InDesign running slow. Spinning ball constantly appearing.

Here's the best answer you're EVER going to get on this because Adobe isn't exactly proactive in seeking solutions for issues and shortcomings in their softwares outside of Photoshop…

LEARN to use Quark Xpress and be done with all the HELLOOOOOO BEACHBALL Nonsense!!!

I'm stuck working with Indesign at my job because we work with a couple of outside people who don't know a thing about quark and if I'm out for some reason and they have to step up to cover for me, they wouldn't know how to do a thing using Quark. The best thing you can do for this POS ass backwards POS software is to open Preferences and change your default Preview to TYPICAL DISPLAY because this POS is CONSTANTLY trying to re-render images as you scroll or move and if they're Hi-Res, it has to calculate the file information for every image both inside and outside the viewable area.

HOW this POS software became mainstream is beyond me and I've been working with it since before Adobe purchased it when it was Pagemaker by Aldus, a time when this software didn't have ANY of the issues that have plagued it since its full release in 1997. Yes, I have been working with InDesign since 1997 and I know it through and through and I can say with ALL CERTAINTY it is simply non user friendly, and impractical. I advise all my tech clients to stay away from it because it devours hard drive space at the same rate unicron devours planets. That just adds to the CONS for this software.

If any of you have been in the printing and advertising industry as long as I have you probably have an idea as to WHY this software overtook Quark, and it had NOTHING to do with performance.

So in closing, set tyour Indesign to TYPICAL DISPLAY preview to speed this turd of a software up!

I had this problem after converting a 2014 InD file to 2020 version.  I would open the file and then all of a sudden, the spinning ball problem would start.  I do not have any add-ons installed.

After playing around a bit with the file and layers, I discovered that the problem was with a single text block on one of the pages.    If I didn't view that page, the problem didn't happen.   Eventually, I was able to isolate that text block on a layer and then turned that layer visibility off, and viola!, the problem went away.

To fix it, I deleted the existing text block and recreated it from scratch.

Maybe this might help someone work through the issue.

Ok - This is an older thread but the issue persists in 2020. All these "solutions" are nonsense trying to hide the fact the InDesign is just badly written software that Adobe for whatever reason keeps kicking down the road and not fixing. What do I mean? Download any CPU monitor (mac or PC) and start whatever process is taking up all the hours in your life. As you watch the beachball spin and the load bar barely creep - you'll notice that the CPU load is negligible (for me its 2%) and that of all the CPU processor cores on your machine, only one at a time engage.

What am I getting at? InDesign does not support modern multicore processors. Rather than address the problem in a new version release, they hide the lag in these forums telling people to trash their preferences or reinstall the software. Heinous.

Dear Adobe - I just upgraded to a 28 core Mac Pro with 192 GB of ram running a factory install of Mac OS Catalina. I installed 3 pieces of software:
1: Current 2020 Creative cloud to install InDesign
2: InDesign 2020
3: a CPU performance monitor

Guess what? When I open my 264-page catalog .indb file and hit synchronize, I get a beach ball, as it figures out a progress bar, then the progress bar creeps across as it chugs along. CPU load? 2% 1 core at a time. It is absolutely infuriating watching it chug along and only access a fragment of the computer's power. If it engaged even 20% of the machine's capabilities, we would never see the loading bar, much less the beach ball; and all these threads and threads of speed and performance complaints across a myriad or support sites would all dry up.

FIX.
THIS.
ISSUE.

I realize this is an old thread, but I've found a solution that worked for me. Hopefully this will help any future googlers if they need it. So I was experiencing this same issue and tried everything listed in this tread to no avail. Called up my boss and he said he was having the same issue. We both found we were using Suitcase Fusion font manager and that was probably the issue. After he called Adobe and Extensis back and forth a few times, someone finally gave him the solution that fixed this issue for both of us:

1. In InDesign, click on Type ->Suitcase Fusion ->Suitcase Fusion Auto-Activation Preferences
2. Uncheck the box Activate Fonts in Embeded Objects

Thats it. InDesign immediately stopped freezing up on me and I was able to complete work on my project.

The only way to fix this is to cancel your CC Subscription and buy Affinity Publisher. InDesign is outdated and built on an ancient platform... Its broken and buggy. 

As you can see, Adobe is focused most on earning money on us, not on improving their products. This is usually the case with a monopoly.
Same problem here. I updated InD yesterday, and it started to lag every action I take.

I had this issue myself on a fairly powerful MacBook Pro with 16gigs of RAM, a dedicated graphics card, and a 2.3 GHz i7 procressor. I'm not using any font management at this time.

At any rate, I was working with an older networked file. It was created maybe two years ago, so on an older version of InDesign. Once I saved as a new version and reopened the file, I didn't seem to have any more issues.

Someone else mentioned saving as an IDML file, maybe it's an issue with reading older InDesign files?

Hi there. I'm not sure if this is the "correct answer" to the problem. I am running Universal Type Client, and there's no option for "Disable Document Tracking" in any preferences for UTC nor InDesign Extensis prefs.

I've scoured all posts on the matter of "slow typing" or "slow performance" in InDesign, and nothing is working to resolve my issue.

It's a matter of TABLES in threaded text frames (my current issue, anyway).

If anyone has any hints, not already mentioned in these threads, please let me know.

Also, try it for youself...

Create a new 11x17 doc

Create a text frame to the margins

Insert a 10x6 celled table

Copy that table, and paste maybe 30 times or so (it will overflow)

Create a new page

Go back to text frame, click on the overflow box in lower right

navigate to page 2

hold SHIFT and CLICK in upper left margin (this will flow the overflow, making new pages for it)

Now, you should have 20-30 pages, if not, do some more pasting of the table.

Now, just try typing into any of the open cells, and let me know how that goes...

Thanks

Probably this would help:

After reinstalling, resetting preferences, turning off preflight and reading a lot of forums I still had the beach ball problem.

Then I thought this new workspace system, which updates your workspace depending on the chosen element might slow down simple stuff drammatically.

So I just switched the workspace from Essentials to Essentials Classic (or any other Classic workspace) and it worked - beach ball is gone.

Probably this could help somebody.

I know this is a reach guys, but just checking… are all of you using Suitcase Fusion as your font manager? I have the same problem, and when I look at my Activity Monitor, the one item that comes to the top of my CPU intensive list is FMCore (which is the Suitcase daemon) at the exact same time I get the spinning beach ball in Indesign (it can hog from 20% to 90% of the CPU for a few seconds). Can anyone else confirm?