@Anonymous
That article sounds great. I sure hope it happens, and doesn't get obliterated by Adobe's corporate and legal juggernaut. I'm sick of having the price of this software jacked up every few months. I'm also sick of this huge shift toward AI, without having improved the basic functionality issues of so many Adobe products.

We need to support other developers instead of letting out our frustration here.
https://petapixel.com/2023/06/08/abode-is-a-new-suite-of-creative-apps-that-takes-aim-at-adobe/

Ive been banned from the Adobe Community for these very same complaints. To make it so much worse, I have contacted support more than 4 times about this, requesting an incident report and was ghosted everytime, eventhough I was promised a prompt reply.

So, yea, your survey is an empty gesture. You can just google "Adobe sucks" and find all the answers you need.

Most Adobe users don't even know this forum exists - and I think that's on purpose.

Complaining that not enough users participate in the survey is just peak Adobe corpo bubble.

I first added to this thread a year ago when an illustrator file I was working on brought my reasonably spec'd M2 macbook pro to it's knees.

It's that time of year, and I have to revisit the file again. Despite the resources of Adobe, they still can't get this right and fix the performance issues with a piece of software that is considered by many an industry standard.

With big files, the software is still buggy. Particularly when applying effects. It is nice to hear this is now being addressed. But in the real-world, no real change yet...

It's really annoying that it takes upsetting this many users to start to move the needle.

Hi Saurav,

With all due respect, this thread has been on here for well night seven years and it might take all of us longer than 12 hours to suddenly respond to you becuase you have decided to sit up and realise we might be onto something.

I agree with Anna, that the problems with the software are clearly outlined in the previous 15 PAGES, should anyone care to actually read it, and probably in more detail than your 2 minute survey will address.

Having said that, I will submit responses to the survey and hope - for your sake - that Adobe doesn't become the next QuarkExpress.

@Avinash 非常期待！同时期待在用户操作体验及功能完善方面也能看到更多的进步

"So far, we have received very little response on the survey form that we floated to understand your pain points better." You have 15+ pages of comments on here. I would start reading those 15+ pages.

Also putting a survey link here would get very little visibility; maybe try adding it to the startup of Illustrator. (But again, I'd start with reading the comments). Thank you.

@Avinash, thank you for bringing more information to the discussion. I look forward to seeing our complaints get crushed by real improvements.

Hello everyone,
First off, I want to take a moment to sincerely apologize for not sharing regular updates with you regarding Illustrator’s performance enhancements. I completely understand the frustrations many of you have expressed about our progress (or lack thereof) in making Illustrator a more multithreaded and multiprocessor-friendly application. Your feedback is vital, and it’s clear that we haven’t done a great job of keeping the lines of communication open.

I want to assure you all that your voices have been heard loud and clear. We are working on making Illustrator multithreaded and multiprocessor-capable. It's a big undertaking, but it's happening! We genuinely appreciate your passion and ideas about how we can improve Illustrator’s performance, and I will ensure that we keep you updated on our progress moving forward. You deserve to know where we stand and what we’re working on.

I know actions speak louder than words, so I'm looking forward to showing you the improvements we're making. Thanks for sticking with us, and for pushing us to do better.
We've been digging deep into the app's architecture, and I want to give you a peek at what we've been up to. We've identified several tasks that were bogging down the main thread, and I'm happy to report we're making progress in moving these to background threads. Some of the areas we have tackled so far: Crash Recovery, Snapping, Thumbnail generation. These processes are now running on separate background threads, which should start to yield noticeable performance gains. We will be continuing to identify and shift more processes off the main thread.

Additionally, we've been focusing on optimizing key areas that users have flagged as pain points. We've made significant improvements in: Image handling, File saving, Applying effects.

Very soon you will see these changes in action. I will share an update once these are in Beta build for you to experience these improvements firsthand. We know there's more work to be done, and we're committed to continuously improving Illustrator's speed and efficiency.

