Indesign lagging badly/very slow with files saved on network server

I've been dealing with this as well. IT can't figure it out. I just replaced the CAT 5 cable, as that was really my only other possible thing, and nope. Spinny balls with rainbows. The main lag is when I'm paginating large books or magazines and placing other InDesign files within the pagination. I can drop 6 ads into the the layout, then the 7th one takes forever to place. Is there something I'm missing?

My team has also noticed a similar lag due to VPN, to the point where I've had to delegate a task to export a very large INDD book (with multiple documents and a lot of links) to PDF to another person who works on-site to avoid the multiple crashes that it always causes when I try. It's a five minute task for her without the VPN, but it's a few hour long process for me between waiting for InDesign to gather the data for export, then crashing, restarting, waiting for recovery and repeating. While I do think it's a problem with the VPN stability, anything the INDD team can do to help improve functionality would be greatly appreciated because there is no way for me to avoid using it. The remote portion of the team uses workrounds like saving locally, but then I worry about data back-ups. Also trying to coordinate work on shared files when you need to save them locally to actually work on them is a huge headache. I regularly need to message people to stay out of files so I can work on them without accidentally overriding their work when I save the document back to the server. We cope, but it's not ideal. 

Hey, I’ve experienced the same issue. The files on our network drive have been super laggy, even when they’re small or have no links. Illustrator and Photoshop work fine, so it really does seem like an InDesign-specific conflict with network servers. Disabling Preflight and Save in Background in preferences helped a bit for us. Some users also reported better performance by switching the network protocol (like from SMB to AFP on Mac). Definitely worth reporting; the more of us that flag it, the sooner Adobe may prioritize a fix.

If you copy ID file locally, is the file behaving the same as it does from the server? I am not suggesting to work locally, only to test if server is really the issue.

The typical advice is to copy the file from the network to your local computer to work on. I know it's not very practical, but it's what Adobe Tech Support typically tells you.

Some users experience poor InDesign performance with files saved on a network, and I'm sure you'll hear from those who know more about various network servers soon.

In the meantime, what's your operating system version? Also, does the problem go away if you roll back to InDesign 20.0 (you can do so from the Creative Cloud app > InDesign > Other Versions menu.) Do you have the same issue with InDesign 2024 (you can install it in addition to InDesign 2025, if needed)?