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.

@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.

@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... :(

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.

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..

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...

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.

@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!

"Hope this helps."... sorry Avinash, but not. The answer is a "c u guys...." WE need performance...

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.