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?

[MikeOMakesStuff]

InDesign is being as big a dog as AI and PS too. I was hoping it had to do with the loads of fonts in Monterrey but after tinkering with that I still have issues. It just feels to me like none of the CC apps are using the GPU properly. I have the best GPU I've ever had in a Mac (AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB) and EVERYTHING is laggy. Move a text box: beachball. Drag a gradient tool: beachball. Move around with the hand tool: beachball. Basic, basic stuff is just horrible. Photoshop is just as laggy with a 500k jpeg as with a 1GB PSD file. It's bizarre. I can open the same PSD file faster in Affinity Photo than is PS. It makes no sense.

[jefc302]

Indesign might be even slower than AI. I just upgraded my GPU last month to an AMD Radeon PRO W6800X 32 GB...I was expecting a huge gain in speed and performance but was disappointed. It did help speed it up but you can feel theres still a very noticeable lag. I also have a large amount of memory 240 GB. The Adobe stock price is up but the software still sucks which shows where the focus is at.

[MikeOMakesStuff]

Some talk here of color profiles and screen resolutions lead me to open Bridge for the first time in ages and make sure the color settings were synced. They weren't but after syncing them, nothing changed. As for screen res, Monterrey does't offer much adjustment so I left it alone for now.

[jefreygunion]

EXACTLY my situation! Been using Illustrator 2021 for a long time with limited issues, then overnight can't run the application! I pay Adobe monthly for running my apps even though my machine is a few years old. I have deadlines! All of a sudden I'm dead in the water! So pissed at Adobe!

[SolarInkGraphics]

I've found that simply turning off Smart Guides, especially when you have vectors with a ton of anchor points on them,, helps to speed up performance tremendously.

This, along with the other suggestions found on the Illustrator peformance improvements page the Adobe website, like deleting unused swatches, brushes, symbols, etc, and adjusting preferences under performance and file handling, etc, should alleviate any slow down issues also.

It did for me finally anyway. 

Also messing with the View > View using CPU/GPU toggle may help also, if you're getting weird rendering issues with fills, etc. 

But yeah, turning off Smart Guides had the biggest impact on getting AI to run normally again. 

Hope that helps someone. 

[PSK J.C.]

Hi,

I'm using

MacBook Pro,  Model Identifier: MacBookPro18,2,  Chip: Apple M1 Max,

Total Number of Cores: 10 (8 performance and 2 efficiency)

Memory: 64 GB

System Firmware Version: 8419.41.10

OS Loader Version: 7459.141.1

Illustrator is slower than ever before... I tried everything.. nothing helps.

Don't know what 2 do anymore 😞 

[crispe123]

Same here.

Some workarounds for me that have improved performance on M1 - turn Real Time Drawing & Editing off if you haven't already. I couldn't move objects that had an effect, transparency mask or stroke profile without it completely chugging before turning this off. And if you're using linked images then embed them - also a night and day difference.

Frustrating to have to go backwards in performance with a brand new machine but these tweaks at least let me use the program without wanting to put my face through the monitor. Good luck!

[joshk25316270]

Feeling very seen by everyone here with similarly superpowered, expensive and brand new computers and laggy as hell illustrator. I have a 27" iMac, bought in 2021 with 32GB RAM, and a 16" M1 Max macbook pro with 32GB of RAM also. suddenly it's just terribly laggy on both machines. unuseable and completely screwing up my client deadlines.

Something just happened that may improve things for you guys, in the short term. The dictation thing did not work for me unfortunately (it was always off) but I switched it to CPU (instead of GPU), lowered history states to 50 (preferences - performance) and turned off animated zoom (kept real time drawing on though). It's MUCH better. I have smart guides off as well, will report later if having them on can work too.

The zoom doesn't change in real time (like a tiny delay, but didn't inhibit my work the way the lag and slowness does).

Hoping this might be helpful.

[Cuto28569207rwaf]

Adobe, seriously? 

You are ignoring the fact that AI can't run any good on some Mac machines. I have M2 Max and it is unusable. If disabling dictation mode can improve AI performance - what piece of crap this software is? I am sorry but let's face it - it works horribly and there is no solution from Adobe team, but users only. Are you planning to do anything with that? 

[Monika Gause]

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@Cuto28569207rwaf  schrieb:

Adobe, seriously? 

You are ignoring the fact that AI can't run any good on some Mac machines. I have M2 Max and it is unusable. If disabling dictation mode can improve AI performance - what piece of crap this software is? I am sorry but let's face it - it works horribly and there is no solution from Adobe team, but users only. Are you planning to do anything with that? 

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This is a user forum, that's the reason why you get mostly replies by users in here.