Illustrator CC 2018 extremely slow saving

[courtneyw98665068]

my set-up

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)

3.3 GHz Intel Core i5

32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3

AMD Radeon R9 M395 2 GB

2.12 TB Fusion Drive 1.64TB Available

Running the latest OS and the latest version of illustrator cc2018 and Illustrator saves (and opens) extremely slow. All other applications run super fast as they should with my specs but illustrator continues to be slow and also usually crashes about once a day.

I've seen a  lot of people with similar problems but i have yet to be able to solve this. I use Illustrator for about 80% of my work during the day and this is becoming a major productivity issue. Can anyone please offer any suggestions on how I could get Illustrator to run correctly?? Thanks in advance.

[Larry G. Schneider]

Do you have a printer attached and is it on?

[courtneyw98665068]

Hi Larry, thanks for the reply. Yes I'm on a network at work and I'm connected indirectly to a printer over the network.

[Larry G. Schneider]

Networked printer setups can give problems to AI. Can you get a small printer and try with it directly connected to your machine. Or if on Windows OS try setting up a virtual PDF printer and set that as your default.

[courtneyw98665068]

Thanks again for your feedback, I am on a Mac but I have just deleted the printer connection & I will continue to work in Illustrator and see how it goes. I will respond shortly with an update, cheers.

[courtneyw98665068]

I can confirm that it is still very slow when saving files unfortunately.

Also according to the Mac Activity Monitor Illustrator uses 100% of CPU when saving....

[Larry G. Schneider]

AI needs to see a printer to properly and quickly save a file. There are some printer properties which need to be written to the saved file. Is there anyway you can try with another printer directly hooked up to your machine? Or check with your IT people and see if there are timeouts on the printer cue which are not being reopened properly.

[courtneyw98665068]

thanks again for your response, no there is no easy way for me to connect a printer directly to my machine and in my experience a printer is not required for Illustrator to function correctly. I use illustrator on my home machine without a printer connected and it functions correctly and saves files in a normal timely fashion.

[courtneyw98665068 · Accepted solution]

Just a quick update I just turned off "create PDF compatible file" in the save dialogue box and it saved the file instantly! which is nice update from the 5-10 minute saves I've been dealing with...

[martijnhoppenbrouwer]

Hi Courtney,

That was the tip! Turn off Create PDF compatible file and file-save-time in decreased by 1000%.

Now we only need an option to ALWAYS turn off this setting, because the save time with this turned on are just ridiculous.

Thanks for finding the solution!!!

[nitink31291663]

i am facing same issues with illustrator CC 2018 and have always used compression with turned of pdf compatibilities. My files always take 4 to 5 min to save

[martijnhoppenbrouwer]

This is a temporary work-around. For webdesign that is. If you are working on print design, than you can't really use this, because you can't export to PDF anymore, at least i can't.

Why did saving with PDF compatibility drastically increase with 1000%?

Do i have to bill my clients 2 hours extra, just because i saved the file 20 times?

@Adobe: Please fix this bug, it is causing tremendous delays in the workflow and unnecessary increase in costs for clients.

[Monika Gause]

martijnhoppenbrouwer  schrieb

Why did saving with PDF compatibility drastically increase with 1000%?

It didn't in general. I'm doing this all the time and there's no increase.

You will need someone to look into your system.

Contact Customer Care.

Contact Customer Care

Or post this as a bug on http://illustrator.uservoice.com respectively add your vote there and get feedback by the engineers. They will need to be able to reproduce it in order to fix it. So they need detailed system info.

[martijnhoppenbrouwer]

Hi Monika Gause,

You say there's no increase and it a problem of my system, but why do so many people in this thread have the same problem as me.

I will add that it's not exactly "1000%", but when saving AI files, the saving process takes multiple times longer (as said by others in this thread) than it used to. I've been using Adobe Illustrator almost every day for years and years - i do notice extremely longer save times right away.

When i have the time, i will go to the Customer Care or post the bug on the uservoice as you suggested, although i still think it's more than just a problem of my system (which is brand new with 10 cores @4.2 Ghz, 32 GB of fast ram, and has the fastest M.2 SSD available and a GTX 1080ti GPU)

[Monika Gause]

There are 4 people in this thread having the problem. And this already includes you.

