Illustrator unusably slow and laggy on macOS

[seand6441683]

Some time in the last year, Illustrator (which previously worked just fine) has become unusably slow and laggy on my 2011 iMac. Anyone out there have solutions or work-arounds?

[rfortes]

Still need to keep testing it, but my file got relatively faster after turning off the animated zoom and real-time drawing and editing

But overall, illustrator turns out to be a very frustrating experience nowadays 

[jarosigrist]

I understand you frustration and I have been experiencing the same issue (which drives me insane..)

The best solution, that worked for me, is to uninstall illustrator and install an older version:

1. Unistalls Illustrator
2. Search for Illustrator in the Creative Cloud app
3. Instead of pressing 'Install' choose 'Other version' from the 3 dots dropdown menu
4. Version 24 of Illustrator works fine

[jarosigrist]

More on installing a previous version: https://helpx.adobe.com/download-install/using/install-previous-version.html

[JPRM]

I have the same problem. Everything - literally - everything is laggy as hell. Even opening a "File" menu has a lag. Two years this problem did not exist.

AI is slow beyond belief.

[Studio GAAR]

Just updated to the latest version, and wish I hadn't. Significantly slowing down my workflow with laggy zooms and clicks etc. I'm locked in the Adobe ecosystem because of the scope of work I do and the variety of apps I'd have to replace, but JFC this is getting tiresome.

Macbook Pro 2018

2,9 GHZ i9

32 GB 2400MHz DDR4

Radeon Pro 560X 4GB

This should be plenty, PLENTY, to run Illustrator smoothly.

[jarosigrist]

I had the same issue – Downgrading to Illustratrator version 24 will speed up your workflow again

[Studio GAAR]

Agreed, although for some apps (not Illustrator, I think), not upgrading leads me to clients delivering files and me not being able to open them because of using 'an older version of ...'

But yeah, will be downgrading indeed, thanks.

[keeldog]

Downgrading to v24 seems to have worked for me. Thank goodness for this forum. Version 25 was literally unusable.  I could do with a lot fewer bells and whistles and get along just fine with some basic tools that actually work consistently.

[jfi0rin0]

Apparently I'll have to downgrade as well. Version 25.4.1 is the absolute worst version to date. Literally, everything results in a spinning wheel for a few seconds just to register a simple request such as clicking on an object. I can't understand why Adobe isn't adressing Illustrator's performance with each update. 

[rfortes]

100%, v24 is def the one!

[joshk25316270]

Hey everyone, chiming in here out of pure frustration.

I just dropped nearly 4K on a brand new iMac, having gone from a 5-year old imac running Mojave. Now I'm on Big Sur.

My imac specs:

3.8 GHZ 8 core i7

32 GB ram

AMD radeon pro 5700 8GB

So it should be able to handle ANYTHING. 

On my old imac, illustrator was buttery smooth, almost never had an issue. My brand new fancy-pants imac? GLITCHY illustrator. Terrible. Every 10 minutes or so it will freeze up, beach ball, everything delayed and can't input, then suddenly move everything quickly and it's fine. I've had it crash a few times too. The beach ball freeze bit happens randomly whenever anything is happening.

I'm just adding that it's possible that MacOS is a factor? Since that's literally the only thing that has changed in my setup.

[guym-p]

Very interesting.  I find my set up (with Radeon 5700 XT 8GB) is sensitive to colour profiles — as many have reported here.  It is absolutely *not* a fix,  but it might help you simply get some work done by seeing whether you get a faster and more fluid feel by switching to Apple RGB in System Preferences.  Colours look 'orrible, but it worked for me.

One thing I have noticed is that the Apple RGB ICC file is tiny (552 Bytes — 0.5 KB) where my X-Rite calibration is 174 KB.  Did Apple change something in ColorSync after Mojave?  That's when it went wrong for me, too.

Otherwise it would be useful to know whether the version of Illustrator you were running on the old iMac and new one were the same, and which version that is.

Guy.

[joshk25316270]

Thanks @guym-p I definitely hadn't considered that. I'll play around with the color profile though much of my work is color dependent (like everyone here I'm sure!).

I was running identical (latest) versions of Illustrator, currently 25.4.1

[guym-p]

Yes — I switch back to my calibrated colour profile to check colour, but at least I can get the basic geometry done at speed.

Other products that I experience dramatic speed changes by swiching ICC profiles are Adobe Audition, Adobe InDesign, and (bizarrely) Apache Open Office.  Adobe Photoshop and the Affinity suite of products are not affected.  Nor is Apple Logic Pro.  So what is it about the way affected products handle colour?

Guy.

[joshk25316270]

It's curious for sure. I'm going to pay attention to other programs too. My Safari is definitely less stable than it used to be. Great tip about doing the geometry. I'm going to try that. If I end up pulling out less hair on my next branding project, it'll be thanks to your post!

[guym-p]

Thanks!  It's not really a fix, though, just a bodge.  I live in hope that magic will fall from the sky in the form of a fix from either Apple or Adobe.  One of them is responsible!

Guy.

[Azar5DD6]

I have to say you could be onto something. I’d been having so many problems with Illustrator (you’ll see plenty of my posts down this thread), I ended up thinking that it was my 3 year old top spec’d MacBook Pro that was the issue. So I decided to get a very high powered PC workstation. After having ordered it, I saw posts saying that the issues were as bad or worse on the PC platform, so I was very down. But I have to say, since I’ve begun working on the PC, I haven’t really had any problems with Illustrator. No one is more surprised than me!!

