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!

[enzoconti]

Just had an interesting experience with ID5. I had 2 24 page documents open at the same time to cut and paste one article from the other and the spinning beach ball came up, after about 15 seconds a dialogue box came up with "Out of memory"???? Anyone here know what that means?

[Ade_Fowler]

I've been using CS5 on a 6 core Mac Pro with 16gb of RAM since early September. After some early teething problems things had settled down and Indesign has been a relatively pleasurable experience.

Yesterday, I upgraded to 7.0.3. Now whilst working on an 80 page book that i've been working on problem free for over a month,  I get 'Out of memory' errors and the page won't redraw. Switching to Fast Display works but that's far from ideal. The only temporary cure is to restart Indesign.

[wilmarboer]

I'm having the same problem.

My Indesign version is 7.0.3.

I'm working on a Mac Pro (2.8 Ghz Quad-Core Xeon) with 12gb memory.

I've switched of Live Screen Drawing.

But still ID CS5 is very slow, especially when moving object. When I move an object it takes about a second to redraw the object. ID CS3 is a much faster experience. Especially with Overprint Preview on. Any tips wil be highly appreciated!

[enzoconti]

Sorry Wilmar, I have no good news. I've been searching for an answer to this problem for months, it's just something you'll have to learn to live with. My only advice is to hope that either Mac or Adobe recognise the issue go about fixing it. I don't think there is anything you can do to achieve ID3 speed and efficiency.

[wilmarboer]

@Enzoconti, thanks for the reply.

@Cre8thenew, I'm not working on a network, but on an (external) eSata disk.

What's even more strange is that my late 2008 Macbook Pro (4gb ram, 2.54Ghz DuoCore) is running ID CS5 more smoothly. Still slower that CS3, but better than CS5 on the Mac Pro!! I really think it's an issue with the ATI gfx card in the Mac Pro. Sometimes when scrolling on de Mac Pro the whole document turns white. Scrolling again get's the screen redraw.

[Guest]

I'm having identical problems you all are mentioning working with InDesign CS5 7.0.3

I'm running this on a MacPro 4,1 Quad-Core 2.66 with 8gb ram Snow Leopard 10.6.4

All other CS5 apps scream with this setup, InDesign is painfully slow.

I most notice the lag when the Pages panel is open.

I work on magazine layouts with hundreds of images, all linked from local SATA drives.

Someone at Adobe must know what's going on here...it's been a while now.

Peter

[enzoconti]

Wish I could help, but we're all in the same boat! Hang in there, Adobe has to act soon if more of these complaints persist!!!

[wilmarboer]

Is there any way to find out if Adobe does aknowledge the problems and/or is already working on it?

It seems like it is happening with the 8core Xeon with ATI GFX only, is that correct?

[Andreas Jansson]

Hi!

Use the Adobe Bug Report Form, if you haven't described the issue there yet. The more attention the performance issues with CS5 gets, the better.

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Best regards Andreas

[Cre8thenew]

If your CS5 files are stored in a network drive, has anyone looked at that?  Are you connecting/accessing your CS5 files on a shared network drive using SMB on Snow Leopard (not Leopard)?

If so, that may be the issue.  SMB definitly works differently in Snow Leopard.  We had this issue for awhile when we upgraded to newer Macs with Snow Leopard, and kept the same file sharing protocols during the transfer.  Accessing files was awful.  It was very slow.  After investigating, we switched from SMB to AFP (Apple File Sharing).  Talk to your network admin to see if the shard drives support it.

That seemed to fix the issue and now everyone is happy.

Let me know if this helps.

[enzoconti]

I have downloaded files straight to my desktop, no difference.

[Alex_Furness]

Hi all - Until a fix is provided I found that selecting 'View / Display Performance / Typical Display' rather than 'High Quality' removed the lag when working with InDesign and the Wacom Intuos tablet. This is of course like going back to Quark with the different preview resolutions. But at least it is moving and not lagging and can then switch back to High Quality when finishing off the design. Hope that helps to those still struggling with this issue.