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.


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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Werner B commented
@Avinash_Singh_Kotwal, your pinned comment is a year old. What sort of improvement has been made regarding this? It's a piece of software, not an entire company. Answer the working professionals' questions, please. They are also paying for your support. Provide it.
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EXEC Design commented
@Avinash/Admin: How loudly should the community shout? Be it about Illustrator or (much worse) InDesign?
The existing posts address all facets and your arguments would at most work for a three-man software company, but not for a global player like Adobe. You have enough resources, both the money and the specialists. If you don't want to assume incompetence, you have to assume cold-blooded profit maximization here. At the expense of the customers and that has been the case for almost a decade. No more excuses will help here. Monopoly position and greed for profit are a cruel mix. SO sad, Adobe... :( -
Luis Encuentra commented
TBH, Adobe technical staff is useless. Sorry if anyone get upset with this, but it's unbelivable that a company who gets ~80 €/$ per user/month (as Adobe Creative Cloud has over 33 million subscribers on 2024... Google said) can't pay a decent and qualifyed staff to improve this stucked improvements.
Public robbery.
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Andy commented
Well its been almost 8 years since I first posted this problem about an outdated and slow piece of software. It actually doesn't please me to say that in the time Adobe took to make a comment I convinced 5 Chinese factories to standardise on another company's software instead meaning that all other clients of those factories also moved away from Adobe to the alternative. The knock on effect, and loss of market share though not insignificant has not been noted by Adobe as presumably the illustrator client base is much less important than other revenue sources. Sadly, if, in 8 years Adobe have not acted on this, then they will not do so, even after another 8 years. In the meantime those of us who have to produce these type of graphics are best to move elsewhere, gravitating to companies who understand, and are hungry for our business and who are able to produce and maintain product which addresses our (appantly) niche and difficult to understand concerns..
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InstyButte Typesetting2 commented
How is working to "take advantage of threads" different from making something multithreaded? I built my first multi-cpu system in 2001. I had 4 cores by 2006. I've had 16 since 2018. I was thinking of upgrading to 32 or 64 (the max my motherboard supports), but none of that increase in power would do a thing for Illustrator or InDesign. It's a good thing that my system also does video editing, or I'd be wasting those cores entirely on Adobe's 1990s-era program technology. I was willing to be sympathetic for a few years, but we're halfway through 2024. I hate monopolies...
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Gavin commented
I've just lost an hour that I'll never get back. My MAC has 8 performance cores to process this workload and I just get spinning wheels and incredibly slow response... If it's any consolation - one core is pegged at 100%. This poor use of hardware is effectively limiting the computer to 12% of it's potential.
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Rob Hutchings commented
@Avinash_Singh_Kotwal - Please look at how Illustrator can be better suited to handling millions of points so that we don't get these false error messages claiming to be out of memory!
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Luis Encuentra commented
"Hope this helps."... sorry Avinash, but not. The answer is a "c u guys...." WE need performance...
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Anonymous commented
I guess Adobe is waiting for AI to solve all issues they can't solve themselves.
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john michael wolf commented
hi all, i hope this helps someone.
i'm using a 10 core M1 macbook pro. i have a complicated drawing and illustrator was stuck (the beach ball was spinning). i was able to open another instance of Illustrator within Terminal and work on another drawing in the meantime. once the beach ball stopped spinning on the first drawing (about a half hour, since i was running Vector First Aid on a CAD file) i switched back to it and was able to save.
i hope this can help someone else. -
InstyButte Typesetting2 commented
Thank you for responding, Avinash. I know it seems whiny, but there are plenty of times when Illustrator simply can't keep up with the users' expectations and workflow needs. Being told by customers that I need a newer computer, when I'm using 1 or 2 cores on an 8 or 16 core system, gets a little old. Plus, it's embarrassing.
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Jean-Michel Le Goff commented
Hi,
At least, do the new 3D features like substance rendering could be multithreaded? As new add-ons,I guess that they can be optimized without compromising stability? -
Anonymous commented
I'll believe it when I see it. Pathetic that this has taken 6+ years.... tick tock.
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Mattnymous commented
@Egor thank you so much for replying. I think some kind of response here is what we have all been waiting for and highly appreciate your input.
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Stuart Chesters commented
@Egor, Thanks for the insightful and helpful view behind the scenes and so delighted that this is getting some attention. If there's a plan then I'm all good with that too. I expect most of us here really love Illustrator as a tool and want it to get the coding love and attention it deserves.
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Will Carvalho commented
That's Fantastic news, many thanks for the update.
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whstlblwr commented
@InstyButte Typesetting2
and the rest who say its not multi-threadded.The Apple silicon version is definitely multithreaded,
i have the 8 core M2 and when i gaussian blur 150 objects at once it takes about 5 seconds and the cpu usage for Illustrator peaks at about 580% while it processes.Rendering all those blurred objects still only uses one core though. Weirdly it used core 6, unlike the intel version that uses core 1 for everything.
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whstlblwr commented
Thanks for the update. You didn’t mention effects or rasterize object. Those are the two functions that I seem to wait the longest on. Specifically gaussian blur.
Cheers.
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Nikolas Karampelas commented
@Egor nobody really believes that multithreading will magically save the world. But we all know by this point that illustrator is a bloated, heavy, ancient, piece of software.
It is like an old man that need to retire so the new generation can take over and work better and more efficient, not because the old man didn't worked right back in his days, but because he is now tired and heavy from all those years on his back.
Just by restarting illustrator from a new, modern code base, will do miracles itself.
And it is not like we shoot at the illustrator team here, we shoot out at adobe and the guys who take the decisions, or don't take the decisions...Doesn't adobe have the financial ability to properly restart development anew for illustrator while at the same time, assign some people to maintain the old code before they are ready to release the new app?
They get a standard cash flow of millions, each year they increase the operating income (that is the "clean" income) by another million! And they can't hire more people in illustrator team to make things happen?
No sorry, adobe just rest in their position of almost monopoly and forget what happened back in the day when they overthrown the old industry leaders like quark xpress.
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Mario commented
Knowing that things are re-written cautiously block by block, I definitely think we can switch this status to ‘Started’. I was also very angry believing that the dev team was just chilling and having fun developing fancy tools like the 3D engine. Let’s be honest, these tools are cool and everybody will find a way to use them in their work when they stop being angry.
Illustrator never crashes to me, it has some nice features that no other vector app has, misses some too, ha ha! (But that can be fixed)
I urge every person who love Ai to join the beta program and expose the issues they have or explain features they want instead of joining THIS rant contest on uservoice. I realized that often, an issue can be solved by just tweaking some parameters. I don’t think multithreading is the one thing that will solve all the problems in the world.
This thread has become useless imho. There’s no constructive comments, probably because the team doesn’t reply (I guess they are busy re-writing stuff?) so people try to be as rude as they can to get a reaction.
Illustrator is such a beast of software in every way, we just take it for granted and that’s a shame.