Get Outlook for iOS

[joshk25316270]

@Azar5DD6 Funny you say that! After getting this high powered Mac I figured illustrator would ZIP on it and the opposite has happened. I will also add that I've noticed some other programs (like Wix web editor) have been a lot more unstable and glitchy, in case we might be building a case about the OS being the issue.

Given the way Apple OS's can be hit or miss in performance, I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's the issue. Always tempting to blame Adobe but so much relates to OS these days.

[aNt]

Totally agree! Useless. I've been an Adobe User for 20 years. I have an iMac 10 Core (2020), 128 mg Ram using a 2gig Samsung T5. Trying to separate files for AE import. Lag time is about 45sec per operation. This is just dumb. Using Sketch now because I am also on deadline and don't have time to isolate the V25 problem on Catalina. 

[sebaguila@gmail.com]

Hi, I've been doing all the workarounds fixes and time consuming possible ways to make this work but it just gets buggier and slower to the point it is unusable. This is making me work very slow, affecting my workflow dramatically and causing me in the end to loose money. I'v been using illustrator as my main design tool for over 10 years but it just got to the point I know Adobe wont fix this and I need to take a desition because this affects my business.

So I started testing alternatives, I really liked Adobe XD, until I realized it doesn't have color management which is something basic for a professional design tool. People complaigning for years for the lack of this feature on the XD forums and again Adobe just doesn't fix it (what is going on Adobe!!!!!).

Finally I tested Affinity Designer, and let me say it is ridiuclously fast. I opened the most heavy illustrator file I am working on and it just worked like nothing happened. Please check this video and downlaod the trial to test it out:

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/latest-update/

For my design workflow it covers everything I need plus I just have to pay once, not every month.

PD: It is nice to see a software company worried about performance, not about the cloud, the stupid new filters, the new libraries and all the crap I don't use.

[joshk25316270]

Thought I'd post an update to my original post way back, like with all of you, I have one of the top-end new iMacs, super powered, 32GB ram, and experience a momentary, always-infuriating lag, seemingly at random, that disrupts everything I’m doing.

Interesting twist:

I've been using my girlfriend's very old (2013) MacBook Air, with 4GB of ram, for traveling. I figured it would be a horrific experience. It's running Mojave I believe. NEVER EVER lags. No pauses. No nonsense. Works smoothly.

So my conclusion, as we've all probably seen, is that this is entirely due to operating system and not system resources or anything relating to our system. Not sure if it helps but certainly fascinating.

[guym-p]

It is interesting.  I think it may be to do with screen resolution.  I only noticed it get slow with v25, but I replaced an ancient Apple Cinema 30 with a BenQ SW321C at about the same time.  To get the same magnification of menus and pallettes, I used the high resolution version of 2560 x 1440 offered by holding the option key while selecting Scaled in MacOS System Preferences. 

However, I noticed that when I take a screen shot in that mode,  the resolution of the screen shot is enormous: 5120 x 2880.  MacOS must be scaling up before scaling down — if you see what I mean.  I'm not sure why this is necessary, but it must cause the whole display chain a great deal of extra work.  These are (very non-scientific) impressions of speed using v24.3:

Apple Cinema 30 (2560 x 1600) — quick.

4K screen at 2560 x 1440 — quick.

4K screen at 2560 x 1440 "High Res" (actually 5120 x 2880) — appallingly slow.

4K screen at 3840 x 2160 — tolerable.

As a result of these experiments, I now run MacOS in 2560 x 1440 (low resolution) when I use Illustrator.  The whole screen has that slightly out-of-focus appearance when using an interpolated mode, but I can use proper calibrated colour profiles this way, which makes it the best work around so far.

The overall situation is still not acceptable, after all, if more modern software like Affinity Designer works perfectly quickly in high resolution and with colour calibration, why can't Illustrator?  I am not enough of an expert to know whether Apple or Adobe are to blame, but I get the impression that two competing sets of colour correction are at work, when only one is necessary.  Perhaps this is a legacy from when operating systems did not support colour correction at all, and Adobe took that job on themselves, but something in all that seems not to be firing on all cylinders.

Guy.

[MikeOMakesStuff]

This is really interesting. I'm new here but having the same problems: suped up 5k iMac and all CC apps run like garbage. I swear ID and AI ran better in my dual G4 tower back in the day than they do now. PS has an atrocious redraw problem that can't render even a 10k jpeg properly when it's first opened. But now your discussions of screen res and color profiles have given me a newdirection to take. 

Still, Affinity can make it work, why can't Adobe? I gave up on PS last week and switched an image compositing job to Affinity Photo and it was actually fun again. I even think their refine selections tools are better than PS. I'm trying to switch over my personal stuff to Affinity but I'm stuck with CC for work.

[richardf48537383]

I find every core app in the Adobe Suite is slower now. Adobe Illustrator especially is INCREDIBLY laggy and I've got a fast system. Applications like this need to be fast – Illustrating is often quite a fast-paced process ... every update seems to dent the performance. I love Adobe solutions - been using them for 14 years continuously - but why are they getting so much worse.

As a designer myself I get the need to innovate – but I do also really feel sometimes it's ok to just leave an application alone .. the constant tinkering and "improvements' are seriously impacting these apps. I get the need for innovation - but please ... JUST STOP DESTROYING THEM.

We rely on these apps for our livelihoods often, and when apps become almost unusable it impacts our jobs. 

[jfi0rin0]

So, I'm on the newest version (25.4.1) and I noticed the title of my document window displaying CPU Preview. Obviously you'd want to use the GPU to process all graphics and alleviate the CPU for other processes.

In Illustrator hit Command + E or go to View > View Using... and chage it to GPU.

I don't know why this isn't automatically set to GPU but it definitely sped up Illustrator. 

Hope this helps most of you!