• Global community
    • Language:
      • Deutsch
      • English
      • Español
      • Français
      • Português
  • 日本語コミュニティ
    Dedicated community for Japanese speakers
  • 한국 커뮤니티
    Dedicated community for Korean speakers
Exit
0

A computer that will handle Adobe products without being sluggish

Contributor ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I have been using InDesign to publish my book for over six years now. I am by far not an expert with InDesign at all. I taught myself by watching YouTube videos. I know there is still a lot I don’t know.
I would like advice on what I should look for or get in a new computer (PC) that will handle all Adobe products without becoming sluggish or slowing down.

 

I have a top-of-the-line Dell laptop. It’s a few years old right now, but it does not seem to handle large files very well. Here is what I currently have.
Precision 7730 with an i9 CPU with 2.90GHz , 6 core processor in it.
32.0 GB of memory installed.

 

I really want to make this computer work or get a computer that will handle my files in InDesign and other Adobe products without being sluggish. It seems to be that large files being used in Adobe products that cause my computer to start being sluggish.
I can elaborate more if you need more information about my current setup or what I am doing in Adobe products.

TOPICS
How to , Performance

Views

1.9K

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

That computer should be more than adequate so perhaps back up and tell us what issues you're having.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Bob is correct; that system should handle even Photoshop and Premiere/AfterEffects projects fairly well. InDesign is not a demanding app on the overall scale.

 

The CPU and RAM are fine. The one thing you don't mention is the storage: fast SSDs make a HUGE difference for nearly all apps these days. A fast HDD is good, but the performance an SSD brings is astonishing, especially with large files.

 

All apps slow down as project files get bigger, the more so when the number of images, links, cross references, footnotes etc. increase. ID has various ways to make projects more manageable, starting with splitting large documents into multiple INDD files (by chapter, usually) and then using the Book feature to manage them as one document.

 

More details on your project and any specific problems you're seeing would help guide better answers.

 


╟ Word & InDesign to Kindle & EPUB: a Guide to Pro Results (Amazon) ╢

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Adobe Employee ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Hi @Attroll ,

 

Thank you for reaching out. It sounds like you already have a pretty powerful computer, and if it's still running slow, we'll need more details to troubleshoot this. Would you mind sharing a few more details like:

 

  1. The version of InDesign.
  2. Is this happening while working on a specific file or multiple files?
  3. Is it slow all the time or gets slower while working on a file or after performing any specific action?


You can also check your scratch disk, as InDesign uses a scratch disk to store temporary files. Make sure you have enough space on your hard drive for the scratch disk and optimize your images.

 

Let us know how it goes, we'll try our best to assist you with this.

 

Regards

Rishabh


 

 

 

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

To answer a few questions that you all asked, Then I explain in more detail about my issue.
I am running InDesign 18.1 x64. That is the latest version from what I can tell.
My C: drive is a SSD 500 GB drive.
My InDesign files are on my E: drive. That is a separate SSD 500 GB drive.
Rishabh_Tiwari, you asked my Scratch Disk. I don't see where my Scratch Disk is inside of InDesign. I can't find it in Preferences. Do I need to set it up?

 

Now back to my explanation.
I also thought that my computer should handle what I have, and it once did.
First let me say this computer is for business and there are no games or junk on here. It is basically used with Word, Excel, and one of my genealogy programs.

 

I have been having these issues for a while now and have been dealing with it, but it has started annoying me too much now. It started after I did an upgrade to InDesign a long while back.
Last time this happened I went in and reset my preferences and that helped. However, I tried this when it happened again a while back and it did not help. I also just did it the other day and it did not help.

 

These problems did not previously exist. I am using the same document and it has not increased that much in size.
Here is what I am having trouble with InDesign.
When I run scripts on my document it takes ten times longer to run than it previously used to take. This is very annoying.When I close my document in InDesign it takes a while for it to close and allow me access to open another document. What I mean by this is the document closes but the InDesign home page will not allow me to click on anything for a little bit. It is like the screen freezes for a little bit. This is only in InDesign because I can go to other open programs, and they are not frozen in the other programs. I know you are going to ask how many open programs I have when using InDesign. It is usually just an Excel file, an Illustrator file, my gmail, and sometime Photoshop. However, this issue happens with InDesign being the only program open.

 

I am also having troubles in Photoshop with it also being sluggish and crashing but I am more worried about InDesign right now.

 

If you have any more questions, please let me know. I really need to get this resolved.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 17, 2023 Feb 17, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

LATEST

How old / what mileage your SSDs have?

