InDesign CS5 lag slow on Snow Leopard 10.6

[markmld]

I am reaching the end of patience with this one and starting to wish i'd not paid for a CS5 upgrade.

I installed under Mac OS 10.5 originally, did all updates and had font and other deathly slow issues in Photoshop.

In the end, I enacted a TOTAL system maintenance routine and upgraded to System 10.6 in order to try and get round probs with CS5.

I since have ditched all prefs, reset all caches, cleared all logs, done total font checks and removed a couple of corrupt ones, repaired disk permissions etc etc etc....  Photoshop 'appears' to work ok, although saving and saving to web can be sluggish (pizza wheel waiting for it....)

InDesign CS5 is now taxing my productivity. I thought it was my Wacom Intuous 3 tablet, but find the issue (at the mo as I've not noticed anything significant yet in Illustrator or Photoshop) only occurs with InDesign CS5.

The issue is the glitchy interface - stepped or delayed movements of objects across the page, selecting menu dialogue boxes can take a second when i click on a value, slightly steppy movements make selecting the tiny up and down arrows on some menus very tricky to be accurate.  PLUS saving and saving PDFs in particular as well as PLACE images CMD-D can be deathly slow.  It used to be almost instaneous, slowed only by the hard drive firing up. Now i try to do things and have to wait on many actions. It's doing my head in!  This is NOT PRODUCTIVE.

In InDesign i have tried turning off Live Redraw, dropping display quality to fast (makes working almost impossible as i need to see what i'm doing), and disabled the Preflight option that is on by default, and i'm sure other options too i've seen on forums.  But no better.

I have a Quad Core 3Ghz Intel Mac with 14Gb RAM, and an NIVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT graphics card.

IS this APPLE or ADOBE issue?  How on earth can i get my speedy productivity back so i can move around the screen smoothly, save and place quickly, and select menu dialogues without waiting for it to react..... HELP!

[BobLevine]

I wasn't talking about you. I was referring to the guy with "G5" running SL and CS5.

Quite impossible.

Bob

[Peter Spier]

PowerMac, Perhaps?

[BobLevine]

Impossible. If it's running SL/CS5 it has to be an Intel Mac.

Bob

[enzoconti]

Hi Bob, I do apologise I do not have a G5 running SL it is a MAC PRO 2.66GHZ QX/2X 512MB/250GB/SUPERDRIVE (as described on my invoice). Nevertheless, the issue is why does this machine run ID5 so much more efficiently than the brand new beefed up iMac????

[enzoconti]

Yes! Power Mac G5. Bob, I am trying to describe my situation to the best of my ability, I have no intention of misleading anybody. As I stated earlier, I'm not very well versed in the language and have perhaps got some terminology wrong. I am taking this issue very seriously and would greatly appreciate your help, from what I've read in these forums in the past you appear to know your stuff. What would you like me to clarify?

[Peter Spier]

So you are saying the PowerMac runs CS3 faster than the new Machine runs CS5? You can't be running CS5 on the PowerMac. Is CS3 installed onthe new machine, too? How does THAT compare?

[Guest]

Peter, this will lead us nowhere. Enzo is just naming his IntelMac G5 and you know it. It is just a wrong name, wrong label, nothing more. The important question is why "older" systems seems to work better with CS5 than new iCore 7 machines with lots of RAM.

[Peter Spier]

Except that a PowerMac G5 CANNOT run Snow Leopard and CS5, and there's no such thing as an Intel G5, so we need to know what's really going on in order to compare apples to apples (pun intended).

[enzoconti]

Thank you Phorna! 5 GB on Power Mac, 8 on iMac.

I'm not here to dazzle people with my worldly knowledge in I.T. In fact I couldn't give a stuff about how these things work. I have been running a relatively successful boutique design studio for about 20yrs. I pay an I.T. professional to set me up with the software and hardware I need to efficiently provide my service. End of story!

I am on a "need to know" relationship with my computers, I know very little about how they work, but I can kick arse in Indesign, or at least I used to.

[Jeremy AB]

My situation is similar. My old Mac was a G5 1.8 Ghz running Leopard with 3 GB RAM. The newer mac (about a year old now, yikes!) is a Mac Mini, Core2Duo 2.53Ghz running Snow Leopard with 4 GB RAM.

I have installed the InDesign 7.0.3 update to see if that makes a difference. Although I haven't had a chance to get into it heavily it does seem a bit snappier with what little I've done since updating. For instance, there seems to be less of a lag when moving around the document, and before there used to be a lag of a couple of seconds when I'd enable/disable a PSD file layer, or add a layer effect (like a drop shadow).

If Adobe keeps working on improving the speed, gives us an option to disabled the dreadful frame edge highlights, and brings back the ability to click a panel title to collapse it (like in Photoshop), then I'll be ready to recommend we upgrade at work.

