InDesign CC 2020 and CC 2019 slow performance on macOS Catalina

[Vesa Kärkkäinen]

I am having issues with InDesign CC 2020 being extremely slow. I have re-install InDesign 2020 and InDesign 2019 and after that both version is extremely slow. HELP! I cant do my work, because every step is so slow, slow, slow.... I have macOS Catalina, MacPro and 2 x LG UltraFine screens.

{Renamed By MOD}

[Guest]

Moving to the InDesign forum from Community Help

[Rishabh_Tiwari]

Hi there,

Sorry to hear about the trouble you are facing with InDesign. I would request if you can try the following steps and share your observation:  

1. Reset Preferences:  

• Close all adobe applications 
• Go to Locations:  
• ~/Library/Caches 
• ~/Library/Preferences 
• Rename Adobe InDesign and com.adobe.indesign to Adobe InDesign.old and com.adobe.indesign.old 
• Launch InDesign from the CC 

Disclaimer: Please note that resetting preferences will remove all the custom settings and InDesign will launch with default settings. This way all your old settings will be saved in .old folders and InDesign will recreate new folders with default settings.  

2. If that doesn't help, try booting the system into Safe Mode (https://helpx.adobe.com/in/x-productkb/global/start-safe-boot-mode-mac.html) and check how it works there. It starts your system so that it performs certain checks and prevents third party software/ services from automatically loading or opening. If it works fine in Safe mode, then there is some third party service or application like antivirus, plugins or web extensions which are conflicting with the InDesign.
3. If that doesn't help either, login to the root account (https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT204012). Check how the application works there. If it works fine there, then it could be related to permission errors. Follow these steps to repair permission errors: https://helpx.adobe.com/in/indesign/kb/preferences-folder-read-only-issue.html.

4. If nothing helps, then we need to troubleshoot this on a live session. Please head here (https://helpx.adobe.com/support.html) and select the chat button in the lower-right corner of the page. We can help on a live session that way.  

Regards

Rishabh

[Rag and Bone]

I'm having similar problems. These instructions appear to be for Windows, not Mac OS Catalina, which is what both the OP and I want to know about.

Are you able to offer the locations of 

• C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Adobe  
• C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Adobe.

on a Mac?

I have cleared caches and deleted prefs, which seem to help for about 2 days, and then the issues came back.

[Vesa Kärkkäinen]

Hi there,

I have MacOS - not PC! So I can't find locations.

I have try booting system in SafeMode and other ways, but it doesn't help.

And why my old InDesigns version is now also so slow? This happends after I install InDesign 2020 version...

[Rishabh_Tiwari]

I am so sorry for sharing the steps for windows. I have updated the steps for macOS above, please try and share your observation.

[Vesa Kärkkäinen]

Thx - I try rename folders, but it doesn't help anything... InDesign is still extremely slow.

Can the 2 x 4K dispaly affect the slowness, because in my MacBook Pro InDesign 2020 run works fast? Both use same kind preferences and OS Catalina. Or do you have other suggest to way out situation?

Help.....

[Rishabh_Tiwari]

Thanks for trying. Could you please confirm if you have also tried the 2nd and 3rd steps mentioned above? If yes, then we need to troubleshoot this on a live session. Please head here (https://helpx.adobe.com/support.html) and select the chat button in the lower-right corner of the page. We can help faster that way.  

[Vesa Kärkkäinen]

I try all steps and nothing happend.. so no help was found. So next I try Adobe support..

[jeffhalmos]

I'm finding that Adobe 2020 is not coded/optimized for 4K monitors. Which is stunning.

[Charlesosawa]

response feels definitely slow

[fueledbydesign]

Silly question, but where do I find these?

• ~/Library/Caches 
• ~/Library/Preferences 

[jlcpu]

On MacOS, the tilde (~) represents your user folder. So this means (your user folder)/Library. It's at the same directory level as Documents, Downloads, Desktop, etc. But it's hidden in recent versions of MacOS. To access it, use the Finder menu: Finder > Go > Go To Folder... and then enter "~/Library/Caches" to get to the first location.

[joseph25680113tikp]

HELP! HELP! does anyone have a link to share a older version of photoshop? my mac is 2011 and will not accept newer versions

[kidguava]

I'm having the same problem and none of the solutions on the boards have worked for me. I have a brand new (week old) iMac and it is running slower than my previous 5-year-old iMac. Let Adobe know about this - vote on my user voice post:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/39583759-cc-2020-catali...

[Rishabh_Tiwari]

Hi there,

Sorry to hear about the trouble. If you have already tried the steps above, then we will need to troubleshoot this on a live session. Please head here (https://helpx.adobe.com/support.html) and select the chat button in the lower-right corner of the page. We can help faster that way.  

Regards

Rishabh

[annem98088358]

It would be really great for Adobe to be more transparent about this problem. If you look at the number of threads with people having issues and the fact that the 2019 release had the same issues until a code bug was fixed. Adobe does not acknowledge they have a code problem in any of the forums however and it just frustrates people. Most of the threads have many people who have done all the trouble shooting recommendations, several times over, and the problems remain but no response from Adobe. Could someone from Adobe please do the right thing and respond to this with an update on what is being done and when it will be fixed? @rishabht95040164 is just the messenger here but could you please look beyond the scripted responses for those little 'routine' fixes and come back with an update about the bigger issue? Thank you. 

