This thread makes me chuckle, as it reminds me of herding cats or as a Yorkshire friend of mine says, 'It's like pushing fog up a ditch with a rake".

That said, I'm glad that we keep on reminding those with the power to make a difference that their product stills falls woefully short and we care about that.

The point I wanted to make was I was genuinely excited as I read through @Seth comment from July 5th outlining what should be possible and a way forward. If only. How great it was to dream for a while about that parallel world where Illustrator got the developer love and dollars it deserves.

I'm also wondering in a genuine attempt to explore alternative solutions, what experience others have had in trying to jump ship to Affinity Designer?

Wishing this community patience, reliable recovery of illustrator crashes and ingenuity in finding work arounds. We're creatives after all!

It is still horribly slow and laggy for complex illustrations. I have noticed no real improvements in any capacity. Again, I don't need Illustrator to save more power for other tasks. I need it to be responsive, quick, and smooth. I don't think I can fill out any more Adobe surveys without swearing. Fix. The. Performance. Issues. That's all we want.

Is this what they call in the US "Gaslighting"?
I believe that Adobe's company vision has recently shifted. It's pretty unfortunate, to be honest.

I'm pretty sure I can speak for everyone when I say this new performance update is yet just another bandaid you guys slapped on a dying pig and is not what everyone is asking for.

The problem is in all your products btw. I'm using Premiere right now and previews in 1/4 with high quality turned off with minimal fx, and only using 10% cpu. 3% gpu, 25% memory, is just a nightmare. It's impossible to get a preview in real time without wasting hours. The issue is not addressing this years ago has made it even harder for you to fix because you buried your legacy code in garbage features nobody asked for. Now you have a giant mess that is virtually impossible to tear down and rebuild.

It's too late for Adobe. It would take less time for a competitor to build a new product from scratch while using Adobe as a cautionary tale to avoid the big mistakes.

Juste installed and tested 28.7: When loading a bit heavier files the interface still freezes and the top menue still fades out to white till AI catches itself again. Exactly like in the current stable release.

Zoom indeed is a bit better (but still far from good - or even smooth). But when I move graphics or vector elements, they still DISSAPEAR which makes them nearly impossible top place. In GPU view I even don't get the vector outlines. Nothing here which blows me away, but honestly didn't expect anything else. So sad, Adobe, so sad...

Zoom is still absolutely lame and universes behind what's possible with modern computer systems. I've an NVIDIA RTX4060 Ti 16GB which empowers most of my software a lot... but Adobe. TopazLabs AI scaling/repairing/enhancing runs ultra fast, half of the times in a blink of an eye (near realtime). Can't afford to use Adobe products here, because I haven't that much time... Pan and zoom in Blender works far superior - in 3D instead of simple 2D Illustrator...

I wanted to add a zip to your survey as you ask for example projects there - but your upload limit is 50 MB. That was 450 too little...

Adobe, this is not "done" at all. You've barely even started. This idea and the support behind it wasn't for a token acknowledgement that multicore systems exist and a surface level of support in only a few aspects of the application.

I'm really curious where you get "up to 5X faster" from, particularly given what core counts are like on most enthusiast and pro-level machines these days. Even mainstream CPU's these days have 10+ cores. Even many laptops offer more cores. So where does such a miniscule number like "up to 5x" even come from? We're expecting _actual_ multithreading, not just optimizing a single function of Illustrator here and there. But don't take that for criticism, optimization when it doesn't break things is a net positive for customers and customer satisfaction.

And considering pan and zoom should be handled by the GPU, the improvement should be an order of magnitude greater. Core counts on even budget GPU's are significantly higher than 10. I just looked at a $50 GT 710 that nobody in their right mind would buy. It has 192 CUDA cores. ONE HUNDRED and NINETY TWO. Not ten.

Even if you were using other cores for others tasks (which you should be) there's PLENTY of room for more than 10x improvement. Considering most of us are probably using primarily vector art, the processing should be insanely simple to compute. The bread and butter of GPUs you might say.

Here are some areas for potential improvement which should be relatively low-hanging fruit:

1. Processing Appearance Effects (adding extra fills, strokes, transforms, shadows, etc. and blend modes)
#1 is probably the area with the most significant potential for improvement in my experience. And honestly, where so much of the complications come from. This absolutely should be the focus of optimization and stability for Illustrator because so much "power" derives from this seemingly minor facet of the program.

