Why Is InDesign Soooo Slow?
Erin wrote:
I am working on a brochure (40 pages, about 180 images). The document is running incredibly slow. It is not my computer, it is specifically inDesign. Every little action has about a 5 second delay!
There are many reasons why InDesign might be running slowly, but here’s a quick rundown of things I would try in this situation, more or less in the order I would likely try them.
- Enough memory? RAM is like air to an app like InDesign; if you don’t have enough, it will be sluggish or even die. I would never try to run InDesign on a machine with less than 2 GB of RAM, and I’m forever cursing that my laptop with 8 GB is not enough (but I’m constantly running 5 to 10 programs, often including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Word). Hard drive space can also be a cause of problems, especially if you’re working on a nearly-full drive. Common wisdom says keep 10% of your drive free. (That’s 50 GB for a 500 GB drive!) InDesign relies on your drive because when it runs out of RAM it writes to the “scratch disk” (this happens far more than you’d expect).
- Display Quality. There are three main display modes in InDesign — Fast, Typical, and High Quality (under View > Display Performance). Obviously, the higher the quality, the more InDesign has to think, and the slower it’ll become. If you’re working in Typical and it still seems like one or more images are in high-quality mode, then those images may have display quality overrides applied to them; you can disable those from the Display Performance submenu. InDesign also has other display modes that could potentially slow it down: view > proof color, and view > overprint preview. Normally, on a reasonably fast machine, those shouldn’t slow ID down, though.
- Preflight. This is a big one. InDesign is constantly looking at your document to see if there are any “preflight errors,” such as overset text. If you have created a custom preflight profile, then it may be looking for lots of different things. Adobe insists that Preflight only works in the background when you’re not working, so it should not slow you down. But there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that preflight can get in the way. I almost always leave it on, but if you’re running into slowdowns, it’s definitely worth turning it off. (You can disable it by double-clicking that little green or red dot in the lower-left corner of the screen, then turning off the On checkbox in the Preflight panel that appears.)
- Cross references. Probably the most notorious offender, causing slowdowns in InDesign, is the Cross-References feature. This is another example of “Adobe says it shouldn’t slow you down, but people keep coming up with examples that it can.” The biggest problem, as far as I can see, is x-refs that span from one document to another. This doesn’t surprise me because I’ve also seen problems when hyperlinks span across documents. I personally think something is deeply wrong with the way Adobe engineered the whole cross-document thing, and until it’s fixed I tend to think that cross-document referencing and linking should be avoided. Now, that’s not possible for everyone, so here are two other options: First, it sounds as though having all the documents of a book open at the same time can help. That is, just open all the files whenever you’re going to be editing one of them. Annoying, but it should help. A second option is to look at the Cross-References Pro plug-in from dtptools. I don’t know for sure, but it sounds as though their x-ref technology is more robust than what Adobe came up with.
- Live Screen Drawing. If you get stuttering or slow-downs when you move, resize, or rotate objects, then you should definitely consider setting the Live Screen Drawing pop-up menu to Delayed (in the Interactive pane of the Preferences dialog box). The Delayed option is how it worked in CS4 and earlier: if you click and hold the mouse button for about a second, then it kicks in to “patient user mode” (where you can see the effect take place as you drag. Otherwise, you just get a gray bounding box. I’m fine with the gray bounding box if it means InDesign works faster!
- Plug-ins (Font Activation). You know I dislike all the font management auto-activation plug-ins and recommend people not install them. (I don’t know who’s fault it is, Adobe’s or the add-on developers, but they’re just buggy as heck.) One person reported that turning off the “auto activate” feature that activates fonts inside graphics helped a lot. But I’d try disabling the whole dang thing and see if that helps, too.
- Rebuild Preferences. I’m not sure if rebuilding your preferences would help slow-downs, but if you’ve tried everything else, then I would try hitting it with this. In the same vein, if you can’t figure out what else is causing the slow-down, you might try logging into your computer under a different account (like a guest account). If the problem goes away, then perhaps it’s something else system-wide going on.