[enzoconti]

Thanks Jeremy, at first glance that update does appear to improve performance. Still a far cry from CS3 but better than it was. I'm back at work tomorrow I'll give it the full throttle then. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks again, very much appreciated!

[enzoconti]

I've had a bit of a play with ID5 this morning, I'd say that update has made a slight improvement, (I think) it's very marginal but it does feel a little more responsive! Worth a try if you're having these problems.

[Guest]

G5 is the name for PPC IBM processors family. This was an era before Apple switched to Intel. Snow Leopard can not run on these IBM processors. Therefore you can't have G5 machine running Snow Leopard and CS5. Simply it is Mac Pro but not G5. Just a wrong label.

[BobLevine]

You said you had CS5 and Snow Leopard running on it. Sorry, but that's impossible.

Bob

[Guest]

Please let me know how much RAM do you have in this Power Mac that is faster than iMac. I try to determine if installed RAM > 4 GB may be a problem for CS5.

[peter minneapolis]

enzoconti wrote:

Yes! Power Mac G5. Bob, I am trying to describe my situation to the best of my ability, I have no intention of misleading anybody. As I stated earlier, I'm not very well versed in the language and have perhaps got some terminology wrong. I am taking this issue very seriously and would greatly appreciate your help, from what I've read in these forums in the past you appear to know your stuff. What would you like me to clarify?

I posted a list of possible performance hits in the forum post titled, "CS5/Mac: Sluggishness Editing Book Files."

It's here: http://forums.adobe.com/message/3443547#3443547

HTH

Regards,

Peter Gold

KnowHow ProServices

[Guest]

Everything being said on this and other forums is true.  CS5 and or  10.6 is the problem. Both Adobe and Apple Are tyring to pass the buck  meanwhile we are losing productivity and money. Money we use to buy new  or upgrade both Apple and Adobe products. I can not stress how much  these issues need to be fixed, My Patience is wearing thin as I am sure  others hear are. ADOBE PLEASE HELP YOUR CUSTOMERS NOW!

[BobLevine]

There's obviously an issue, but adding a me, too here will only go so far to get sympathy from other users.

Please use the bug report form to report it directly to Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

You might also consider reporting it to Apple. I have no idea who's responsibility it is but it can't hurt to report it to both.

Bob

[Guest]

Just letting people know installing the 7.0.3 update has greatly improved performance for me. Previously (7.0.2) page thumbnails seemed to be the culprit of my laggy performance — I could switch the thumbnails on and off and see immediate benefits. With 7.0.3 installed, lag has *almost* gone.

It even works with:

Prefs > Interface > Options > Hand Tool = Higher Quality

Prefs > Interface > Options > Live Screen Drawing = Immediate

Prefs > Display Performance > Default View = High Quality (although I don't normally use this option)

I'm running an original Mac Pro tower, 14GB RAM, and have clean installed everything before installing CS5.

Thank god it's made an improvement (for me at least).

[enzoconti]

Must Agree! I've just spent the last day and a half using ID5 pretty heavily and have noticed very few probs, it seems a lot better!

[Treasures_Trinkets]

Installed CS5 in June on a brand new mac running snow leopard, 3.06 GHz intel core2 duo, 4GB 1067 MHz. Started to run poorly in October, as well as Illustrator. Slow to open, save and occasional crashes. I found that removing com.adobe.mediabrowser.plist worked for Illustrator.

Today I read about the 7_0_3 patch for InDesign. It's working much better! Thanks for your advice.

[tramadius]

Excruciatingly slow here. Running InDesign 7.0.3 on a Mac Pro 2 x 3 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon with Mac OS X 10.6.4 — 10 GB of RAM. 132 page annual magazine divided into 6 book docs.  Recently upgraded from ID CS3 and Tiger (not a clean install). Never had any slow-down issues previously with identical network setup.

All typical display settings (nothing set to high-quality). Even lags when set to fast settings. Using all Open Type fonts.

Any ideas anyone?

Photoshop CS5 has been working perfectly (faster than ever).

[enzoconti]

Hi Tramadius, my only suggestion is to firstly, forget about CS3. 5 just doesn't work as fast or efficiently. I migrated the same way and was very disappointed by the comparison. Secondly, try trashing your Indesign preference file in Libraries (not something you want to do everyday but it helped me, just keep your workspaces folder and then reload it). Lastly, just persist the new features in 5 are great and perhaps we have to accept the trade off.

[Guest]

Try this guys:

The reason that you are experiencing lag in InDesign5 is because the 'Live Screen Drawing" is set to 'Immediate'.  Set it to 'Delayed' and it should minimize your drag lag.  The same setting is default (Delayed) in CS4.

Also, please make sure you have the latest patch for inDesign.

Please let me know if this helps.

[Jeremy AB]

I already have that setting at "Delayed", I pretty much changed it on day one. The lag described in this thread goes beyond what this setting affects.

For instance, simply locking and unlocking layers is slow. When I click to lock or unlock it should be instant but there's a bout a 1 second lag.

I also have the latest patch.