Indesign CC June 2015 update is seriously slow - HELP!

[LottieNess]

Updated Indesign last week, and it's really really slow.

Lots of lagging - very sluggish in moving things around, menus slow to respond etc. Very frustrating.

Colleague has the same issue both at work and on personal Mac.

Using Mac fully spec'd up to meet requirements.

Help!

[ptcmark]

I foolishly updated to InDesign 2015.2.  It now can take several seconds to refresh a page.  The worst part is that overing the mouse over a text box can cause the page to refresh, even when I haven't edited anything on the page, and it erases everything so you can't even proofread while waiting for InDesign to do something. 

[Steve Werner]

Try restoring your InDesign preferences:

Trash, Replace, Reset, or Restore the application Preferences

[ptcmark]

Those instructions need to be updated.  It's really hard to do on a new Mac with a flash drive.  It seems you need to hold down the 4 keys before the program launches, which happens almost instantly.  I could not do that at all.  Even when I got the keys pressed before the icon animation appeared, it was too late for the preferences alert to come up.  Tried it from the Finder and from the Creative Cloud launcher.  Finally, I held down all four keys and then launched In
Design from the Finder.  That worked, and I was able to delete the preferences.

No difference, though.  At first, I thought it worked, because the first document I browsed didn't show any of the signs.  But as soon as I turned off the Application Window, the problem returned.  I work a lot in books with 4 or four documents, and when I have more than one open, it gets really bad.  One page turn resulted in a page that never did update.  I counted 15 seconds and then scrolled the page up a bit.  Then it updated. 

I have a new Mac Pro with tons of memory and hard drive space.  Until the update it was incredibly fast. I've been on El Capitan for some time without problems.  It was the update to 2015.2 last week that killed me.  I don't know what version I was on before the update.

[Colin Holgate]

There is an almost identical topic in the Photoshop part of the forum, and there they have discovered that the font preview feature seems to affect things. Turning off the font preview has made Photoshop a lot more responsive for some people, but not everyone.

Is there a font menu in InDesign that has a preview option that can be turned off?

[ptcmark]

I turned off the Font Preview in the Type preferences.  Not much difference.  I can't find a pattern.  Some pages will display display fine a few times, then stall the next time.  Switching between documents in a book seems to be the worst.

I turned the Font Preview back on and it doesn't seem any worse, so in my case, I think the Font Preview is irrelevant.

[Colin Holgate]

I misremembered something, it was the font preview size. Here's the Photoshop topic, read message 206:

Re: Photoshop CC 2015 is so slow it is unusable on my system

At the very least, you can feel like you're not alone in this!

[ptcmark]

Here's a hint for the Adobe folks.  I have a semi-transparent watermark that resides on a master page on the top layer.  When page rendering is interrupted, the watermark shows 100% opaque on the unrendered part of the page.  After some time, the page is rendered with the watermark transparent.

It's like the page is rendered at 100% transparency, then rendered again with the correct transparency.  Usually, it's almost instantaneous, but when it stalls, it takes several seconds to forever.  I have not noticed the problem on pages without the watermark.

This worked fine in all previous versions of InDesign.

[Willi Adelberger]

ptcmark schrieb:

Here's a hint for the Adobe folks.  I have a semi-transparent watermark that resides on a master page on the top layer.  When page rendering is interrupted, the watermark shows 100% opaque on the unrendered part of the page.  After some time, the page is rendered with the watermark transparent.

It's like the page is rendered at 100% transparency, then rendered again with the correct transparency.  Usually, it's almost instantaneous, but when it stalls, it takes several seconds to forever.  I have not noticed the problem on pages without the watermark.

This worked fine in all previous versions of InDesign.

What file type is the watermark?

[ptcmark]

It's a 540 x 720, 72dpi (7.5" x 10") CMYK JPEG!  Looks like it came from a CMYK Photoshop file. 

I reserved it from Photoshop as an RGB JPEG.

With the RGB watermark, I'm still getting the flicker when scrolling, though actual page turns seem to render immediately.  Still, once in a while it stalls on a page turn. 