I will continue to update this thread with ongoing progress. I’d also like to invite you to be part of our Customer Advocacy Board (CAB). This CAB will allow for closer engagement, giving you a seat at the table as we explore ways to enhance our product. If you're interested in contributing and being part of the conversation, please let us know through this link: https://survey.adobe.com/jfe/form/SV_czQpFnmd3PWAreS

We appreciate your patience and feedback.

Image traced raster images are a big pain point. I've noticed a number of customer files we have performance issues with include very complex vectorized images (likely scaled down from a larger raster image). Even worse when those are used to make a pattern. Performance is also affected if they're hidden behind a clipping path. Often best to rasterize, but that also takes quite some time. I uploaded an example file to the survey last week. It was a small example around 20mb, but we've had nightmare AI files of over 1GB using complex vectorized images.

The worst offender is stock vector "watercolor" images that are probably just image traced rasters with no optimization at all. They just trace it, save it and good luck opening that file.

That being said those files are working OK on affinity designer not great, but manageable at least, so yeah it can work better, if the application is good.

@Seth I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes I get massive raster files that have to be traced and manually cleaned up, then I have to use the shape builder to optimize it. It can get to the point where it takes a minute or two between operations, just waiting for Illustrator to do something. The final file is usually just a few MB, but you wouldn't know it from the way the program responds to future edits. By then it is 100% vector, but still as slow as molasses. I haven't had a crash yet, from that type of scenario, but I know it is only a matter of time.

Oh, speaking of files you can't upload, I once had to handle a monstrosity that was an image trace of a print resolution wood texture behind a logo. It was something like 48"x36" and was well over a gig and took something like 5 minutes just to open and draw all the layers (there were only a couple). And if you wanted to do anything... you... just... had... ... to... ... w---.... be..... pati-...ent.

That one made Illustrator crash more than once. lol, it was a nightmare.

I imagine Adobe has the means to reproduce such a nonsensical real-world nightmare. But yeah, that's one of the reasons I think Illustrator needs a few more cylinders under the hood, because we don't always get to choose what we work on and sometimes a client (or corporate) hands you a "situation" and you just have to deal with it.

I would have loved to have uploaded a problem file in the survey, but they are all property of my clients, and I do not have permission to share them.

@Neff oh I see, you mean you work with them in a collaboration and don't provide final files. Tough luck, I work with smaller clients and the only time I need to share files are with the printshops that most require PDF anyway.

1.关于填写调查表，我想大家不愿意填写的原因其实很简单， 就是Illustrator团队不够重视客户的意见，提出的建议可能需要等几年后才会开始解决。目前在论坛中的很多小问题、与日常操作息息相关的问题也不能及时得到解决。
2.长期以来Illustrator卡顿、崩溃、缓慢问题一直都没得到有效改善。
3.希望Illustrator团队接下来一方面尽全力优化性能；一方面解决日常使用（甚至是基础的）息息相关的功能，比如：选择功能，画板操作，统一变换，对齐操作，在不同输入法状态的快捷键问题，等等。
4.与Illustrator相比，photoshop做出了很多高质量的升级：启动速度、移动画布速度、滤镜渲染速度等等都非常快，最近推出的“悬停显示图层边界”功能，“自动设置默认字体大小”等功能都非常实用，解决了日常操作的很多痛点。这些都是值得Illustrator学习的。

@nikolas-karampelas that is nice for you, but when my clients (that are also bigger companies) expect me to handle files in AI or PSD because they internally work with that, I can't just tell them to accept PDFs.

@Neff just handle out editable PDFs, I don't know which type of client is expecting ai and psd but I don't provide those files, whatever I use I hand out editable PDFs and jpeg/png.
The safest option and nobody complain to me.

@stuart-chesters In my last tryouts with Affinity, it was in general at least 10 times faster than any Adobe product. The problem still persists in a lack of advanced features compared to Adobe and of course Adobe being the industry standard (monopoly). So when a client comes to you he expects everything to be handled in AI and PSD files, which Affinity doesnt fully support. This is by design from Adobe, as PSD and AI are closed formats, that others need to reverse engineer.