Problem is often with the newest equipment, not with the older stuff.

[nitink31291663]

Can't understand why no official from ADOBE is answering to our issues, we have relied and invested on their products for so many years now, and these products are part of our day to day work, now it is this single issue that is shaking my belief in ADOBE.

There may be only 4 people in this thread with same issue, but i would like to inform that i have a team of 25 Designer working on same platform facing same issue and i speak on behalf of them.

Most of the people just ignore such issues, adapt to the situation and don't end up discussing.

I feel we all are just speculating our issue with hit and try methods whereas these softwares were designed with logic and reasons, hope this discussion forum is answered with a solid solution or i will have to adapt and bring saving time consumption to my man hours time calculation

[Monika Gause]

nitink31291663  schrieb

Can't understand why no official from ADOBE is answering to our issues, we have relied and invested on their products for so many years now, and these products are part of our day to day work, now it is this single issue that is shaking my belief in ADOBE.

There may be only 4 people in this thread with same issue, but i would like to inform that i have a team of 25 Designer working on same platform facing same issue and i speak on behalf of them.

Most of the people just ignore such issues, adapt to the situation and don't end up discussing.

I feel we all are just speculating our issue with hit and try methods whereas these softwares were designed with logic and reasons, hope this discussion forum is answered with a solid solution or i will have to adapt and bring saving time consumption to my man hours time calculation

Please contact Customer Care.

Contact Customer Care

[BrightShadow]

Maybe my system configuration is not so fat, but I have same problems (already mentioned above). That is really strange, that the team didn't notice it. I'm a developer and our testers are finding such problems immediately, they really love to terrorize developers and prove that their code is slow 🙂 🙂

[martijnhoppenbrouwer]

So older ánd newer systems seem to suffer from the same problem.

Isn't it a viable option to just double check the PDF compatibility thing - this is where the problems lies.

I did go through Customer Care, but after choosing the different options, it returns me to this forum.

I'll try to free up time to get in contact trough a phone-call or chat.

[BrightShadow]

I'm also disabling compression. File takes around 3-4 times more, but... Saving for me takes 7s. Before it took around 40s. After I disabled PDF compatibility I got 20s.

[nitink31291663]

Can't understand why no official from ADOBE is answering to our issues, we have relied and invested on their products for so many years now, and these products are part of our day to day work, now it is this single issue that is shaking my belief in ADOBE.

There may be only 4 people in this thread with same issue, but i would like to inform that i have a team of 25 Designer working on same platform facing same issue and i speak on behalf of them.

Most of the people just ignore such issues, adapt to the situation and don't end up discussing.

I feel we all are just speculating our issue with hit and try methods whereas these softwares were designed with logic and reasons, hope this discussion forum is answered with a solid solution or i will have to adapt and bring saving time consumption to my man hours time calculation

[horstj74304021]

Just this morning Illustrator started opening and saving files extremely slowly for me. Especially saving. My fix (which was a fix to a similar Adobe issue years ago) was to quit all CC products, go to the Prefences folder in the Library and delete the file "com.adobe.mediabrowser.plist". A new version of this file will generate automatically when you open an Adobe product. (To access the Libray folder, hold down the option key while in the finder and use the "Go" pull down" menu.)

Doing this instantly resolved the problem for me. Hopefully it will for others as well.

[martijnhoppenbrouwer]

Hi horstj74304021​

Thanks for sharing your possible solution. That is what i call constructive feedback.

I'm on Windows here - Do you maybe know where i could/should find these files? Or if there is another solution for Windows users?

I've searched everywhere for a *.plist file, but the com.adobe.mediabrowser file isn't here.

[horstj74304021]

So sorry, I am one of those annoying Mac people. Windows is a foreign language to me. I couldn't even tell you if the cause of the issue on a PC is the same cause as on the Mac. Hopefully someone with cross platform experience will offer some help.

[brilliant_mentor98A1]

I tried this work around but didn’t have that link in my library. Anything else I can try?