InDesign CC 2017 slow

[ponderosa_pine]

I am having issues with InDesign CC 2017 being extremely slow. If I click on a font the beachball just spins... I tried working in it for a few hours but it is killing me and went back to the previous version.

I use Suitcase Fusion and turned off Typekit. I am running Mac OS Sierra.

Is anyone else having this issue? I can't find any complaints online.

Thank you

[mattjd]

If this is Adobe's stance from their support threads, (I'd like to see all the responses from Adobe posted) then I think it's time the Adobe site update the FAQ with an official response reflecting said position. If they are firm on their stance it's a network issue they must have network packet logs to back that up. I'm sure they had to test so they should know what ideal network conditions must be. This would be helpful information. If our networks need to meet certain requirements should that not be included in the System Requirements? Prior to purchase, we have to consider hardware aspects of our systems be it PC or MAC. Now in the new age of CS maybe they should include network requirements?

Thank you all for adding to this discussion. As I mentioned I like to see those responses. I know one user posted something earlier in the thread.

[rickhino]

I used a sniffer back when they first created this problem in the 2015 update.  I was pretty surprised at what they were sending to the Adobe servers.  Personally I think they stepped over the line and are grabbing what I consider to be proprietary information.  I uninstalled 2015.  I won't install again until they fix the problem.

[Jonathan Wills]

@rickhino -- Could you expand on that? What was Adobe getting that you considered proprietary? I'd like to hear more.

You wrote:

I used a sniffer back when they first created this problem in the 2015 update.  I was pretty surprised at what they were sending to the Adobe servers.  Personally I think they stepped over the line and are grabbing what I consider to be proprietary information.  I uninstalled 2015.  I won't install again until they fix the problem.

[gaphic2]

I used a sniffer back when they first created this problem in the 2015 update.  I was pretty surprised at what they were sending to the Adobe servers.  Personally I think they stepped over the line and are grabbing what I consider to be proprietary information.  I uninstalled 2015.  I won't install again until they fix the problem.

Could you give some more detail? I think this is something we should all be aware of.

[rickhino]

Sorry, I can't be more specific.  Let's just say that everything I type on this thread can be recalled later.

[tessellati-cc]

Echoing jb89's note - the only consistent solution we've found to this problem is to isolate the machine running ID. No network connection at all. This is, obviously, a totally unacceptable "solution" to a problem clearly due to choices Adobe has made relative to its subscription model. We'll endure this only as long as we can't determine a better option to ID.

Adobe, please note – this is where Quark found itself oh-so-many-years-ago. I abandoned XPress with a glee that I find hard to describe. The level of frustration we're experiencing with ID right now is not far from that I endured in my last weeks of using XPress. Please don't f*ck this up like they did.

[drasahershoff]

Actually my Beachball issue, on and off for three years or more, is not coming from wifi.. It is about SCREEN REDRAW which is I believe at the root of most of these issue. That is certain because it only starts after text starts flowing to the next page. And the more linked pages, the worse it gets. Any backspace, selection of text, etc, starts the beach ball, from a few seconds to almost a full minute!!

BUT it is not on every single document. I tried changing fonts entirely, shutting off most of my fonts in FontBook, etc. Sometimes this worked for a time, but then the problem returns. Similarly the wonderful sudden adding of 10 pages and other bugs persist.  Changing various preferences as indicated in this and other thread is of no avail, and either is trashing preferences or re-installing ID.

My solution: I use MICROSOFT WORD now to do my word processing. As an author I am literally twice as productive, not waiting for beach balls, the auto spelling correct is light years better.. and there are no crashes. Fonts also look much crisper and legible than on ID. After I am through for the day, I paste my work into ID for its layout and graphic capabilities. But I am considering switching to Scrivener as well.

What one must realize is that not all corporations are as benevolent as hard-working, sincere, honest creative folks. There are mega corporations, even in the "entertainment" industry, ones that put out animated fantasies that delight small children and tell moral stories, that care NOTHING about end users, staff, creative personal, but ONLY the almighty dollar, profit and power. I have seen this first hand in boardrooms. I am afraid the top tier of Adobe is just that. If you check these threads there are multiple bugs and super design flaws that have been reported for six or more years consistently in all of the Adobe Suite products. They DO NOT CARE. THEY ARE NOT LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS (or they wouldn't take years to hunt them down folks). Unless there is a direct profit from making some move, they will not invest manpower, time or especially cash. And whining and complaining users are irrelevant to them. Hey, I will pay one dollar right now to have this bug go away, Adobe!

But hey, it was a pleasure typing in this forum. Very nice experience and no beach balls, no lags, no hangups. Maybe this will be my new ID...