2. Vector Operations like shape booleans, path simplification, etc. This, to me, should easily be the undisputed fastest aspect of Illustrator. Vectors should be unquestionably stable, fast, flexible, and accurate. I expect a GPU focus for vector math would provide incredible speed benefits. It might even be the case that the current functions don't take advantage of newer CPU instruction sets that could also provide speed and efficiency benefits.

Pan, at the very least, should meet or exceed 60fps at ALL TIMES, in any condition. I wouldn't expect Zoom to perform quite as well because it requires recalculation, but Pan is just translation; there should be absolutely minimal overhead.

Additionally, while accelerations and optimizations are made to things like appearance processing, I think redrawing and recalculating should be offloaded to a non-blocking background thread that is not fatally tied to the main process. I expect this is where a lot of errors and crashes occur and it should not be possible for the main process to crash from something this simple.

There should probably be a little progress bar in the appearance panel that indicates if it is processing in the background. An outline or ghost of the object should indicate it is being worked on (should be user preference, some might want the last known good state to simple stay there until processing is done).

In the event there is a failure, there should be a warning flag raised in the appearance panel. The warning should be non-blocking and non-modal unless the user wants that, but it should absolutely not be fatal to the main process. Perhaps an overlay flag could also be pinned near the offending element(s) to indicate an error status to the user.

A background tasks panel should probably also be available to indicate what Illustrator is working on and perhaps also highlight processes that are taking longer than expected. Having background, parallel, non-blocking, managed threads for processing would also allow recovery from otherwise fatal errors by allowing error handling to monitor the threads and catch exceptions before the main process gets nuked in the collateral damage, losing work, state, etc.

For background processing of things like appearance, users might also appreciate "progressive" or "scanline" render previews. This would provide immediate visual feedback of progress, and provide an interruptible indication of final state in case the user wants to tweak something before waiting for the final result, like maybe a shadow isn't the right intensity, blur, distance, etc. Rather than waiting for the entire process, being able to see and interrupt would also probably help users by reducing frustration and wasting time.

(wow, that got long.)

"Hey, these stupid user are STILL calling for Multi CPU support."

"Oh, just tell them we make some performance improvements and mark the topic as resolved."

Is this a joke Adobe? Can I in the future just pay a part of my subscription fee. when I say your demand was resolved by sending you 10 bucks?

Right now, InDesign is the only thing keeping me on my Adobe subscription. I'm a teacher so I get the whole package even if I just need the one; if I felt anything came close to InDesign (Affinity Publisher and Scribus both have a LONG way to go) I'd end it right then and there. Affinity Designer is *almost* there – it's not quite as good with non-destructive editing through effects etc, and it doesn't have Actions, but Affinity are working on getting scripting/plugin programming support and once that's done I'm guessing the community will quickly fill any holes. I'll probably try my hand at it myself.

I don't think multithreading will happen in any meaningful way unless Adobe tear the whole thing down and start from scratch. The codebase is extremely old, after all. And I'm guessing a total teardown-rewrite isn't going to happen because the userbase for Illustrator is probably much smaller than the one for the rest of the Adobe suite. Also: why the heck would they? The subscription model means they have NO interest in doing any actual work. As long as people are locked into their eco system, they don't have to do anything, they have no incentive to improve anything for current users – only to add new features to entice *new* users into the fold.

Improvements to basic functionality doesn't sell subscriptions.

But I'd love for Adobe to prove me wrong here. Until they do, I'll keep looking for something to replace InDesign with, and then I'm jumping ship.

I've been a user of Both Adobe and Affinity for the past 6 years. The main advantages Adobe products currently have is more features and tools. However, Affinity has a much more pleasing experience in terms of workflow, amazing snapping/geometry/grid tools, performance and the tools have been catching up.

Having been a user of Affinity since around 2018, I've watched as they have built a set of apps that really do rival Illustrator, Indesign and Photoshop. They all work seamlessly with each other, which makes the workflow much better. You can switch between both designer and photo within publisher which makes multiple page print design so much easier. Recently the performance updates to Affinity Designer literally blow Illustrator out of the water. Not even in the same league anymore in that aspect. Utilisation of the full power of modern hardware.

Adobe really look like they need to start from scratch if they want Illustrator to survive. I'm as sick as others with the poor performance. Hopefully some competition will get this issue treated as a priority. It's really frustrating having to deal with such poor performance on a daily basis.

