript) does not match its file extension and has been removed." - I'm now trying to upload it with different export settings to see what I can get through this faulty automatic MIME type check.

[Met1]

I get the error too, but if I just select a group or indeed all, they delete.

Have you tried select object instead - I do have Graffix's Select Menu plug-in installed so maybe not applicable - but I can select object and delete.

Probably of no help to you, but it is something to do with the select same, I guess it's using a different method of identifying the objects.

[Chris Germany]

Thank you @Met1 Met1 for pointing out the plugin, I imagine it will be of great help in the future!

I used [Select Object > Unfilled paths] to select the same black circles, but hitting delete runs into the same memory error message.

I really hope that Adobe Support ( @Ashutosh_Mishra ) can take a look at this suspected bug, because unfortunately I cannot open my own support requests due to the annoying enterprise policy where one has to go through the local admin.

[Rainer5FCE]

Hi Chris,

did you find a solution to this problem?  I am having the same issue with Illustrator 2024.  I'm working in a large file with hundreds of thousands of polygons and lines and when I select a large number of objects (for example polygons with the same fill color) I am unable to delete them or do anything else because of the "nearly out of memory" message.  According to the task manager I am no where near out of memory.  Were you able to solve this?  I have already tried updating to the latest version, resetting preferences, reinstalling illustrator, and pulling all of my hair out.  But so far no luck.

Many thanks,

Allie

[Chris Germany]

@Rainer5FCE I am sorry to report that I was never able to circumvent the issue within Illustrator. If you have a personal subscription, I would kindly ask you to open a ticket with Adobe Support on our behalf. Sadly our group subscription only allows the license admin to submit support requests. As a public university, needless to say that our few admins have other things to do than to make bug reports on behalf of individual users.

@Ashutosh_Mishra(whose account appears to be inactive since end of 2021, but I do not know how else to tag Adobe Employees here): The bug was never fixed. I can still reproduce it with the file posted above, meanwhile running on a 128GB RAM machine and the latest Illustrator 2024.

[Monika Gause]

Illustrator cannot handle roo many objects in a JavaScript.

You need plugins for that.

If you want to make a bug report: https://illustrator.uservoice.com 

[Chris Germany]

@Monika Gause Thank you for joining the discussion. However, it is not immediately clear how your response relates to the original question. The bug does not occur during custom javascript execution but during normal Illustrator use, unless you are claiming that, internally, the engine is using javascript to handle the steps described above. Please note that I mentioned javascript in my original question only as a possible (albeit inefficient) workaround, NOT as the cause of the original issue.

[Monika Gause]

OK, sorry, then I misunderstood your mention of scripting here.

Then please make a bug report. That's how you reach out to the engineers.