[Srishti Bali]

Hi there,

So sorry to hear about these performance issues. I have send you a DM for more details, please check.

Regards,

Srishti

[jeffhalmos]

Here here! CC performance has been THE major issue we all want solved. Forget the new features. Give us performance. Adobe, you're now up agains Affinity, which is anihilating you at the moment, with a smooth, fast, and immediately responsive experience. It's not even a contest.

[frazzlesnap]

This is a near-universal issue. I'm running Windows 10 Pro x64, and experiencing the same problems. My 14 year old dual Opteron 290 16GB RAM U320 scsi RAID 10 system ran InDesign CC 2018 faster than either my Core i7 9700 32GB RAM Samsung 970Pro work system, or my slightly older Ryzen Threadripper 2950X 128GB RAM Samsung 970Pro home system, though the latter seems notably happier with CC 2020. At least Mac users get the option for GPU acceleration in InDesign. One of my Mac coworkers "upgraded" to CC 2020, and it has been absolute hell for him, on a pretty decent, 2 year-old iMac. He has to go back to CC 2018 to get anything done at times. I wish I'd left it installed on my systems, too. As has been stated in other threads, InDesign is basically "optimized" for a single-core system. Then there is the mantra that Adobe keeps chanting as a cure-all. I refuse to trash my Preferences any more. That has never fixed any issue I've ever encountered. Besides, exactly what is corrupting them in the first place? Swamp gas? I've been a designer since Pagemaker 6.5, and have encountered trouble with literally every version of InDesign ever released. The old versions basically just crashed a lot. Now it's incredibly slow. At work, I will open the program and literally have to wait up to 7 minutes before it finally decides to start functioning. At home, it usually takes about 1 or 2, but this is still ridiculous, and can't be tied to the CPU's performance, since the i7 9700 has better IPC than my Threadripper. When using the program, it will occasionally decide to just freeze for a bit. I've checked CPU useage. 0-2% for InDesign at these moments. Just like on some of the Macs. I really hope that someone finally addresses all this. The lack of multithreading support should be considered criminal.

[BobLevine]

The only issues I've had on Win 10 were with conflicts caused by the Bing interactive wallpaper. I don't know why or how it was killing InDesign's performance but when I switched to a static wallpaper, every performance issue on the machine went away.

[frazzlesnap]

I've never used Bing interactive wallpaper. I try to keep the systems lean, because many of them are about 10 years old.

I just had InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, and Photoshop all freeze on me for almost four minutes, with no files open in any of them. 0% cpu use the whole time. No other open programs seemed affected. This hasn't happened before. The general slowdowns, however, are consistent across all the machines we have here, except one lucky 2017 iMac running Catalina that opens everything pretty much instantly and never experiences slowdowns or freezes. I have to mention that only three Windows 10 computers and two Catalina iMacs are running CC 2020. Everyone else is still on 2018, but they've all got issues of their own, and three of those systems are all but bricked by CC at this point. I know I said that I refused to trash Preferences any more, but I went ahead and tried it on a few of the Windows machines, and it had no effect.

My home system is a very complex beast, and I've had to manually install several CC 2020 apps from the temp folder, because the CC installer kept failing, so it seems strange that it runs everything so much better than the completely clean installs on the work machine. Most of the Windows 10 systems here are upgrades of 7 and 8, but the one I use was a fresh installation of 10. It's kind of maddening trying to pinpoint issues in Windows, with all the various hardware permutations, but a company as big as Adobe should be able to produce software that isn't so full of bugs.

I still would like to know what is corrupting the Preferences all the time, and what necessitates them being so delicate that, in 20 plus years of software evolution, Adobe has never managed to correct that vulnerability.

[Willi Adelberger]

I do not experience those problems, but in the past I had often huge performance problems. They were caused in given files which hat all or one of theses issues:

1. They had some EPS files linked. Solution: Don't use EPS, use AI or PDF/X-4 instead.
2. They had a lot of images embedded. Solution: Don't embed and unembed and link embedded files.
3. They had an old history, either from old versions with many updates or many crashes. You can find this information in the file history. Go to About InDesign and hold down the cmd/ctrl key. Solution: Export as IDML, open the IDML, repair unwanted changes and save as new INDD.

In my experience one or all of these problems caused terrible performance.

[jeffhalmos]

Not for some of us. I can create a new letter-sized doc, and do nothing to it, and it still scrolls around with the grabberhand like I'm using a Mac SE.

[Brad Grigor]

I recently "upgraded" to CC from CS6. Subsequently, I did a bare metal install of Win 10 and then re-installed CC. As I write this, InDesign 2020 is searching a 236-page document looking for "s^]". It is taking at least 3 or 4 MINUTES to find each one. In general, InDesign 2020 is terribly slow at everything and gets slower the longer I have it open. It has resulted in me rebooting much more often than I like (or should ever be necessary). Please fix this Adobe--it is KILLING my productivity (and patience).