[martind53001206]

I am facing the same issue.

I cannot simply downgrade, because of no admin rights. Working on network is must (I have not seen difference if I use wi-fi or LAN). No other suggestions from this thread has helped.

[Eunice Ockerman]

I'm not on a network for what it is worth.

[mike-green-and-black]

This is the link to example of the document which runs extremely slow. Try to move text column or add text to the text column. I had to wait about 30 seconds in between any 2 actions. Please try it out if you have the same problem with this document. Thank you!

[Eunice Ockerman]

Yes I had the same problem with your file. Extremely slow.

[Laubender]

mike-green-and-black  wrote

This is the link to example of the document which runs extremely slow. Try to move text column or add text to the text column. I had to wait about 30 seconds in between any 2 actions. Please try it out if you have the same problem with this document. Thank you!

Hi mike-green-and-black,

FWIW: As far as I can see this document is last saved with the first version of InDesign CS3 5.0.0.458.
I would recommend installing the latest bug-fix version of CS3 5.0.4 and proceed with that.

Back to your problem of slowness:
I opened your document with my Mac OSX version of CS3 5.0.4 and had no problem with speed.

All is running well. All is running fast. I could add text, remove text very fast. I'm doing this on a MacBook Pro from late 2008.

I see some composition problems with the Russian text, it's language formatting is "English USA" wheras the "No paragraph style" that dictates the formatting of text if I draw out a new text frame is suggesting "Russian". But that's an aesthetic problem. Maybe the one creating the document did not want to hyphenate at all.

That was the CS3 side of things. Now on to CC 2017:
If I open your document in CC 2017 it's amazingly slow. Adding a character will take some seconds, opening the Paragraphs Style panel? You have to wait. In contrast to that CS3 is blazingly fast on a nearly 10 years old machine.

Next thing I tried is to export the CS3 document to inx InDesign Exchange Format and opened this with CC 2017.
InDesign reacted slow. Very slow. So this workflow is no solution. Also: CC 2017 moved the items on the master pages when opening the inx file. CS3 opening the inx did not.

Also opened the CS3 document with CS4 on the same machine. No problems with speed.
Now tried CS5: And there the slowness began. So that's not a problem solely to InDesign CC 2017.
Also had this with an IDML exported from CS4 and opened with CS5.

My advice out of that (but first check the paragraph below) :

If you have the chance, go on with CS3 in an bug-fixed version like 5.0.4 or with CS4 6.0.6.

Or recreate the document.

Maybe I found the culprit of slowness here after some experimenting in CC 2017:

I changed "Justify" for "Vertical Justification" in the Text Frame Options dialog to "Top" and text editing speed was better.
Not fast, but "better". Changed it back to "Justify" and it stayed better.

// At least with CC 2017. Tried the same with CS5, that did not help.

Regards,
Uwe

// EDITED

[mike-green-and-black]

Hello! Thank you for the detailed research. I recreated the file from the scratch using Indesign 2017 only and found no difference in performance. I think the culprit is the the multiple columns of text connected together (so the text goes to the next one, i.e. overflow), set to justify and goes along 5 pages (8 columns per page, 9pt font). This kills any modern InDesign.

[mike-green-and-black]

As I said, I recreated "slow" document in InDesign CC 2017, you can see it here.

[tessellati-cc]

This is probably the last time I'll post here since it clearly is making no difference as far as Adobe is concerned...

For those struggling with this issue, we have determined on the two machines impacted by this (of 5 we have running 2017), the ONLY consistent "fix" is to work locally. The size of the document, its contents, the fonts used, etc. seem to make no difference. It might function perfectly fine for a period of time, then suddenly (and seemingly with nothing causing the change) start the beachball dance.

The inconsistent appearance of the issue and the fact that it has only impacted two systems so far just makes it all the more frustrating. Open a document on one machine and it works fine. Open it on one of the "bad" installs and it tests one's patience...

NOTHING in our network was changed from before the problem appeared to correspond to the initiation of the issue. The installation of 2017 started the problem (or maybe it was 2015 - hard to recount the timeline at this point).

Good luck to you all... To reiterate - "work locally" has been the only thing that has worked consistently us.

[RG user]

Just curious what computer you are using for the slow reaction.  The HP we are using it on works fine. It is the Dell on which we have a problem. Both are on the network. Wondering if this makes a difference.

[specialkbreak]

I have been having this problem for ages. I finally found a way to fix it (at least for now). I have removed all variants of Minion Pro from my computer, except "Regular." I now need to substitute a different font in my documents. Ugh. I have used Minion Pro as my Go-To font for years. However, if that is what is needed to fix the problem, I guess I can live with it.

