Mac Studio seems to struggle

[MattMcCutcheon]

I recently upgraded my 2017 iMac Pro to a Mac Studio M1 Max 32 GB.  Apple told me this would be very overpowered for anything i am doing in Illustrator.  After a couple days of use i still find it is having to take time processing large files or when sending certain print jobs. One of my larger files is 1.13 GB.

It is also not letting me drag a large file into another one.  It just automatically opens the file i am trying to drag. I have books i do that are multiple art boards.  I design all the pages seperate and then drag them in one file for the print job.  Now when i drag them in it will auto open the file. 

Is the computer not big enough to handle what i am doing or is this and Illustrator issue?

Any help is appreciated.

[Anubhav M]

Hello @MattMcCutcheon,

We understand how frustrating it can be to experience performance issues when working in Illustrator, especially when your computer should be up to the task. Would you mind trying the suggestions shared in this help article (https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/kb/optimize-illustrator-performance.html) and checking if it helps?

Also, try running Illustrator under a different administrator account (macOS) and share your observations.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,

Anubhav

[Tammy28773766j0nr]

Hey Matt, any updates to your issue?  I'm experiencing similar preformance issues on my Mac Studio.  Very unimpressed with this thing!  I got it refurbished but that usually means they inspect it closer than the brand new ones.  Really surprised that it struggles w Illustrator files and I'm not even working with files as large as you are.  Hope you have found a solution, if so let me know!

[Park Street Printers]

This issue is mainly because Illustrator doesn't support multiple parallel processes. It uses one core on your cpu, for the most part. So, no matter how many cores you have to blaze through Photoshop or video editing tasks, you'll find yourself struggling with complex graphics in Illustrator. There is nothing wrong with your systems. I've had to wait minutes for large and extremely complex files to render changes in some cases. A fast GPU can help, but the cpu bottleneck remains.

[MattMcCutcheon]

No one has explained it in that way before, that makes a lot of sense.  Besides using Illustrator I am not much of a computer person so it didn't make sense to me why my computer was fast in Photoshop but seemed to struggle on large files in Illustrator.  There have also been a couple updates since my first post that seemed to help Illustrator run smoother. 

Thank you for the response. 

[Park Street Printers]

Illustrator is a great program, but it lags significantly behind current hardware capabilities. An Adobe employee explained that it isn't a simple case of just updating code to enable multi-core support, as it could adversely affect stability and other aspects. I guess we need to wait and hope for real improvements. I'm happy that you were able to get Illustrator to run better. My home system does better than the one I use at work, mainly for rendering tasks because of the difference in gpus.

[Monika Gause]

Can you try this: https://community.adobe.com/t5/illustrator-discussions/lag-when-clicking-and-dragging-objects-in-ill...