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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.

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Started (Available In Beta)  ·  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:

  1. Open the Creative Cloud Desktop App
  2. Navigate to the "Beta apps" section
  3. 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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  • Andy commented  ·   ·  Report

    Yep. Definitely needed for windows and Mac.
    Illustrators biggest failing is performance

  • Talash commented  ·   ·  Report

    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.

  • whstlblwr commented  ·   ·  Report

    Will we finally get multi threading in the ARM version of Illustrator for MacOS 11?

  • clusterx commented  ·   ·  Report

    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.

  • Tomek commented  ·   ·  Report

    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 8GB 

    and... 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.

  • dmg commented  ·   ·  Report

    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.

  • Nebojša Kuzmanović commented  ·   ·  Report

    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.

  • Oliver commented  ·   ·  Report

    @Nikolas: And please do the same with photoshop: fresh code *halleluja

  • Nikolas Karampelas commented  ·   ·  Report

    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  ·   ·  Report

    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.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    @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?

  • Tomek commented  ·   ·  Report

    If will this increase performance of Illustrator it will be cool but Adobe pls fix this issue from video underneath on macs:

    https://youtu.be/HBO0pH_ee3A

    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...

  • Ribeye Design commented  ·   ·  Report

    Probably the most important thing for Adobe to sort out

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    This really need to be done. Especially in the time multiprocessing is going to be more and more.

  • Henry Rivera commented  ·   ·  Report

    TBH I love Illustrator embracement of GPU rendering

  • Derek S. commented  ·   ·  Report

    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.

  • Matija Erceg commented  ·   ·  Report

    As new computers started to increase threads, rather than single thread performance, Illustrator stopped improving in performance (relatively speaking).

    It's because it's not a multi-threaded app. That makes it way behind the curve.

    There are some scenarios (such as the pattern making/editing tool) that absolutely halt to an unusable crawl if you do anything interesting with it. I believe it would be greatly helped by multithreading.

  • Studio GAAR commented  ·   ·  Report

    I'm probably not the first to mention this, but here's the annoying part: In GPU mode, performance is (usually) great! In CPU mode, it's more than horrible*. What's the problem then? GPU mode completely messes up colour display, with colour being one of the most important tools of a designer. Since this issue started, it has become increasingly cumbersome and error-prone to design visual identities in Illustrator.

    Following Apple, Adobe seems to be less and less focused on quality control for the professional market.

    *Macbook Pro i9 32GB 2018

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Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests: Performance, Enhancements

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