Why is Indesign Exports so Slow? 8 cores and it only uses 10% of the CPU

[colincharisma]

Every time our publishing company exports a magazine through indesign

It takes about 9-10 minutes to export a PDF Print File.

We upgraded our hardware and have lightning fast PCs, however Indesign seems greatly limited.

If a book takes 10 mins to export and uses approx 10% CPU

then how do we make it so it uses 100% CPU and takes a lot less time.

I just tried Ashampoo Core Tuner....... no effect. so what is limiting the export??

We are running Adobe CC Indesign, 64 Bit Windows 7, M.2 Drives, 8 Core Machines 32-64gb ram

on most of our editors PCs 

HOW do we get our export much more effcient, we are loosing massive amounts of production time simply waiting for Indesign to complete its tasks.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

[briann57175377]

RAM and CPU resources are allocated automatically. There are other factors at play when exporting, like linked art (how big) and the location of these files (slow server?). Try turning off preflight, if it's on. Or you can try to make Indesign not export it in the background, although i don't anticipate any huge diffeerence. 5-10 minutes might seem long, but one of my pdf took 45m yesterday (10GB of linked art on the server, used in 7 OOH banners). This is on a iMac Pro.

[colincharisma]

all of the files are on an M.2 Solid State Harddrive, access time is 3500mps about about 35 times faster than a standard harddrive... It has 8 cores but is only using 4. and it has 100% of the CPU available but is only usng 10%

This implies that Adobe Indesign is built in a way that it greatly limits the CPU and Ram usage from within the program.

Has anyone managed to design a work around for this,

or will we need to edit the software ourselves to fix this?

SURELY ADOBE would have an update or Patch to fix this.......

Exporting after all is the KEY PRODUCT of INDESIGN.

Anyone with actual solutions please let me know...   

This seems to be the slowest piece of software on our PCs

and yet we need to use it the most.

Has anyone had experience with using Adobe Indesign Server for Exports?

[Lukas Engqvist]

Part of export is shuffiling data from links fonts etc, so proessor speed is not the only issue. InDesign does this in background so that if you have multiple tasks you can get on with the next task as it exports. The bottleneck is most likely the network or read/write procedures. Layout/design is the primary function export is important but usually not as speed critical. The preformace is also dependant on the kind of designs.

(Access time is read time not write time)

[colincharisma]

the files are on the same drive - C Drive which is an a Sumsung 960 EVO -  insanly fast, so it is not that.

[colincharisma]

If you produce hundred of magazines a month... export time is a huge bottle neck.

with Indesign running on essentially a high powered gaming machine, 

with 8 cores, the fastest solid state drives, and on the same drive.

The ONLY BOTTLE NECK....... MUST BE ADOBE INDESIGN ITSELF.

Are there any solutions to resolve this?

[TᴀW]

Are you exporting as a background task (async exporting) or have you disabled that option? (https://geofffranklin.com/disable-adobe-indesign-background-tasks)

I don't think this makes a difference to speed, but with the old export you get 2 progress bars so you have more information as to what is happening, and you'll be able to tell what is slowing things down, perhaps.

It may also depend on transparency flattner presets you're using, as well as whether artwork has to downsampled during export (in which case, consider doing this separately in PS so that all artwork is at the correct resolution in InDesign).

An hour to export a document seems too long. I haven't worked much on fully-fledged magazines with tons of transparency, etc., but I regularly export 300+ pp books full of pictures and illustrations, and rarely does an export take more than 2 or 3 minutes. 

[TᴀW]

As you mention InDesign Server, here's an idea. Break up the file into 4 separate files (a script can do this), then fire up 4 instances of InDesign Server (with a Server license you may run as many instances as needed, I believe). Use each instance to export a different section of the magazine, and when it's done combine all sections into a single PDF in Acrobat.

This should cut the export time down to 25%. But chopping up the InDesign files can be slow (and destroy cross-references). So probably not a solution....

[colincharisma]

We already do exporting, multi thread as background tasks....... however each task is still taking 10 mins.

So again..... this is info we already knew about

No actual solution from Adobe.

Who do i contact to get the Adobe team to work on this?

[Dov Isaacs]

The response is very simple.

PDF export from InDesign is single threaded although the writing to disk is buffered.

The nature of the PDF export operation is such that it is very difficult to arbitrarily assign multiple asynchronous processes to it. Optimizing embedding of fonts and detecting reuse of embedded images are operations that pretty much require linear processing of the InDesign document. And if your magazine has many, large, high resolution raster images, compression and downsampling of those images are fairly CPU-intensive.

Quite frankly nine to ten minutes to export a high quality PDF file from a very graphically-rich InDesign document with many pages doesn't seem all that bad. 

One thing you might check are the settings you use for PDF export. Adobe recommends PDF/X-4 without any color conversions. PDF/X-4 files have live transparency. Transparency flattening is exceptionally time and resource consuming. That may be a factor in what you are experiencing. (Note that preflattened content with conversions to CMYK are old, deprecated workflows that generally lead to lower printed as well as display quality!)

                - Dov