Make Illustrator multi threaded on CPU
Illustrator performance is awful, its slow and lumbering at all but the most basic operations. It is bound to only a single cpu thread which is ridiculous now in an age of multi core and multi thread CPU's and it has been this way for many years. It cannot handle background tasks and is completely out of parity in function and performance with other Adobe software such as photoshop and inDesign.
andy
shared this idea
AdminAvinash Singh Kotwal
(Principal Product Manager, Adobe Illustrator)
responded
Adobe Illustrator's Multithreading Journey Begins!
Dear Illustrator Community,
I'm thrilled to announce that we've embarked on an exciting journey to bring multithreading capabilities to Adobe Illustrator. This significant undertaking will enhance performance and responsiveness across various aspects of the application.
While this is a complex process that will take some time to fully implement, I wanted to share our progress so far.
Our Approach
We've strategically begun by focusing on the most computationally intensive operations—those that typically take more time and block the main thread, resulting in slower response times while you work. By moving these operations to separate threads, we aim to significantly improve your overall experience with Illustrator.
It's important to note that you may see more noticeable impact in some areas than others initially. However, we want to assure you that this is just the beginning, and we will continue this journey to bring improvements across the entire application.
What We've Accomplished So Far
We've already moved a few areas to multiple threads:
- Periodic document back-up
- Snapping guide generation
- Rasterization (currently for JPEG, PNG, and TIFF formats)
- Thumbnail generation for layers
- Linked/Embedded image (jpg, png, tiff) handling
What to Expect
These improvements will lead to more responsive and faster performance in several key areas:
- Placing multiple images
- Embedding linked images
- Object > Rasterize
- Export to PNG format
- Document opening with heavy linked images
- Simultaneous placement and drag-and-drop of multiple linked/embedded images (JPEG, PNG, and TIFF files)
We're committed to enhancing your Illustrator experience, and this is just the beginning. While the full implementation will take time, we're excited about the improvements already in place and those yet to come.
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue this journey. Your patience and support are greatly appreciated as we work to make Illustrator faster and more efficient than ever before.
Try It Now in Beta!
We're excited to announce that these multithreading improvements are available for you to try right now in our Beta builds. You can access these builds through the Creative Cloud Desktop App:
- Open the Creative Cloud Desktop App
- Navigate to the "Beta apps" section
- Look for the Illustrator Beta and download it to experience these performance enhancements firsthand
We encourage you to try out the Beta version and share your feedback with us.
Thank you for being part of our community!
Best regards,
Adobe Illustrator Team
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Dan Castrogiovanni
commented
I've only just learned about this and I'm absolutely dumbfounded.
"Under review" for over three years!
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Andy
commented
Yep. Definitely needed for windows and Mac.
Illustrators biggest failing is performance -
Talash
commented
Please, Give us multi core support, we really extra perfomance. I am so lagging just because of so many anchor points. I am a Online freelancer on UPWORK and My illustrator files are really heavy, especially Design Adaptation.
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whstlblwr
commented
Will we finally get multi threading in the ARM version of Illustrator for MacOS 11?
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Eric Bryant
commented
Hot mess.
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clusterx
commented
In a good way, Adobe needs to not only add multithreading to Illustrator, but also rewrite the kernel completely. A very big problem arises when adding some average amount of third party stuff to load with Illustrator like custom brushes, scripts, styles, plugins etc. Illustrator menu UI becomes unusable. That is, an illustrator can only support a strictly defined amount of third party stuff to load during startup. If it is impossible to overcome this barrier, then Adobe can at least add a startup manager for third party stuff.
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Tomek
commented
STILL NOTHING ! After couple of months ago, type here and on uservoice and beta versions program community. Report this issue to dev team. Nothing has changed...only two things:
1. I have added more ram from 16 to 72 to my iMac 2019 i9 3.6 ghz, 1TBSSD, Pro Vega 48 8GB
2. Bought Mac Book Pro maed out 16 inch with i9 2.4ghz, 1TB SSD, 64gb RAM, 5500 M 8GBÂand... the feeling and laggy illustrator is the same on both those machines. Nothing was improved. Still moving on cavas is laggy, still resizing rectanglem circle, triangle shapes are delayed. Where are more complex document, even the cursor on illustrator is delayed (feels like is drunk and its hard to point on anchor point or on the path).
Photoshop has improved and its really nice to work now but Illustrator is a disaster.
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dmg
commented
They could at least make the 76 unnecessary background processes and launch daemons run on a different cpu core to the application. Then the times that saving in the background doesn't fail, it wouldn't take 5x longer than a regular save used to.
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Nebojša Kuzmanović commented
And again, latest verson of AI for Mac. This is horrible mess of a software. I try to copy and paste vectors only into another file, and I'm stuck with spinning beachball half of the day. It's 2020, and Illustrator simply ain't capable of performing basic operations.
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Oliver
commented
@Nikolas: And please do the same with photoshop: fresh code *halleluja
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Nikolas Karampelas commented
he means it's impossible with the pile of old code that illustrator is...
really adobe with what the programs cost to use and with a never ending money maker like the subscription model should have already rewritten the program from the ground up to be a modern application with fresh code. -
Anonymous
commented
How is this technically impossible?! Programs like Corel Draw and Affinity Designer are able to use multiple cpus and threads so I imagine Adobe can do it. The reason I imagine it’s taking so long is they’ll have to re-code a lot of the program from the ground up.
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Anonymous
commented
@Nebojša Kuzmanović: as was explained before – it probably is technically impossible to make the rendering of layered vectors a multithreaded task, because you can't parallelize the drawing of elements which overlay each other.
How should the lower layer estimate the shape of the layer above before it is calculated? -
Under review more than 2 years?? Any updates on that?
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Tomek
commented
If will this increase performance of Illustrator it will be cool but Adobe pls fix this issue from video underneath on macs:
Pls check this issue because is hard to work... I'm showing this problem from December 2019 but exist couploe of years... this is ridiculous...
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Ribeye Design
commented
Probably the most important thing for Adobe to sort out
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Anonymous
commented
This really need to be done. Especially in the time multiprocessing is going to be more and more.
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Anonymous
commented
I'm surprised to see that AI doesn't take advantage of multiple-cores. Can we do something about this? Even viewing in wireframe mode doesn't seem to speed things up by much. Or perhaps AI can take better advantage of the GPU??
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Henry Rivera
commented
TBH I love Illustrator embracement of GPU rendering
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Derek S.
commented
Yes, multithreaded processes, and background tasks, e.g., being able to save or export one document then switch to another, or continue working on a different task.