Huge lag, spinning beachball

[Jeremy AB]

Hello, I have a fresh install of Creative Cloud in macOS Big Sur but it lags terribly. Tried it on a small project with the free trial with no problem, left it for a week, and now bought it. I can barely work because of the lag. Clicking things takes at least a few seconds every time, and often I get the spinning beachball cursor. It's not a big file. Under 100 pages and just black text.

iMac 2017, 3.8GHZ, 24GB RAM, Radeon Pro 580 8GB (my home computer)

I also had it crash once today since buying it, and once when I tried to quit the app, the Quit command didn't work, making me use force quit.

I had InDesign CS6 until it stopped working with Big Sur, but this is otherwise a fresh install of the suite. I made sure to turn off Preflight, changed Display Performance to Typical. I don't get how it lags so bad. I have a 10+ old machine at work running CS6 which has no lag with more complicated files.

[Derek Cross]

(Presumably you have plenty of free disk space on the system)

You haven't mentioned resetting the InDesign preferences to see if that resolves the issue.

If not it might be worth using Adobe Cleaner to delete the application and reinstall it.

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/creative-cloud/kb/cc-cleaner-tool-installation-problems.html

[Jeremy AB]

Thanks for the tips! I have 1.52TB of disk space free. I did a reboot but haven't tried resetting or reinstalling yet, which I guess I'll ahve to try next.

[Eugene Tyson]

Yeh Fresh installs or not - the software can have corrupt preferenecs.

See the link by @Derek Cross 

I also wrote a blog post about the 2 most common fixes (basically because I find myself posting the same info every day).

https://indesign-fixer.blogspot.com/p/indesign-not-working-as-expected.html

[Woodley43]

Hi

I am a user, not a programmer. After updating my top iMac 2018 to Catalina using the TimeMachine to retrieve important goodies. A mistake, as I had to leave my well working CS6 and load the expensive CC Suite. I encountered many problems (TimeMachine backups were endless, large time lags, when opening apps, Volumes were ejected while working etc.). Adobe Cleaner did not help. I was told to make a clean install, as heavy users produce with increasing time many unnecessary things that are plugging up the libraries.

• Now my question: how many objects and how much space is used up in your User library and the MacIntosh library?

If the sum is less than 30 GB and some 150'000 Objects, it may be O.K.

I had factors more (120 GB and 1'000'000 objects !!) before my first clean install...

[Jeremy AB]

There were some app updates today, so after that it seemed to be better for awhile but then it got very laggy again for a bit. Then it seemed to be laggy on and off, instead of almost constant like before. So when I have a bit of time I'll look into resetting, or reinstalling.

[Jeremy AB]

Unfortunately I've seen little improvements. I used the cleaner tool and reinstalled. I actually stepped down to the 2020 version. The lag is exactly the same. It almost seems like it's mostly when I do text related changes, like changing fonts or editing styles.

[Jeremy AB]

New info... when the lag starts, I check Activity Monitor and "spindump" is taking 100% CPU.

[Eugene Tyson]

Are you running any anti-virus / firewalls? 

[Jeremy AB]

No anti-virus or firewall is running. The closest thing would be Little Snitch, but I tried turning it off and still experienced lag.

[Ashutosh_Mishra · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

Sorry to hear about your experience. Please try suggestions given on this community post(https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/resolve-slow-performance-and-unexpected-behavior-of-indesign...) & let us know if they help to improve the performance of the app.

Looking forward to your response.

Regards,

Ashutosh

[Jeremy AB]

Thanks for the tips!

- My iMac greatly exceeds the minimum requirements.

- It's not a specific tool, seems random. I've seen it happen in several files now which started as templates.

- All files are local

- This is a fresh install after using the adobe cleaner tool

- I don't have very many fonts enabled, but I distabled some more just to see

I guess the only thing left to do is try in safe mode or create a new account with nothing else running.

[Derek Cross]

Don't forget to give us your feedback after trying the new account route -- and good luck!

[Jeremy AB]

I realized awhile after creating a new account that there would be 2 problems:

- it would be a pain to move/share everything I needed to the new account, and switching back and forth was not an option

- several apps are installed and apply to all users so it didn't matter

I decided instead to disable a few and see what happens. I don't know for sure, but I observed that after turning off VNC and Little Snitch there didn't seem to be much lag after several hours of work. So today I enabled Little Snitch and it was fine for a little while but eventually the lag returned. I kept at it for awhile to make sure the lag was consistently back. Then I turned off Little Snitch again and the lag eventually seemed to go away, but not right away. So I am leaning towards that being the cause but I continue to test, and turned VNC on, leaving Little Snitch off. To my knowledge, Little Snitch is not blocking any network connections so this is strange.

[Jeremy AB]

Hello, I'd like to say that after all this time I still don't have a lasting solution. This past weekend was particularly paindful to get anything done. At one point, the app was beachballing so much I decided to quit it, but it took 5 minutes for the app to start responding again so it could be quit. Almost every click resulted in a lag and then the beachball cursor.

I started up again later in the evening and it seemed to be better. The lag was still happening but in shorter bursts rather than constantly. I can't see any reason why this is happening nor why it's better sometimes and worse other times.

[content1971]

I am experiencing this exact same issue after installing the latest update. Working on Big Sur and again, this problem only arose after updating InDesign. I am BEYOND frustrated to have to come here searching for answers and seeing the same old "Trash your prefs" solutions. I just spent 2 hours on a 1 hour job. That's a lot of time waiting for the beachball to go away.

There's something going on where the app is clearly trying to access something. It reminds me of the same lagging feeling when you open a new illustrator doc and the app runs off to the internet to look up document sizes and formats. Classic bloatware.

[Jeremy AB]

I agree. If it's trying to connect somewhere, even disconnecting from the internet doesn't stop the lag.

What's even more frustrating is that there doesn't seem to be any pattern or obvious cause. I haven't changed anything and yet in the last couple of days I've experience barely any lag. I'm now kind of scared that I just jinxed it!

Regarding my comment above about the Spindump, I looked it up and basically it means macOS noticed that an app is hogging a lot of processor time so Spindump starts collecting logs or information to find out why.