I guess Adobe is waiting for AI to solve all issues they can't solve themselves.

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.

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.

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?

I'll believe it when I see it. Pathetic that this has taken 6+ years.... tick tock.

@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.

@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.

That's Fantastic news, many thanks for the update.

@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.

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.

@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.

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.

@Stuart, I was that guy who reported the super zoom issue. I definitely felt angry when it slipped through into the release. It’s especially enraging that many other problems that get reported on this stage get fixed just fine — and in the end nobody just never gets to know about them — and there are a lot of them, those never happened. It’s like preventing problems by going back in time.
Illustrator is hard to develop and maintain. It’s not about new code gets written slowly, it’s about dealing with the legacy code and making all of it working cohesively. A tiniest oversight — and we get guides that don’t hide with their layers, we get missing buttons, blank dialogs, you name it. And all of these are caused by good intentions, by the effort to optimize it, to streamline it, to pay off the UX and tech debt that one inevitably gains in ~30 years of doing anything. Like if none of us here don’t have a shelf they must nail to a wall, or a door to paint... I am not defending the team here. We pay, we use, we report, we expect the attention and care! It’s us getting exhausted, tired, rude... as if the team does not — although I can’t say the team shows anything of this on public.
I’m the first in line to be angry. And this thread, I must say, became a Swamp of Wining :D 'Multithreading' here is believed to be a shiny Shambala that awaits all of those who preaches enough. No, it’s a thing that can crumble the codebase into the chaos. If even a smallest change leads to painful experience, how can anyone here believe the gargantuan effort to make Ai multithreaded all of sudden is going to be anything different? :)
But I should not be angry, as anyone here. And I must rely on facts, right? What I know is that the effort to make Ai multithreaded is something that is happening — right now — and it’s have been in the making for a long time. All new modules that get added, like the Smart Export (which works fast, doesn’t it?), the 3D engine (of course it is), the Image Trace (which becomes less useful, to my taste, but still incredibly fast), — they all use multiple threads. The team looks into those areas that can benefit from multithreading and cautiously, carefully, slowly, to avoid this Jenga tower fall, replace them brick by brick — until it all gets that boost we dream about. We are driving this car, remember? 24/7, and it gets upgraded just below are bottoms.
But it’s not a panacea, not a magical bean, not a finite goal, it's a mundane everyday task. And honestly — some much smaller things make me much more happier that this abstract idea. Have you tried the filtering in Layers, which is available in Beta? Do you try Beta at all? Do you help ourselves to get it the way we, users, want?
In the light of this new info, that now we know is the current state of things — do you think the status of this should be 'Started'?

Adobe,,,what if I told you,.,.,.......multithreading will make it easier to do all the stupid social media sharing stuff that nobody wants...

I now hate gambling with updating illustrator. If it's currently working in a relatively stable fashion and I know how to work around all the myriad stupid things that don't work properly (like editing gradients from the gradients window or unreliable copying of text - 2 of the most annoying at the moment) then I don't bother. It's such a massive pain in the neck and loss of productivity to have to reset keyboard shortcuts, profiles, workspace layout and settings when you roll back a version. It's like admitting defeat if they make it easy to do. A recognition that updates don't necessarily improve user experience, or heaven forbid introduce a new problem like the recent super zoom in and out effect that made it utterly unusable.

I feel for the volunteer testers who flag these things as the guy who reported that issue during beta didn't get his feedback responded to and we get a know about broken 'update'.

Shame as it's juts another slow drip of annoyance for the faithful monthly funders. Grr!

+1 for this. Please. Illustrator is an outrageously poor performer on my computer. Constant freezes. Constant crashes. All kinds of glitches. It's feeling less stable with each release.

actually since 2017 if they wrote 100 lines of code a day for 365 Days for 7 Years, I don't know with 220,000 lines of code maybe they would have rewritten Illustrator from scratch and made it better, stable, fast, ready for the future. They created new software like XD from scratch And maybe now It will pass no to Figma. So wasted time behind XD when they could boost AI and use it for UX interfaces as well.

affinity designer is written from the ground up, they did had some joke of a program before, but they put up the work and made it right.

So adobe with all those millions can't make a program from scratch?

What a joke, they just don't care.

Im guessing Illustrator is a complete mess and any performance improvement will require a rewrite. Yes, it's a massive task but it's been 7+ years and the performance was never acceptable. Are other long unresolved issues related to the core engine?

The team cant seem to fix simple 4+ year outstanding QOL issues like hyphenation or adding HSB.

The team doesnt seem to understand the userbase. The team fails to act or communicate on high priority issues. They release fixes that are broken on release requiring months / years to correct such as Asset Export or Remove Canvas Size. Its very disappointing.

They could secretly pay some mole in Affinity to have him explain how they made the software multicore, have 1000000000% zoom, speed and rapidity, precision in hooking paths (nodes and curves), etc.
it's absurd, affinity should learn from Adobe's mother and not the other way around.