 

Maybe they are just worn out? 

 

Do you use ANY network resources in you INDD files - fonts / links? Or links to other Excel sheets in your main Excel sheet?

 

▒► ID-Tasker / ID-Tasker Server - work smart not hard ◄▒

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Your symptoms could easily be caused by file bloat or minor corruption. It's a good practice to, at a minimum, do a Save As at the end of each editing session. Ordinary saves leave all the change information in the file, but after closing it becomes inaccessible useless Bloat.

Rather than just Save As and overwrite the same file, I recommend saving a new version wioth a new name soi you have a backup chain, just in case something goes south, or if you work for other people, you can go back several versions and easily branch off in a new direction. I name my files [Filename working 1, 2, 3 ] and so on, but you can use any scheme that makes sense for you.

A corollary to bloat is minor corruption that can slow down or ultimately crash a file. Export to .idml, open that nad save with a new name and carry on.

Another major source of file slowness is large quantities of embedded graphic content. Link graphics and images instead. Even a very large book that's properly set up should typically be well under 100 mb.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

This, in big bold red type.

 

"Purging" work files is essential to keep them from bloating and slowing down over time. And a consistent Save-As, rotating backup plan is essential with any project that's not a five minute trivial thing.

 

And consider splitting up very large documents, either as separately managed files or under a Book structure. That has many advantages on big, long projects.

 

Also, if you are not backing up your project and other data files, you should stop right now, go buy a good rugged external USB drive, and do so without delay. Weekly backups of your array of on-system backup files is cheap insurance against losing a drive, the data or the laptop. Or just making a stoooopid mistake, late one evening when you're tired and in a hurry.

 


╟ Word & InDesign to Kindle & EPUB: a Guide to Pro Results (Amazon) ╢

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Backups should be DAILY at the max for work files. Weekly is OK for programs and OS which don't change frequently, but do you really want to lose a whole week's work on that project coming up on deadline?

 

There are plenty of good, automated, drive imaging backup systems out there and they are well worth their cost. One crashed hard drive that you can recover in an hour will pay for them. It's a lesson lots of us have learned the hard way...

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Peter

I do do this. I have known about the bloat thing  About ever other time I update the document, I change the file name.

Example:

File name-1

File name-1A

File name-1B and so on.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

James

I also have a NAS drive and my files are backup on a regular basic to the NAS drive.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

OK, that's good. How big are these slow files? And what do you consider slow?

 

Do you have a lot of other stuff running in the background? Have you checked Task Manager to see what's using CPU and memory?

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Peter
My InDesign document is 132,632 KB.
The excel file that I am running the script on inside the InDesign file is 213 KB.
I have four excel files inside my document. They are about the same size.
Each time I make and edit one of the excel files with excel, I need to update the excel file in my InDesign document.Once it is updated in my document, then I must run three scripts on the excel file that I updated to manipulate the format a little for the InDesign document to reformat it.
Once script tweaks the format just a little. This one does not take too long. I am not concerned about this one.
The second script searches the excel file for phone numbers, email addresses, and url’s and makes them hyperlinks. This takes about two minutes. It used to take less than one minute.
The third one searches the excel file for a certain character and replaces it. This takes almost 7 minutes. It used to take about three minutes or less.
Everything has doubled in time. Then like I said exiting the document it seems to get sluggish and freeze up InDesign for about 20 seconds or more.

 

As I previously mentioned this will happen with InDesign being the only program open.
I have checked with the task manager to verify this.
I have noticed that InDesign does have multiple instances of something called “Adobe CEP HTML Engine” open, 30 instances. I don’t know if this is normal.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Okay, there's your answer.

 

Scripts are outside the normal InDesign performance standards (loosely speaking). They are somewhat slow for inherent reasons (that is, a fairly simple script that does some formatting task will be noticeably slower than a similar, app-based task). When you have large files, and large component files scripts are processing, yes... the routine will get slower and slower no matter how fast and capable your system is.

 

This isn't really an ID problem. It's a project-scale problem, and with interpreted scripting, there's not many ways to speed it up unless you can break the docs and the files into smaller pieces.

 


╟ Word & InDesign to Kindle & EPUB: a Guide to Pro Results (Amazon) ╢

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Feb 17, 2023 Feb 17, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Yout're saying it is because it is the scripts that I am runing inside of InDesign. I can live with that but I don't know why they doubled in running times over the last three InDesign upgrades. I will jsut keep dealing with it, if that is what I must do.

