Is Illustrator CS5 performance better than Illustrator CS6?

[Brent_Blaskievich-SFeqPG]

There is a pretty sharp decline in smoothness of panning, zooming, dragging elements around the screen in Ai CS6.

Using both versions side by side on MacBook Pro i7, 8gb Ram, 10.6.8. Ai v16.0.0. The files are as small as 0-200k.

Ai CS6 is simply jumpy and laggy. Try a new blank artboard of 800x600 in both and drag around view at 100% zoom. The artboard skips around.

It's not unusable, but its there, and for me overshadows the improvements.

Thanks,

Brent

[babygenius55a]

If they don't want your money, what can you do except request a refund until a faster, more stable version/fix is released?  There is always cs5.5, or open source even.  Inkscape is actually a wonderful program.

[CupertinoFruit]

The Navigator window crashing bug is also fixed in the 16.0.1 (and 16.1.0) update. I no longer see the crash happening.

Have you tried quitting, trashing app preferences and restarting the app to see if the problem goes away?

[Ironhide001]

i have not tried trashing the preferences. I shall try that now and see if it helps. Ta

[Ironhide001]

nope, i can still recreate the crash, exactly the same as always, the Nav window doesn't update quickly enough, then bombs out when i try to drag the red nav box around. *sigh*

[powerful_individual0D45]

After a couple of days of trial and error, I did something that solved it for me.

1. Select everything in the AI file
2. In the appearance panel you'll probalby see a 'Mixed appearance' message
3. I clicked on the 'Clear appearance' button at the bottom of the panel (the one that looks like a 'no entry' sign.)
4. The 'Mixed appearance' message dissapears

I though all my effects, drop shadows, and rounded corners would dissapear.

They didn't. Everything still looks the same.

The only change that I realised was that a weird white shape dissapeared from the bottom of some artboards.

A shape that I didn't draw myself.

Now everything is quick again.

Hope this helps some of you out there.

[Guest]

Hey, can you share any such file here. This might not apply to all the files. I am really curious to see this performance improvement before and after removing the Mixed apperance attribute.

[ykhatri · Accepted solution]

Dear Friends,

Greetings from the Illustrator Engineering Team.

We have been following this thread and the issues discussed here are a cause of concern for us. We have been working closely with most of you either directly or through customer support, and we have been able to fix issues that led to sub optimal performance by following some of these approaches:

     1. Creating a new user account.

     2. Clearing font cache

     3. Dumping personal cache files and repairing permissions

     4. Installing latest OS updates.

     5. Disabling beam sync

     6. Clearing any extra appearance attributes which might have applied to the artwork.

     7. Deleting any stray points in the file.

     8. Turning off some unnecessary/conflicting processes.

     9. Stopping any web streaming.

     10. Clearing unwanted mixed appearances

Since performance issues are typically hard to isolate, we would like to work with you individually to understand and isolate your issues. Most of you would have already got an email from an Adobe representative by now, and if not, you can write to us at ‘ShareWithAI@adobe.com’. 

Additionally we request you to create a new thread for each issue so that its easier for the user community to find relevant information for their issue.

Looking forward to working with you to isolate these issues.

Thanks

Yogesh

On behalf of Illustrator Engineering Team    

[Mathias17]

Very nice to have a staff response, finally. Thank you, Yogesh.

But the obvious question now is: Why is it necessary to jump through these hoops just for Illustrator CS6?

Because no other Adobe software requires these measures, the finger is still pointed right at Illy CS6 as the culprit of it's own performance issues.

The 'mixed appearance' thing for instance - doesn't this indicate that Illy is going through the motions of calculating the appearances of affected artwork, for no real reason, but is not displaying the results of those calculations to the screen (as if there's accidental duplicates of artwork Illy is trying to process)?

I just get the notion that with this 64-bit re-write of Illustrator's core, some critically sloppy and un-optimized code was left in place. At least Photoshop is screaming fast these days. Nobody complains about its performance. Maybe the illy team and PS should go out to lunch together more often, hah.

[Floatingrock]

I couldn't agree more. I for one, especially given adobe's attitude toward licensed users now, am not going to be a beta tester for a product that should be, stable, robust, feature-rich and completely optomized by now. I'd suggest that the real problem lies with the engineers that are working on it. Hand this application's future to the same team that's made huge improvements to AE or Premiere and perhaps we'll get somewhere. Better still, bring back the developers that worked on Freehand for Macromedia, I'm sure they could give it a much better go.

[-Tantoon-]

Dear Yogesh

On behalf of all the angry users Please fix the @#$~! thing

It's not our computers it's your applicationg, AI CS5 works like charm! same pc same configuration!

I'm also having the same Issues, AI cs6 gets really really slow after a while, not to mention the other issues.

best,

Sam

[Frank Heller]

Who deigned this as the "correct" answer? Now that it's parked at the top of the thread, it gives the illusion that the problem is solved. Anything but.

Has anyone investigated suggestion #5? Disable Beam Sync?  Google Beam Sync and get a load of what they are asking us to tackle. Are you kidding me?

As stated by Mathias17: "Why is it necessary to jump through these hoops just for Illustrator CS6? Because no other Adobe software requires these measures, the finger is still pointed right at Illy CS6 as the culprit of it's own performance issues."

I couldn't have said this any better. That list is mostly a wild goose chase. It's as though they threw darts at a white board filled with everything they could think of, short of their own programming.

This is a stall.

[babygenius55a]

I say petition for a refund, and revert back to cs 5. They spent to much

time on making it look pretty, and not enough making it work. That's just

bad form.

[AshutoshChaturvedi]

Story for me has been Illustrator CS6 performs faster than CS5 in many areas and at places where I do not see performance benifits it stil performs as good as AI CS5.

