I would like to add profiling evidence from Illustrator 30.8.2 on macOS 15.7.3, running on an Apple silicon Mac Studio. My workflow involves a document with many linked PSD images on an external APFS volume.

In one session, memory stayed around 1.3–1.4 GB for roughly 70 minutes after launch. Around the time I opened the document, it rose to approximately 3.1 GB. After an initial fluctuation, logged memory readings increased at roughly 2 GB per hour. A sample taken about 5 hours 20 minutes after launch reported a physical footprint of 10.1 GB. These figures come from different logging tools and rounded displays, so they are approximate.

Later, when no document windows were visible and I believed the document was closed, memory continued to increase. A filesystem trace recorded a specific Illustrator thread accessing PSD paths referenced by that document. I have not verified whether Illustrator still retained an internal document object. The saved document metadata contains 210 distinct PSD references, but the short trace does not establish that all 210 were accessed.

In a five-second sample, this thread was sleeping for approximately 97% of its observations. The active branches included file-existence checks, URL-resource queries and display-name lookup. One branch in the Illustrator executable was:

0x19d61dc → 0x19d5544 → 0x19d4eb4 → 0xf17c98 → 0xf17e10 → @objc _NSFileManagerBridge.displayName(atPath:)

The same relative offsets appeared in an earlier sample from the same Illustrator version while documents were open. In the later trace, the filesystem thread identifier matched the thread in the sample. Calls included stat64 and getattrlist on PSD files and their parent directories.

In a separate overnight session, vmmap showed increasing numbers of allocated small blocks in MALLOC_NANO and MALLOC_TINY. Total allocation counts rose from approximately 7.5 million to 105.3 million, while allocated bytes rose from 1.9G to 23.5G over about ten hours. This is a net increase in outstanding allocations, not a count of every allocation operation.

The evidence suggests that file-reference monitoring may remain active after document windows close. I have not established that this thread owns the growing allocations, or that it is the same root cause as the original report. Restoring the external device's USB 3 connection did not stop the observed file checks.

Could the team check whether this relates to the issue already reproduced here, and whether there is a supported workaround that stops the growth without quitting Illustrator? I can provide sanitized sample, filesystem-trace and vmmap excerpts. I will remove confidential filenames and paths before sharing them.

FYI - this is still NOT fixed.

Hi, thank you for reaching out.

I have some additional information that may be helpful.

For my current project:

* Number of linked images: approximately 3,000
* Total size of linked image files: approximately 430 MB
* Illustrator (.ai) file size: approximately 384 MB

The file contains only placed linked images. It does not contain any vector paths, text, clipping masks, effects, symbols, patterns, or any other Illustrator objects.

When I first open the file, Illustrator uses around 3 GB of memory. After that, the memory usage gradually continues to increase over time, even if I leave Illustrator idle without doing anything.

Compared to my previous project, this file actually contains less data. I also tested opening only this single file with no other Illustrator documents open, and the same behavior still occurs.

In contrast, I have not observed this issue with files that contain only vector artwork and no linked images. If there is any memory increase in those files, it is so small that I have not noticed it during normal use.

The issue is also not specific to this file. If I create a new document containing a similar number of linked images, I get the same result.

Regarding the debug session, thank you for the offer. Unfortunately, I'm very busy with work at the moment, so I don't think I'll be able to make time for a live debugging session. However, I'd be happy to help through chat by providing additional information, collecting logs, testing builds, or trying any troubleshooting steps you would like me to perform.

Thank you for looking into this.

Hi, I from from Illustrator team. Would like to know more about your issue. Can you please share what kind of objects your file contains, what operations you are doing and whether the issue is specific to this file?
Also, please let us know if you can join a debug session with us, we'll setup one.

Thanks for your suggestions!

I don't use any third-party Illustrator plugins.

I do use several scripts, but they worked without any issues in Illustrator 2025 under the same environment.

I also checked the GPU issue you linked, but the problem still occurs even with GPU Performance disabled.

Memory usage keeps increasing over time, and closing the document doesn't release the memory. The only way to recover it is to restart Illustrator.

So it seems to be a different issue.

Just checked mine on iMac M3. Illustrator 2026 (V 30.6) uses only 6.61 GB here - and it's been open since yesterday; I've been working extensively with it, also with large files. Do you use certain plugins?

Can be a similar problem:
High GPU load on macOS 26 Tahoe
https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/601447/suggestions/50552691