What would cause the issue with me closing out the document and the home screen of InDesign freezing of about 20 seconds before I can do anything with it again?

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

You should probably post the script code that is slow so some of the scripters can have a look. Parsing a big Excel file might just take a lot of time in general to look at every character...

 

Not sure how many instances of the CEP Engine is a lot. I know they seem to spawn like rabbits. It would perhaps be instructive to see what's happening with speed and in Task Manager if you reboot and start to work on the file first thing.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 17, 2023 Feb 17, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Looks like you are using VBA from Excel - it will be much slower than running script inside InDesign... but as you are communicating from / with external application - it will always be slower that working only in the InDesign. 

 

Unfortunately, InDesign is evolving, with many new options and some things may work slower. 

 

Try to minimize InDesign's window after you run script in Excel - in essence, it will stop InDesign redrawing contents of the pages - you should get at least 30% speed increase. 

 

▒► ID-Tasker / ID-Tasker Server - work smart not hard ◄▒

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

the biggest tell is the GPU. What GPU are you using? 

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Probably irrelevant in this case, as the book is not said to have a lot of graphic elements and Windows doesn't use GPU acceleration. Even in graphics-heavy documents, GPU performance pretty much only comes into play when displaying a specific page or spread — that is, graphics load is not cumulative for all the undisplayed pages.

 

 


╟ Word & InDesign to Kindle & EPUB: a Guide to Pro Results (Amazon) ╢

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Windows most certainly uses the GPU to render the page on your screen. Graphics and text are drawn with the help of the GPU, including zooming, drawing text frames, smart guides.. color rendering. It is especially important for Windows and Mac.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 16, 2023 Feb 16, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Well, yes, of course the GPU is what creates screen renders.

 

But Windows systems do not use the GPU as a 'fast processor' for internal calculations and rendering operations. Macs do, although it can be problematic and create display artifacts and display weirdness.

 

But GPU power, on almost any reasonably modern PC, is all but irrelevant to InDesign performance. Just maybe on a doc with page after page of multiple layers, transparency, high-rez graphics elements, effects... yes. But in most "book" documents, even ones with a few images per page, few users would notice any difference between a workaday video adapter and one that can generate monstrous numbers under some AAA game.

 


╟ Word & InDesign to Kindle & EPUB: a Guide to Pro Results (Amazon) ╢

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Feb 17, 2023 Feb 17, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

In our production setting, decent GPUs do show advantages over our laptop users with integrated low spec CPU/GPUs. Our print shells are huge, many layers, a handful of graphics, but displaying our dynamic templates is demanding.

 

We avoid these issues by sticking to ID 2021/2020 for mainline production, and it stays pretty smooth. under the hood, ID has changed a lot especially the way the text is handled. I can only speak to our workflow environment employing a dozen people on InDesign for mass print and digital.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 17, 2023 Feb 17, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Again, I won't argue with you in principle... and I have been building graphics, CAD (and gaming 🙂 ) systems, and servers, and whole networks for such uses, since the PC days. I am thoroughly aware of the contributions of a graphics subsystem.

 

And laptops with only "business grade" video, usually the Intel chipset stuff, can be overwhelmed by graphical software, often more because the rest of the system is relatively limited and low-end.

 

But I'll maintain that any decent system with a CPU and RAM suited to Adobe apps, with either brand-name video chipset, is likely to be all most InDesign users can desire, excepting possibly those building very large, graphically complex layouts. I've used systems that were positively crippled in specs... and had no real complaints with ID's performance for "books" and similar docs.

 

I don't see where the graphics subsystem has anything to do with the OP's problem. It's a huge document with a complex structure for which he runs complex scripts on a repeated basis. Possibly a more powerful CPU would help, but the GPU is all but irrelevant, especially on a Windows system... and I am not at all sure a Mac's use of GPU acceleration would make much difference.

 

(And yes, yes, more is always better, power is is its own reward, five more FPS is divine, etc. But the real world payoffs to extreme hardware get pretty few against their cost. My solution is to never, ever stick advanced users on laptops, especially laptops that basically never leave one desk-top. 🙂 )

 


╟ Word & InDesign to Kindle & EPUB: a Guide to Pro Results (Amazon) ╢

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 17, 2023 Feb 17, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Two chicken-soup suggestions for you:

If Windows, have you emptied out the Temp folder lately?

Have you tried exporting your big INDD file to IDML; and re-opening the IDML file to SAVE-AS to a new fresh INDD file?

Mike Witherell

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines