Hello All,

With the latest Beta, we have now implemented multithreading capabilities in some areas of Adobe Illustrator to improve performance. We've a clearly identified Performance-enhancement roadmap that we are executing against and will share regular updates on the progress.

For now, we have added multithreading support to the following operations:
-Image Import & Export
- Import, Place, and Drag-and-drop operations for JPEG, PNG, and TIFF files
- Converting linked images to embedded images
- Working with Photoshop files (Import, Place, and Drag-and-drop)
- Exporting to JPEG and PNG formats

Effects
- All Photoshop effects on images
- Object rasterization (via Object menu)
- Working with layers panel

Smoother and faster layer operations: Hide, Unhide, Expand, Collapse, Scrolling up and down. etc.

We'd love to hear about your experience with these improvements, particularly if you've previously encountered performance issues in these areas.

Please:
1. Test these operations with your typical workflows and assets
2. Pay special attention to files or operations that previously caused performance issues

You can provide feedback through this two-minute brief survey: https://survey.adobe.com/jfe/form/SV_e2Olp1bJXTun2Zw

Thank you for your time. Your input helps us continue improving Illustrator's performance for everyone!

@Oli no, it have being customized for sure over the years, and way before the first CS release but it is probably very easy to break something.

So if they have a piece of code that does something and can be re-written to do that thing better, they have to ensure that it also still works with the myriads of components that depend on that code to do other things.

imho, every piece of software need to be re-written after a decade at least and not keep on building on decades old base.
ofc you don't start from scratch, I mean if something works independently and works fine on the old app, why not to move it's code to the new app and do a bit of customization there? Anyway it is complicated, but the thing remain, illustrator need to restart from scratch.

@nicky there is space for improvement but what you see with having better performance with CPU is purely because the 1050Ti is a slow cards. I have noticed it when I moved work from a system with a newer AMD 5500XT 4GB to the same system at office but with a much older Radeon HD 7850 1GB. CPU was working better with that old GPU.
The thing is for illustrator to tap on the compute power of the GPU to improve more things. Here even affinity is only using GPU for accelerating rasters, they should find ways to tap the power too.

I think the problem is not only CPU performance, but also untapped GPU performance. I read many posts with problems in GPU performance, users complaining about having an Nvidia 4090 and having slowness and blockages. Even, and I confirm even though I have a modest nvidia 1050Ti, if you disable GPU Performance and Zoom with animation in the Illustrator settings, the software works much better.
For example, when I start Illustrator for the first time and create an EMPTY DOCUMENT, or open a file, this only in the first start, Illustrator takes a long time, even if the document is EMPTY. By disabling GPU performance, the empty document is created immediately.
Absurd GPU Performance should increase performance, not decrease it significantly...
So Houston we have very very very serious problems...

Thanks for your input @Nikolas. Does this mean that the underlying code has not been customized since the first CS release, or worse? Wouldn't this code have to be adapted for each version? Otherwise it would be extremely obvious that you would have to adapt the program from scratch. This would also be worthwhile if this were to be implemented in a dedicated version according to the input from paul roper and oz. You could still support the "complete" illustrator as a legacy version for a few years. Now it makes sense why adobe xd is so much faster than some other adobe programs ... such a shame.

@Oli Affinity is wrote from scratch, it is by all means a modern application that perform better in modern hardware.

illustrator is bits and peaces of software code accumulated through decades of development. You will even notice yourself when it is opening that it is loading a lot of extras actually, as it is by design very modular and they build on top of the older code for adding new things.
Now this sound great in paper but if the core is that old they can't just change it to be better without breaking something else there.
This is why I'm keep asking why they don't just remake illustrator, adobe have the funds to do it.

@ Avinash I'm really looking forward to the announced performance improvements and to your dedication to this forum. Because I have absolutely no experience with the program architecture of Adobe Illustrator, I have a few basic questions. Why is multithreading mainly applied to raster-based elements in the first steps? Shouldn't the basic functions of Illustrator be given a performance boost first, or are vectors technically excluded from multithreading? Unfortunately, I have the same experience as Mike and Margot. It's not uncommon for me to decide to simplify a file instead of expanding it further, and it's also not uncommon for me to invest time in workarounds instead of better visualizations. Even files that were slow in 2012 are still sluggish today - despite the massively improved single and multicore performance. Why is that? And - without wanting to get on your nerves - how can it be that the same files feel so much smoother on affinity designer, what do they do differently? Shouldn't Illustrator run more smoothly than Affinity due to the subscription costs and years of experience?

Hi guys, a fellow cartographer here too. Using MAPublisher plugin to turn Illustrator into to a fully featured GIS and Cartograpy software. Unfortunately when I make maps of the size around 100x70 cm it's impossible to work with labels at all. What I have to do is I have to export the rest of the map (without labels) to a raster image and then mount the raster image in a new illustrator file and copy my labels there, work on the labels and then copy the labels back into the main document. It's crazy that one has to do these things 2024 with such fast computers we have now.... I'll send a map file to you @Avinash too.

I have also found a bug in these super slow document. And that is if I type normal characters, like a to z and then add a dash (-) for some reason the dash disappeares if I press cmd-enter (as in finalise my typing)...

Keep seeing promises of improvements but nothing that is actually experienced during use. To be honest Adobe can continue on this trajectory and watch as the competitors take over. Majority of the time I'm now using affinity designer. The way the affinity apps flow between one another is brilliant and the performance is vastly superior.

Don't expect too much from Adobe. Their focus is on features for kids not for serious professionals. If they cant fix simple issues with UI I don't expect the can improve on other fields.

Nice input 👍

also SVG Metadata. keywords and notes do not save with the documents.