All that said, there are some times when InDesign is just always going to be slow. For example, it tends to quit slowly — and the longer you’ve been using it, the longer it takes to quit. There are some technical reasons for this (I believe it has a lot to do with code that is cached on the scratch disk), but nothing you do will get around that. Some folks say they just use Force Quit (or End Task on Windows) to speed it up, but jeez, that makes me nervous. I wouldn’t do that unless it was taking over a couple of minutes and it was clear InDesign had actually crashed. Note that InDesign only writes your Preferences to disk when you quit properly, so if you force quit you may lose those.
InDesign will also run slowly when you’ve asked it to do something that takes a long time. I know that’s obvious, but it bears saying. I was once editing a 40-page index with 8-pt type, and I edited the index paragraph style definition… with the Preview checkbox turned on in the dialog box. Every change I made took a loooonnnngggg time, because InDesign had to update thousands of index entries, checking line breaks changing, reflow, and so on. Turn off the Preview checkbox in those situations! (Unless you are paid by the hour.)
There could be a dozen other reasons InDesign is running slowly. (Or perhaps you drank too much coffee and it just seems like InDesign is moving slower than usual.) Do you have other suggestions that have been helpful for you besides these? Write ‘em in below!
Great list, David. Add page thumbnails in the Pages Panel to it. Turning them off does seem to help.
Quote: ” Normally, on a reasonably fast machine, those should slow ID down, though”.
That “should”, should probably be a “shouldn’t”.
One other thing that slows down InDesign, is having a lot of fonts installed.
Great list David! Let’s add this one to our Resources > InDesign FAQ’s list of Popular Posts http://indesignsecrets.com/popular-posts
I have not found that having lots of fonts installed slows down InDesign, at least not in OS X, where the only time that may slow things down is when you’re rebooting the Mac or making Word or Photoshop to rebuild their fonts menu. In OS X, fonts only use resources when they’ve been applied to the active page/document.
One other cause for a slow InDesign is if you’re working over a network and the “pipes are clogged” … slow connections, slow ports, overloaded router, underpowered server. Even if the ID file in on your local drive, if you’ve placed images from the server, then redrawing the high res previews or something could slow things down. The way to test is to copy everything to your local computer and see if that makes a difference. (To copy links scattered over the network, select them all in the Links panel and choose Utilites > Copy Links To .. from the Links panel menu, pointing it to a folder on your local hard drive.)
@Issac: Thanks! Fixed.
Not sure I agree with your Font Activation unless your talking about plugins in indesign itself.
I find that FontExplorer X Pro is a God sent.
Would not be without its auto activation saves me lots of time every day.
Other then that I agree with you about PreFlight, I have actually had that crashing indesign CS4 constantly and finished up just leaving it off until job was ready for checking.
Live screen redraw was a big problem when moving jobs that had lots of images in them until i turned greeking on for pictures when scrolling.
Thanks for the tips, great post
It helps if you “save as” your file. In many cases you get very smaller file.
One way to make InDesign a lot faster on moderately equipped machines is to break up long documents into books made of several InDesign files. I once (long time ago) worked on a 240 page file on a computer with around 512 MB of RAM. Without the book feature, every dialog box would always take several seconds to open.
Another personal observation from that era is also that Mac OS X is/was quite a bit more responsive and stable than Windows XP when system memory is close to full.
Yup – very nice post! Thank you!
Another idea is to use LD files in project – just relink to HD in last phase, or break links at all (by rename folder with images) until print.
Memory: InDesign is a 32-bit app and can only address 4 GB. So, if your machine isn’t doing anything else at the same time, there’s not much point to having more than 4GB for InDesign alone. (If other apps are resident and executing, then that can indeed help.)
Books/breaking up documents: Peter, I’d strongly caution against moving to an INDB Book in CS5.5 if you need to export them all together. There are some fairly nasty bugs that mess up your page numbering still out there in CS5.5 7.5.2.318, Only affecting books.
Also, InDesign does not do multi-core processing (with the exception of PDF export), so it can max out one core and leave three others sitting idle. Annoying. Maybe this will be fixed in CS6?
