Shape Builder Tool Slow Down

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
October 2, 2017
2 replies
20267 views

I am encountering a MAJOR slowdown issue when using the Shape Builder tool. I was just experimenting with a group of circles, and each time I subtracted or combined a shape, the process would progressively take more and more time. It has now reached a point where it is taking 3-4 minutes to do this, and am even experiencing major slowdown when simply attempting to change its color.

Has anyone else encountered this type of issue at all?

Thank you in advance for any help you could send my way.

iMac (27", Late 2012)

3.4 GHz Intel Core i7

32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2048 MB

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Correct answer Monika Gause

12 paths shouldn't be a problem.

Can you check if there are cloned paths (that is two identical paths exactly on top of each other)?

That is something I have seen to slow down the shapebuilder dramatically.

Y

Yuzhen22642435pcx6

Participant

I don't know what causes this problem, I ran into it just now and it seems to have created an exponential number of layers.

I fixed it by selecting the duplicated layers and merging it down with the pathfinder rather than selecting the layers and deleting them individually. I am trying to reproduce the issue, but I can't get it to happen again. I don't think it's due to 'corruption' at all, my guess it's something to do with paths being overlapped before using the shape tool.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

How many paths in your case? When there are too many paths, the shapebuilder tool will be slow.

Y

Yuzhen22642435pcx6

Participant

Hi Monika, it looks like it's created a couple dozen copies of the same shape. The second image shows a glimpse of the ducplicated shapes created afterward. These were all in the same compound path before I copied and pasted them out to their own layers for demonstration purposes.

It got progressively slower the more I used the tool so I'm assuming it doubled up on the previous results as I was using it. The third image shows how a bunch of duplicated shapes were created, I unstacked a couple to show that they are the same.

I'm trying to replicate it the problem again and it doesn't seem to work when I start with duplicates of the same shape.