@Yogesh: I would be interested in knowing how many have already written to you asking you to investigate slowness of CS6 as compared to CS5. My guess it will only be a handful as AI users that I talk to are happy with CS6. the hiDPI update that you pushed out last time makes AI look amazing modern.

[shanewi11iams]

That is good for you, but after quite a few updates it has stabalised but still crashes. I have lost hours due to this. I think the amount of people not happy with this is more than a handful, I am happy until it crashes and loses my work! And yes I am incrementally saving. Still needs a lot of work.

[AmericanGothic]

The issue for me is absolutely the type engine. The more text I have on the page the slower it gets. It is maddening to say the least.

[ykhatri]

@shanewi11iams,@AmericanGothic, @z284pwr:

Please contact us at ShareWithAI@adobe.com with details.

[ykhatri]

Just 3 people have contacted us so far.

[Frank Heller]

Just 3 people have contacted us so far.

Yet over 30,000 people have viewed this thread. Do you think there might be a reason for that large a number?

[Monika Gause]

Frank Heller wrote:

Yet over 30,000 people have viewed this thread.

But why don't all those people take the chance and report the details so the problem can be solved? I would guess that the engineers need to reproduce a bug on their systems in order to be able to solve it. And in order to do that they would need as much detail as possible.

[hemmickreef]

I bought a new iMac last year for my work and had so much hassle with CS6 not knowing if it was a software or hardware fault.  Took a month with Adobe and Apple to try and sort it all out... wasn't sorted so the iMac went back.  I'm back on a PC with CS3?

[Floatingrock]

The issue isn't that they can't recreate the problem, it's pretty clear given how many users are experiencing the same issues that shouldn't be a problem. All they'd have to do is load any document of reasonable size into a very fast computer (like I own) and they'd see firsthand the issue. I'm sure they've done that, if they haven't then they're poorer at programming than even I thought. This is simply adobe trying to appear as though they're doing something, when we all know they're not seriously interested in doing anything. The so called engineers are spending their time working on the next little advancement that could entice more users to go the subscription route. Fixing bugs that have been around for a long time or repairing performance issues in the last version doesn't get them where they want to go.  I mean we're talking about version 16 here, not version 1! The performance issues should have been solved a very long time ago. Xara pro will open Illustrator files (CS3 and lower) and the screen redraw performance is so much better it's staggering! I can move around a very complex drawing without any screen tearing. Something commonly experienced in Illustrator. I for one won't play adobe's BS game, I won't be their free beta tester, and I won't help them maintain the facade that they're interested in doing something about it, I won't waste my breath... I'll just take my money elsewhere, screw them, their off-shore developers (cheap labour) and their shareholders.

[Mathias17]

You remind me of the question that always strikes me, in these cases - how is it that we have all these modern, graphically intense, 2D and 3D PC games - Halo III, Mass Effect III, Call of Duty #?, etc etc (I don't know; I'm not a gamer) with SO much going on in the game all the times - thousands of polygons, layers of pixel shader blending, sprites, geometry/hit collision detection, enemy artificial intelligence, all drawing to the screen with a nice, smooth FPS . . . and yet, here's little Illustrator that can't even maintain decent screen performance when tasked with redrawing only 1% of what these games do sickeningly well.

Might one argue graphics acceleration support? How about not. Mercury Engine, anyone? A quote from Adobe:

Unprecedented performance across the board

Work with precision, speed, and rock-solid stability on large, complex files thanks to the new Adobe® Mercury Performance System in Adobe Illustrator® CS6 software. Illustrator CS6 has been renovated from the ground up, resulting in the fastest, most advanced and efficient vector drawing environment in the software’s 25-year history.

source - http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/mercury-performance-system.html

Honestly - what's happening with Illy?

[Kurt Gold]

I can imagine that some Illustrator advocates may wrinkle their nose, but it's a remarkable – though obvious – aspect you're mentioning here, Mathias.

I'm not a gamer as well, but I recently looked at some people who performed a modern computer game on an ordinary 2013 machine. Impressive. If Illustrator were the fundament of the games, some of the gamers would probably go back to the football ground as that performance would be more exciting.

As for the "unprecedented performance" marketing gag: As far as I remember, every version since about AI 10 has been introduced with that "unprecedented performance enhancements". I've never been able to confirm these declarations.

By the way, have you ever got some official fact sheets – provided by Adobe – that would prove or at least underline the pretended performance enhancements ?

[Mathias17]

hah

Nope. Never seen any benchmark tests or anything like that. Closest I've seen is the test data put forth in this very thread.

oy . . .

I say take some of that grandiose zeal from the marketing team and give it to the developer team!

[cynthiadesign1990]

I've been struggling with every single one of these problems mentioned in this forum. I've finally figured out a way to fix it by adjusting my settings and wondering what might be the difference or fix for the problem. Seeing closing down illustrater and starting it up again had seemed the most useful solution to my problem, I realised that something after starting it up was making it slowly lag and decrease the performance. And when you close down, you clear the clipboard, as well as your history, a feature only illustrater has (compared to the other problems) that can almost make you CTRL+Z into infinity.

I've figured out that if you go to Edit > Preferences > Plug-ins & Scratch Disk. Then put a bigger disk (I choose my C drive) as your primary and/or secondary. The problem -should- be fixed now. If you still seem to have any problems, I'd suggest assigning more RAM to running Illustrator.

If Illustrator has insufficient RAM, then it uses hard disk space (that is, a scratch disk) to process information. Illustrator is fastest when it can process file information in memory, without having to use the hard disk. But, when you don't have enough room on both, you adjust the default settings of illustrater and assign more RAM to it. Mind you, other programs will run slower when youre working in illustrater then!