InDesign 2022/2023 incredibly slow page preview times when photos exist on network share

[link470]

We have Adobe Creative Cloud products installed on hundreds of Windows 10 computers in our organization.  Our organization has multiple sites.  We have high speed WAN links between each of our sites (100Mbit and up).  At our two sites, they're using InDesign 2022.1 extensively to create pages, and each page contains anywhere between 3-8 photos.  The photos are all stored on a server over the WAN.  For this post, I'm referring to an InDesign file with 6 photos on it.  The photos total around 30MB, and the InDesign file itself is around 6MB.

The problem we've been seeing is that InDesign is incredibly slow to render a preview of the page.  While working with the photos themselves, it's not too bad, since InDesign is just showing the preview image in the document.  But when rendering a preview of the page, it can take up to 5 minutes long.  If the files exist locally on the computer, the preview takes around 4 seconds.

The easy conclusion to jump to here is "pfft, it's obviously the WAN speed".  But this doesn't make any sense to me because if I simply copy the folder containing the photos for that document from the network share over the WAN to the local computer, the whole folder copies in about 10 seconds.  If I watch the small render bar at the bottom of InDesign while the preview is generating, it'll sit there processing a single file seemingly at the same place for a long period of time, and then move on, where as I can go back and copy the folder from the server over the WAN to the local machine over and over again with no issue, while waiting for the original preview I ran to finish.

As a test, I also installed InDesign 2023 on a test machine and tried that to see if the newer version makes a difference.  But I still experienced the same issue.  Really fast preview times when the files are local, but downright awful when the files exist on a network share, even though file copies over the network in Windows Explorer are WAY faster.

Other applications seem to have no issues loading and saving over the network.  InDesign is the only application organization wide where users have complained of how slow the preview is.  It really looks to me like something Adobe needs to fix with how InDesign is handling the network communication to those resources, since the file copy speed itself clearly isn't the issue.  What's InDesign doing here that a simple network copy isn't?  Is there anything I'm overlooking?  Any way to optimize this?

[Steve Werner]

With an organization the size of yours, you must have an Enterprise account. Has your administratorm tried contqcting Enterprise support about these issues?

[link470]

I haven't gone down this route yet.  But we do have an enterprise account and I'll most likely try this as well.  But I thought I'd see if the community had any ideas first or to see if this was more wide spread.

[Eugene Tyson]

And to add to @Steve Werner - you must have an IT department - can they not solve the network issue? 

I do know working with large photos in Photoshop over a network is not recommended. The file must be local.

But you're using InDesign here. 

I am wondering if the folder structure on your server is too deep - too many levels maybe?

Hard to know - can you give us more clues?

[link470]

And to add to @Steve Werner - you must have an IT department - can they not solve the network issue?

I forgot to mention in the original post, but I'm one of the lead systems administrators for the organization.  It doesn't seem like a network issue because files themselves transfer over the network very quickly, and other applications seem to have no issues.  We've only seen these kinds of performance issues with InDesign.

I am wondering if the folder structure on your server is too deep - too many levels maybe?

Good guess, but I don't think that's a issue here.  The folder level of this particular directory is only 2-3 folders deep, with relatively short folder names.

[link470]

We've only seen these kinds of performance issues with InDesign.

Just to clarify, by performance issues I mean the page previewing.  Editing the document itself is fast once the photos are in, as I'd assume it's just working with the photo preview stored in the InDesign file (guessing here).

Basically, the time it takes a user to copy files from the network share to the local machine is way faster (a few seconds) than the time taken for InDesign to render a preview of these images (up to 5 minutes).  This just doesn't add up or make any sense and points to InDesign having a problem dealing with images saved on a network location.

[Peter Kahrel]

I see this problem a lot as well. It has nothing to do with the speed of your connection. What I have discovered is that if the link's path name starts with a numerical address of the form //000.00.00.00/dir/dir/photo.png then it takes long for the document to open. But when the server path is non-numerical (a clumsy way of putting it, I know) such as d:/dir/dir/photo.png, the document is processed quickly. This is a Windows-only problem.

The problem was reported a while ago.

[link470]

What I have discovered is that if the link's path name starts with a numerical address of the form //000.00.00.00/dir/dir/photo.png then it takes long for the document to open. But when the server path is non-numerical (a clumsy way of putting it, I know) such as d:/dir/dir/photo.png, the document is processed quickly.

That's interesting!  I don't think this is the issue here.  The hostname of the server does contain digits (as well as letters), but it starts with the letters.  We're also not mapping these shares via IP address for the users.  All shares are mapped via hostname, and DNS is healthy.

[Mike Witherell]

What happens if you trash/reset InDesign preferences, and restart everything?

Maybe it is not a network problem?

General Troubleshooting Advice Here.

[link470]

What happens if you trash/reset InDesign preferences, and restart everything?

This happens on every machine we've tested this on, whether or not a user has ever fired up InDesign with their profile or not, and whether or not the version is 2022.1 or 2023.  This happens on an existing installation of InDesign or a clean installation of InDesign.

[DaffCr]

Hi Link470, you maybe can test a workstation with InDesigns Preflight disabled. I onlywork local, but since the latest update that did the trick for the persormance issue on my workstation. Hope it helps for you too

[alexanderh97394298]

Over here I am experiencing utterly slow redraws in ID 2023 with RGB images in layouts. As soon as they are CMYK, redraw speeds are quite normal.

I have 64GB RAM and this reduction in performance with an update ... not nice!