@Oz We would also gladly use these Extra features, the problem is that Illustrator is jerky just using 4 basic vector logos, imagine if we even wanted to think about using some high CPU load function or just a Shadow.
It will end up that the competition will equip itself better and we will move on, AD is already much more performing in addition to supersonic zoom... If it improved only 5/6 little things, the transition is worth thinking about...

Since they created the CC version, they had written a bit of code from scratch for Illustrator for each year, today on the threshold of 2025, after 12 years we would have a new, fast, performing software that fully exploits CPU, GPU, RAM and even A.I.
I have read problems of people with recent Hardware, eg. Intel 14700k nvidia 4070ti, 64gb ram and still have performance problems.
So money wasted on Hardware etc... Imagine those who bought the Mac Studio Pro with 96GB of RAM, machines that cost an arm and a leg to not see any personal advantage.

it's all very frustrating!

Heck, if the extra features were plug-ins Adobe could even monetize them. 50 cents/month here, $1.99 there. Pay à la carte for the decade's extra features you want or you can pay the basic price for the fast, lightweight base program.

I bet this would be a popular option. I'd be ecstatic, as I'm sure most of us in this thread would be, with fast performance and none of the frills we never use.

Wouldn't it be nice if Adobe created an "Illustrator Superleggera" without any of the features that have been the headlines of releases over the past, say decade? No perspective grid, no 3D at all, no Adobe Stock integration, no Creative Cloud libraries, no AI...just a high performance, lightweight, stripped down high speed version of Illustrator? We could all vote on which features to ditch.

Mike Boruta, Nice engaging with another cartographer! And, I'll follow a similar path to simplify the file as much as possible.

Avinash, Thank you for paying attention. I understand that sharing the file would be valuable, but it's a client's, and I'm not comfortable doing that. Sorry!

I'll be separating the artboards into unique files to simplify it, and hopefully, that will help. If it doesn't I'll revert to the prior version. I cannot bill for Illustrator's incredibly slow workflow, nor can I afford to give away that much time.

-Margot

Avinash,

Thank you for following this thread and appreciating how important performance is. Up until now the push has always been for adding more features to Illustrator, but it was already too slow and each release felt slower than the one before it. New features may look cool on the product page and I'm sure they help drive sales but once a paying customer starts *using* the program they find out how painfully slow it is. It makes all of us wonder how much internal testing is being done if this sluggish performance is considered acceptable.

I sincerely hope multithreading is just the start of a long line of optimization upgrades, with performance and the user-experience being a higher priority from now on. Thanks.

@Nikolas Karampelas You would think after Adobe tried to shovel out 20 BILLION DOLLARS to buy Figma, they would have enough resources to create a new Illustrator from scratch.

But no. After the failed buying another competitor, they threw themselves on the ground like a toddler and even cancelled their own product Adobe XD, because nothing is worse then developing your OWN software. Maybe Adobe will try to buy Affinity next, to get their superior vector tool.

@Avinash Singh Kotwal, within an organization like adobe that is not lacking resources, shouldn't be easier to just make a new app, with clean code from scratch and then work from there?

I mean it is your app, you have easier access to the insides of the old app that can help you ensure compatibility with older files versions, while being freed to use newer hardware without trying to not break the whole code behemoth you are trying to, right now.

It is understandable that there are a lot of third party plug ins that people work with, but sending a clear message to the makers of those plug ins and being open to the other developers, can help make an easier transition that will eventually be beneficial for everyone, even for adobe that try to maintain all those dependencies that keep illustrator in one place.

Hi,
Thank you, Mike and Margot, for sharing your detailed experiences and candid feedback about Illustrator's performance issues. As cartographers working with complex documents, your use cases are valuable to us.

Margot, I've reviewed the video you shared showing the delay in text manipulation, and this is not the experience we want for our users. I'm particularly concerned that you're seeing worse performance after the 29.1 update, as this runs counter to our goals. We're investigating this specific regression as a matter of priority.

Mike, you shouldn't need to remove data layers or resort to workarounds like recreating text elements instead of editing them. We are working towards to make sure we address these issues in next few releases.
Let me be transparent about where we are in our multithreading journey. While we've begun implementing multithreading with rasterization in 29.1, we've a clearly identified roadmap that we are executing against. We're taking a methodical approach to these changes to ensure stability.

Your real-world examples are invaluable for our testing and optimization process. I would greatly appreciate if you could share your working files with me at kotwal at adobe.com. These files will be used exclusively for internal testing and will help us replicate and address the specific scenarios you're encountering.

We will provide regular updates on our progress, and we will ensure that your use cases are represented in our performance testing suite.

Thank you for your patience and continued feedback as we work to improve Illustrator's performance.

Margo Carpenter - as a fellow cartographer and user of Illustrator for about the same amount of time as you, I feel your pain. I have experienced the same sort of scenarios as shown in your video. I keep hoping it will get better but it gets worse and worse! Last year I invested in a new computer, an M2 Max Mac Studio with 96GB of RAM, and that hardware upgrade did nothing to improve my experience with Illustrator. The software does not seem to take advantage of any of my hardware's capabilities. I'm constantly trying to find work arounds to trim my files and make them run more efficiently. The crazy thing is, some of these files are maps that were created 10 years ago, and ran well on much weaker hardware. Now I'm having to remove data layers just so I can work on them. Sometimes when I'm adding text if I make a typo I will just delete the label and start over because using backspace slows everything to a crawl. With the map I'm working on now it takes about 15-20 seconds just to create a new empty layer. And meanwhile, I'm running ArcGIS Pro, on a virtual Windows installation on the same machine, and it can handle massive amounts of data without lag or hiccups. Argh.