What to do when Illustrator on your Mac is IMPOSSIBLY Slow (solution!)

[joshk27465175]

I've posted a few times here and wanted to share this in case anyone has to go through this like I did.

I have a super powered 27" iMac from 2020, i7, 32GB of RAM, Radeon Pro 5700 blah blah, more than enough power for Illustrator (also on OS Big Sur). And it's always worked pretty well, until Illustrator 27 hit and then it was LAGGY and terrible. 

No problem, I downgraded to 26. Good as new. Worked great for months. Suddenly, out of nowhere, it was IMPOSSIBLY slow. Just unbearable. Every single move, on even basic documents, beach ball. Regardless of network drive or local (and dictation was off... some people talk about this on here).

THE SOLUTION:

I tried every single thing. uninstalling, trashing prefs, downgrading and upgrading to literally every version of CC they had. nothing changed. 

What worked: I deactivated EVERY font from adobe fonts (just click the button to deactivate all, in the Creative Cloud window). Immediately everything is zippy. no more beach ball. it's perfection.

Yes, I have to re-add them again, it's annoying, but I"m sharing this in hopes that any other designer who was completely screwed on client deadlines because of this insane software bug might be helped. 

[Monika Gause]

Just out of curiosity: how many fonts did you have activated?

[joshk27465175 · Accepted solution]

Maybe 50 - 60?

BUT I have an important update... the next day the problems returned even with ONE font installed.

I'm happy to report I have finally found a real, workable solution.

There was clearly some issue either with the OS or the version. I updated my Mac to OS Ventura (which is one before the latest OS, as of now), and Illustrator is completely smooth, no more lagging, regardless of the fonts. I haven't had a single issue. Will report back if the issues return but I'm sure I would've seen it by now.

So my recommendation to anyone struggling like I was: 

• Try removing fonts and re-adding,
• try working from the desktop rather than the network drive,
• try installing different (older) versions of Illustrator,
• Try trashing preferences,
• try messing with illustrator's performance preferences (history states, real time drawing/editing, GPU/CPU) 

but if all of that does nothing, which was the case for me:

Try changing to a newer OS (not just incremental). 

Hope this helps!