Instability has been an issue at least since version 15

[Mr_CES]

Searching for the words 'crash', 'freeze' and 'hang' in this Community brings 155 results, as of today:

Search link for reference

Such results are irrefutable evidence there is a clear need for improvement on behalf of Adobe.

My personal perspective is that a person must acknowledge the existence of a problem, then understand causes and consequences derived from it, finally seeking to address the problem in a proper manner.

User reports regarding stability provide little insight, other than "it's not working as expected".

The issue occurs whenever you open InDesign, create a new blank file and merely close the program, without any edition whatsoever. This is a demonstrable fact of memory management deficiency.

Assessing what could be a cause, I ended up with the possibility of a specific version of Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime (VCRT) including a particular instruction which became obsolete or was replaced by a more efficient instruction.

I leave this post for reference and contribution of others to improve understanding of the problem and providing guidance to the solution.

Thanks in advance.

[Steve Werner · Accepted solution]

My attitude is different. I personally almost never have crashes, freezes or hangs.

I know from being in the InDesign prerelease program that trying to prevent these are always part of the development of new versions of InDesign. It's helpful when someone does have these problems consistently that they report bugs to the InDesign User Voice website so they can be recognized.

However, these issues can also occur from a lot of other reasons — corruption in files, corruption in graphics, corruptions in fonts. Not to mention that a lot of users have poorly maintained systems which are often the source of the problem.

[Mr_CES]

Thank you for replying.

Would you be kind enough to share your Desktop/Notebook brand and model, operating system and InDesign versions, as well as explaining whether the working setup has different-purpose software programs?

I understand most membes of this discussion forum are reasonably aware of variables potentially impacting program stability, and the purpose originally stated aims at finding a lasting solution for the majority of users facing the issue, which is not to be dismissed based on a single exceptional testimony.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Second this. Problems with ID as an app are vanishingly rare in my experiences since at least CS3, with probably 25-30 hours a week of use across that span and on multiple systems, some mine and some employer/clients'.

I'd make the mild observation that the summary of posts on such topics is a biased sample; users that might never search out this forum and log in to ask technical questions are more likely to log in with a "help!" sort of question in a crisis. That's true across platforms, apps and decades of online discussion and support.

I run a fairly vanilla Win11 system, ASUS mobo, modest Nvidia graphics, acres of monitor resolution.

From years of observing, I'd say most InDesign faults fall into three categories—

• Shortage of RAM. There seem to be many users running ID on laptops with 8GB or even 4GB of RAM, and that's just not enough any more. ID might run fine with smaller/simpler docs and then choke out when size, number of images, multiple sets of cross-refs etc. start being used, simply because it can't keep enough relevant data in RAM at the same time.
• Faulty updates. If ID has one genuine fault Adobe should be able to fix, it's that it tends to mess up updates by retaining or corrupting preference and system settings that should be cleanly deleted and rewritten. A vast number of bizarre faults, mostly UI or feature based, seem to be caused and cured by wiping the preferences, often right after an update.
• Faulty drivers. Whether a video, keyboard, mouse or printer driver is outdated, corrupted or just not completely compatible with ID, a lot of faults — especially mouse and printer — seem to trace to a buggy, outdated or limited driver.

I'm in no way excusing InDesign or the development team — there are, and have been bugs and glitches in every release. It's a huge, complex and aging app, pounded to death by thousand of users pushing it in endless different directions.

But from my experience and observation of reported faults and fixes across many years, I don't believe it's a fundamentally flawed application, and don't think it has any inherent problems other than the aging core and engine—which has more to do with things like not supporting multicore operation and other modern, efficient performance enhancements than stability and crashing.

And it goes across both major platforms. WinTel of course is a wild west with endless different manufacturers and configurations, leading to oddball situations a standard installation can't handle and needing tweaking of drivers and settings. But Macs have their laundry list of issues as well, such as the inconsistent GPU performance and resource limitations on many older models, and (oddly, to me) all kinds of trouble with secondary and external monitors.

My TL;DR here is that I don't think, as a longtime user and not a terribly tolerant one, that InDesign is a problematic app; and I think most problems are readily solved by a few simple steps (trash prefs, update drivers, add RAM). And I certainly look forward to an update on a wholly new core/engine/architecture some day anyway. 🙂

[Mike Witherell]

Steve, from your experience, what are some common things a user can address to have a "betterly-maintained" operating system?

[Mike Witherell · Accepted solution]

Here is a reference to solutions;

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/reset-indesign-preferences-and-other-troubleshoo...

[Mr_CES]

Thanks for replying.

I'd like to state the need of associating the action of resetting preferences to the specific malfunctioning - even non-funcioning - aspect causing InDesign to crash/freeze/hang, incluing evidence demonstrating eventual recurrence (as it may happen), and the preferences changed by it.

I understand most members of this discussion forum are reasonably aware of different "refreshing methods" applicable to software program maintenance.