My computer seems to have slowed down noticeably after some OS update. It is a 2017 iMac 8 GBs of RAM and a Fusion hard drive. It takes over a minute to open InDesign and a project. Has anyone else experienced this and is there a cure?
Sorry to hear aout your experience. In addition to the helpful suggestions given by Diane & Mike, please try creating a new user account on you macOS & see if you see a difference in the performance of the app there.
Additionally, you may follow the instructions given on this community post to improve the performance . Hope it helps.
I did a clean re-install, but of course I had to migrate my data from a backup. I reset InDesign's preferences and have spent a lot of time restoring things to be the way I want them. Performance may have improved somewhat, but it still takes a minute to open the app and a large document. Other apps like Photoshop and Filemaker also open slowly. For now I am just living with it, and I can only guess that it has something to do with cacheing or compressed memory or disk space. I have First Aid on the disk several times. I don't know enough to interpret what Activity Monitor says is going on when I open the app. I appreciate the efforts to help with this.
I just timed it again. Opening InDesign without trying to open a document takes over a minute to get past the splash screen to the point where I have the choice of opening a previous document or creating a new one. Even then it gets a spinning beachball a couple of time when I try to scroll down to select a document.
My 2012 iMac opening in 13sec only has 8GB, so it seems like it might be Big Sur related. Did you try @Ashutosh_Mishra suggestion of creating a new user account? Have you tried a safe boot?
The Apple store says a 16GB module is $400 and a 32GB module is $800. That does not include installation, and it's not my idea of "reasonably cheap." I could buy the memory from some other source for less but installing it on a 2107 iMac involves removing the display and I question whether I want anybody other than an Apple technician doing that.
If you built a Mac for less than $300, I'd sure like to hear how. And I still don't understand why I don't have enough RAM if I have 1.95 GBs of RAM used for Cached Files. I suspect a lot of these cached files could be trashed and just reloaded as required.
When InDesign opens one of my documents which has 810 photos on 237 pages, Activity Monitor says it is using 1,25 GBs of RAM. It says the Swap Used is 0 bytes and it says Memory Used by everything is 6.02 GBs. Cached Files use 1.95 GB, but I have no idea what files are being cached or how I control the amount of memory being used to cache files rather than run the current app. I don't see why I need more than GBs of ram to work in InDesign.
If InDesign is taking over a minute to simply launch, the problem isn’t RAM there’s something going on with your system. As I mentioned above I have a much older 2012 iMac with 8GB and InDesign works just fine on it for light work.
Does the delayed launch happen with a safe boot—starting up with the shift key down?
Yes, I tried it with a new user running nothing else and it still took over a minute to load InDesign. Most of the time is spent with the splash screen displaying a series of messages about what it is loading.
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