I'd like to say it's better than when it was CMYK, but I can't really tell until I've used it awhile.

[Willi Adelberger]

Did you try to create a watermark in Illustrator, save as AI and place it instead of a PSD. Does it make a difference?

[ptcmark]

No, it's a low resolution JPEG on its own layer to watermark the document during editing.  The layer is turned off for publishing.

I'll turn off the watermark layer and work with it today to see.  The document is still jerky when it scrolls, but turning pages seems as fast as it was before.  So far, I haven't seen any of the multiple-second delays like I did with the watermark on.

Keep in mind that this document has worked fine since InDesign 2.0.  It was only the update to 2015.2 that caused the problem.

[00rhodiad]

Most likely a side-issue, but you mention that this is a legacy document (“this document as worked since Indesign 2.0”). FWIW, I’ve found that some old, repeatedly up-versioned Indesign files can develop problems. One easy way to clean them up is to export an IDML file. Apparently this strips out gobs of legacy gunk—Indesign basically builds a brand new file when you open the IDML.

Give it a try; certainly can’t hurt anything.

[Frans v.d. Geest]

What is the setting in your Preferences / Interface / Options? Is the Live Screen Drawing set to Delayed or never? Try changing this setting, you will see a difference 😉

[Frans v.d. Geest]

What is the setting in your Preferences / Interface / Options? Is the Live Screen Drawing set to Delayed or never? Try changing this setting, you will see a difference 😉

[DavidR_SF]

There are extensive online discussions on this. Most people have tied it to

the creative cloud interface. different parts of InDesign are trying to

pull data that's not on your computer. You can revert to 2014 and it may

save you hours of needless grief. We reverted our computers , we can import

2015 formatted files, and we've had no trouble since.

[Greg Harbour]

@DavidR_SF > we can import 2015 formatted files, and we've had no trouble since.

Ooh, interesting. I'd consider it if it didn't mean outputting everything as an IDML beforehand.

Did you need to IDML your 2015 docs? Or will 2014 natively read 2015 docs?

[DavidR_SF]

The earlier versions of ID 2014 didn't . But after a few updates, they did.

Now each time we try to open a 2015 ID doc it simply tells us it's

converting. No IDML file required.

[Greg Harbour]

Awesome, thanks for the tip! Great to know.

[aeknauf]

Only updated today and what a poor showing Adobe!  Dramatic response time delays which is really slowing down the team.

There is no point in adding new features if the main app becomes annoyingly slow.

Please issue a fix ASAP!!!!

[BobLevine]

It would help if, instead of simply complaining about it, you supplied system specs.

While there are enough posts here to conclude that some users are experiencing this, the vast majority are not. In fact, it's screaming fast for me on Windows10 with Core i7 and 16GB of RAM.

[rsalwayjm]

iMac 27 inch display, 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7, 32 GB 1600MHz DDR3, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB. And Stupid Slow!!!!!!

[Peter Spier]

Something about iMacs, it seems. Lots of complaints about them.

[rsalwayjm]

It was fine until the update, so it seems it is an Adobe problem, not a Mac problem.

[Peter Spier]

I'm not saying it isn't an Adobe problem of some sort, just that it seems to affect certain Mac configurations more often, so I would suspect hardware or driver incompatibility, or possibly a program conflict with something that is commonly run on these machines. And of course there are probably multiple causes that result in the same slow response, so there won't be a single answer that solves it for everyone.

[Steve Werner]

This is no consolation to those of you experiencing this problem, but the great majority of Mac users have no slow down at all. Both of my Macs running the latest version of Yosemite work fine. So there has to be something system-related or third party software-related causing the problem. It can be very difficult isolating what it is.

I would recommend for anyone having this problem that you create a new user on your computer and launch InDesign from the new user. That isolates system problems that might be caused by system corruption of some kind.

You can also try launching InDesign before launching any other application to isolation software, or browser extensions which might be interfering.

Also, as has been pointed out before, font management software can be the culprit because the font management software, for the most part, has not been adapted to InDesign CC 2015.