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Eric30668053fslk
Participant
June 22, 2023
Question

Multiple layers in Illustrator now drastically slow down when showing and hiding layers in 2023

  • June 22, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 1033 views

Files with over 1000 layers now drastically slow down when just clicking to hide and unhide the layers in the 2023 latest version of Illustrator, theis took less than a second to render in the May 2022 version of Illustrator.

 

In 2022 when I had a file with over 2500 layers I could click to show or hide a single layer in less than a second, and it worked that way on two completely different laptops running Windows 10 with latest drivers installed.

Before I am given the textbook help answers please know that -
No, its not the RAM, one laptop has 16GB the other has 40GB.
No its not the hard drive, both have SSD with plenty of space.
No its not the page file, I've increased that greatly as well.
...and No, its not my artwork because I just tested this with a completely new and blank file by making 199 empty layers and then drawing a box on the 200th one, then copy those  until you have 800 layers (with only a simple box on 4 of them) and you will see the drastic slow down now occurring just hiding and unhiding a single layer when there are many layers in 2023 version of Illustrator.

Adobe did something to the way their code is calculating redraw on layers and it is exponentially slower than what they had implemented in May of 2022 (where I had a file with 2600 layers and artwork on each layer and could show and hide any layer within a second). So  how do we get that functionality and speed back Adobe? How do we evenget back to the performance of 2022 of 1600 BLANK layers visiblity toggling without there being nearly 30 seconds of delay just to toggle a layer on/off now? What has Adobe changed and how can I set it back to the 2022 level of performance?

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

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Nate31479391yt5x
Participant
August 3, 2023

Have you found a fix for this yet? I just recently opened a project that I had not worked on in a couple of weeks to find out it now takes almost 5 seconds for me to hide/unhide any layer. This is extremely frustrating and is costing me a lot of time waiting. There has to be a solution for this issue as I don't see how any consistent users of AI can function like this.

 

Monika Gause
Community Expert
Monika GauseCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 22, 2023

Possibly the introduction of the Search field in the Layers panel caused this.

You can report it as a bug to https://illustrator.uservoice.com 

Upload your demo file there and give the developers a step by step description of how to reproduce the bug.

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Eric30668053fslkAuthor
Participant
June 23, 2023

Thanks for the redirection on this. I agree, it looks like this was introduced with the Search field in the Layers panel. Prior to that I could have 2500+ layers in a single file and toggle any of their visibility within a second, but now it take half a minute for one layer. I made a sample file with only 1600 layers (and only 4 layers with actual art on them) and when all 1600 are unfiltered it take 30 seconds to toggle one of the box layers off or on. However, since my example file has all the other layers empty, I can use the search filter to "filter" it down to just the 4 showing and of course then they can be hidden/unhidden quickly within a second,...but that is not a fix for the real file because of course it has shapes on all 2500+ layers and so that doesn't really give a fast way to shrink it down and my guess is the massive delay has now been introduced by the code that is generating the matrix of the various "types" to search our layers for and whenever we try to hide/unhide a layer it is recreating that matrix, which of course gets worse and worse the more layers your file actually has now.

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