I see this topic has been recently reactivated as users' frustrations mount. Thank you to fellow Illustrator users for continuing to prod about this glacially slow progress.
Yes, I feel frustrated too because when it functions correctly I love using Adobe Illustrator. I have loved Adobe Illustrator since 1998. My main frustration is that I make perhaps (too) insanely busy designs in Illustrator with the aim of recoloring them into variations. If my poor computer could be better supported by multi thread code it would be personally creatively life changing. But at the moment life with Illustrator is like trying to live with a depressed addict artist who can't get help for his or her problems despite the love (and time and money) one invests. I hope Adobe will see fit to properly fund and support the engineers so we can see some progress soon.

Adobe's lack of action is about to drive me off their products - after 28 odd years of being a faithful user...

Currently I'm checking out the Affinity suite of software to see if I can just drop Adobe and move to something that's not such expensive bloat ware.

Sketch is great for web stuff. Need a replacement for Indesign and something more adequate for photoshop replacement.

Well, the have added a bunch of features, but I'm not finding I use them that much...

Seems like this request is getting increased activity over the past few months. Keep pressing Adobe on this.

Between the lack of android apps, the unwillingness to improve the codebase, and the gatekeeping support, they can't keep this up much longer without losing profits.

"1. General improvement in the application's responsiveness: By making background running tasks such as document back-up, snapping computations more efficient, we are leaving more power for your computer to do other tasks. "
I don't need Illustrator to free up more power for my computer to do other tasks. I have (at present) 15 cores that are twiddling their thumbs while Illustrator does something. I guess I can try to do some video editing in Resolve or Fusion... I don't use After Effects (or anything else Adobe) for video editing, as the multithreading is so abysmal. As soon as someone makes something that is a full replacement for Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, with GPU acceleration and multithreading across the board, I am very likely to jump ship.

I'm sure a multibillion company can rewrite from scratch their bloatware while doing the bare minimum (as always) maintenance alongside it.

Every what's new is "performance improvements" this is just patching ancient code. Just do it the affinity way, Serif did had a vector and bitmap program before they made affinities, but it was like adobe's programs, ancient code patched to date.
They made the new apps from scratch and avoided the collapse of ancient code that nobody alive have seen before...

The What’s New button in the latest Beta 28.7 says this:

We are making significant changes to Illustrator to make it more performant.
With this release you will notice:
1. General improvement in the application's responsiveness: By making background running tasks such as document back-up, snapping computations more efficient, we are leaving more power for your computer to do other tasks.
2. Working with linked images (only JPEG, PNG, and TIFF files without spot channels) is now significantly faster: operations such as placing multiple images, applying effects to the images, rasterizing them are now up to 5X faster.
As these changes are fundamental, it might have some unintended side-effects.
So please try out these changes on moderately heavy files and let us know of any feedback or Bugs by clicking on the Discuss button.

End of Quote.

'Effects', I am told, are those involving rasterizing: blur, shadows, all from the 'Photoshop Effects' section.
So Ai now will load these images and compute these effects in parallel, and this seems to be the way the team meant — to gradually switch rails for computation heavy tasks... One Jenga block at a time, to avoid collapse, because HEY, we are using the app, it’s a sailing ship.
I only wish for more! I’d prefer for it to handle PSDs as well, and I hope this gets dealt with next.

Several Beta testers (me involved) run a few tests to compare the document load speed.
For me it varies from 4 to 12 seconds improvement. For others, who have even more links, it was even larger. I encourage everything to try it yourself and share timings.

Product stability is the top priority? than why were features added that broke it for a moment. at least start with each document on there own thread. Its been too long. as you see im a long time user of illustrator but with how slow its getting even on current top of the line hardware, it still slow. if stability was top this should of been already completed. please fill free to contact me with some ideas for stability. i have tinkered with hacking illustrator to make it stable but sometimes with each update it takes too long to reconfigure. airobin 2024 seems to be the most stable please pause all feature updates and get Illustrator MT complete. and or atleast have each doc on its own thread.

Guys, just stop giving them your money. Affinity Designer is a good alternative. Let the competition do its thing.

Adobe is to busy stealing our content for AI training, they have no time for menial tasks like actually providing solid software.

That we are still BEGGING for a multi core support in 2024 is pathetic. This Thread is from 2017. 2017! 7 Years ago!
Smaller companies created better complete vector tools in half that time.

Unheard community... next step? No support provided as we all pay for.... next step?
Legal maybe? We are on it. We are done.