[geir_helgi]

This is absolutely terrible, working on a server (with a super fast fiber-optic connection) and I get this beach-ball hang at least once every 5-10 minutes, for around 5-10 seconds. That's fr199in' a lot during the whole time since this CC17 update came. I suspect it has something to do with the data-rate the program is using while constantly updating the previews, links/images and that kind of stuff.

(Yes, working locally fixes the problem but there is a reason why we have these servers to work on, certainly beats that purpose...

On top of that Creative Cloud is a proud modern-day internet-based service that doesn't seem to be able to work on the internet LOL)

[tessellati-cc]

OK, I swore I wouldn't be on this thread again, but Mother Nature intervened. Let me explain...

Today, in the Boston area, the latest Snowmaggedon storm limped by. With work-from-home looming, I decided to take one of these beachballing babies home with me. To my complete befuddlement, it has worked flawlessly. Indesign zoomed through the day with nary a wee pause. I'm no IT guy, but this seems to indicate a network-related issue.

What I can't figure out is what could have changed on our work network when these problems started appearing. We hadn't been doing any work or made changes to the network or anything that I know about. Also, why is this problem not showing up on all our Indesign machines? Why is it so inconsistent and sporadic? What happened to Malaysian Air 370? All mysteries.

So, I suppose Adobe is not entirely wrong blaming users' networks for the problem. But why would this have suddenly appeared with some recent version update? Why with Indesign? Why so unpredictable?

Whatever the heck is going on, it's absurdly frustrating if you are dealing with this issue. The one thing I haven't tried yet, but might because it's probably worth it, is to completely wipe one of the machines and build everything up from scratch, documenting everything along the way. Might not make any difference, but it might save us a few brain cells.

Then again, I still have my old mechanical paste-up tools - Rubylith, waxer, One Coat, Bestene, Xacto... maybe I'll just go back to basics...

Thanks, Adobe!

[rickhino]

All well and good, but you're stating that Adobe not being entirely wrong blaming users' networks let's them off too easily.  If this were truly a user network issue, Adobe would have sent in one of their fan-boy minions to provide us with network settings leading to a fix.  That won't happen because they'd rather we didn't know what was going on through the back door.  Ask your IT department to place a sniffer on your computer while using UnDesign.  It's an interesting little exercise.

[tessellati-cc]

Didn't intend to give Adobe a pass on this. Obviously something is wrong and it's hitting a wide swath of users and it's not due to user incompetence or problems with networks (that worked perfectly fine with previous versions of the software). Adobe identifying the user's network as the source of the problem is not inaccurate. It's not "right", but also not incorrect.

What is so amazing about this is we can have two nearly identical computers running on the same network, working on the same files, but one lives in beachball hell, the other glides along completely normally. Removing the misbehaving machine to a completely different network setup fixes the problem.

Again, I'm considering a completely fresh install of everything on this problem computer, just to see if it makes a difference. If I try this, I'll report back...

[Susan Loncar Design]

I tried reinstalling CC 2017. I tried downgrading to CC2015. No luck. Finally, today I re-installed my old student version of CS6. Amazing! I finally can work with no interruption or spinning rainbow beach balls of delay, delay, delay. CS6 is my happy place right now ...

[JohnCookScreenName]

The same issue here...beach ball on every click.  I've no idea what to do...it was fine yesterday!

We all know that WHEN IT WORKS Adobe software is amazing but when it doesn't...which is all too often considering the monthly outlay, we al know that their support is crap...or should I say TOTALLY AWFUL....or TOTAL CRAP!  Embarrassingly so!  How many staff have been commenting on this post!!!  Just one response I think!

It's OUR fault though....we put up with it because in the main, we HAVE to put up with it, they have us over a barrel as there are no viable alternatives - Quark?...good luck, that's a bigger a piece of s**t and is soooo not an option.

It is just such a shame Adobe don't give a s**t about us...and they do have us over a barrel...i KNOW that, You ALL know that.

Suck it up peeps...or take a stand and switch Applications...i dare you!

[rickhino]

I have actually removed InDesign from my development process.  I am creating electronic books in PowerPoint.  Actually reduces my development timeline.  I still use Photoshop, Illustrator, and Animate, but am looking for alternatives.  We pay too much money to Adobe to be treated in this manner.

[JohnCookScreenName]

Good work Rick..I Wish I could but when Suppliers and Client require it...I am a bit stuffed!

I admire you very much...it would be great to find hooky copies of CC that work!!!  It goes against my principles but...I would use them!  A sad sign of the times...how being treaty so poorly can lead to such thoughts!