Cannot thank you enough for those tips. Everything runs fast and nice now. Merci!
BTW
There is another good question…
Why (and how it is possible) Indesign CS3 could work smooth and way faster.
I remember those days very well. Are new features are so memory hungry?
Well… Maybe this is caused by eyecandy (it is not actually) unneeded fancy skin, wide and wasting place top menu and tabs (!) Good for browser, not DTP tool – someone forget ctrl + ~ shortcut to jump to another open windows. Dunno how others, but I work with just one project at once… So not need tabs. Should be as an option, same as skinning. IMHO
i’d add the following:
1. using the span columnes feature makes IND very very slow.
2. using long stories. i’m trying to cut stories so they won’t be longer than 50 pages. and less is even better.
3. sometimes it’s a faulty file. exporting to IDML and then opening it may fix some of the slowness.
Thank for the tips, David! I’ve noticed that since CS5, the apps are total resource hogs. If I “forget” to close InDesign (or Photoshop or Illustrator) at the end of the day, it is impossible to work in it the next day without quitting. And I have to admit that I must force quit more times than not, otherwise I’d be waiting up to 10 minutes. This is my biggest problem, so I guess it’s not really that the app is slow, but all my users complain daily. Ugh.
I also run Universal Type Server and have the Client auto-activate. It never seemed to slow me down in CS4 and lower, so I wonder if it could be the culprit in 5.5?
See you at Pepcon!
Merci!
@Blatner: Additionally we’re facing another issue called ‘InDesign Hanging’ especially while setting ‘Keep options’ in the CS5.5 template. We need to start discussing this issue too.
I don’t know who is Adobe making this new software for… Emo kids, who need to be visually attracted?
I bet pro guys demand f-a-s-t and stable performance, not plethora of background tasks that report weather all around the globe and predict SuperBowl finals. Damn, I’d like InD. to look like PageMaker. Ugly. And if I need some extra feature, I can manually turn it on. InD. 5.5 is worst piece of software I worked with for few years. I think lack of competition makes Adobe lazy.
Switch off “Always Save Preview Images with Documents”. It helps a lot, especially when drawing paths, moving text frames etc.
Strange, but it looks that Preview is generated in background every time you change something in layout, so it slows InDesign significantly.
Down side: you don’t have previews in Bridge
Another big one: if any of your text frames has “balance columns” turned on, it will make things slower, especially if there are anchored objects.
Another slowdown I find is humungously large multi-page tables, especially if applying some kind of formatting to a column. Sorry, no workaround though
1. GREP styles can slow a document down to a cawl. Avoid them if you can.
2. Since InDesign reads and writes files all the time, keeping your hard disk defragged makes a difference. Especially defraggers that sort directories together.
Peter
Book.
Is this true about bad bugs concerning Book in 5.5?
We use Book heavily and are currently using CS5.
I am mostly still impressed with the speed of ID, currently using 8GB ram on an 2.8 i5 imac, and I usually have PS and AI open at the same time.
Still good to know where to look if we do get problems.
The article is very helpful –and so the comments. But there is something wrong here…
To keep ID responsive one should avoid or reduce the use of long stories, indexes, cross-references, preflight tool, high resolution images, high resolution screen redraw, balanced columns, spanned paragraphs, GREP styles, keep options, and previews saved into INDD file.
Although not cited, other resources are also guilty of slow performance when used in average-to-intensive frequency: contextual text, transparencies, effects, hyphenated text with multiple languages, complex text wraps, and multiple-level large TOCs.
In other words, to make ID run comfortably one have to use it just as an improved PageMaker and not as InDesign itself. Let me add that by “InDesign itself” I mean a powerful, elegant solution designed to produce high-quality publications in an integrated workflow with other graphic- and text-production tools.
Don’t you think the application is becoming excessively complex, bloated with unreasonable workflow? Its 56 panels and huge learning curve became intimidator as one can note by the reactions of newbies in ID classes. No big improvement was made on workflow during recent upgrades, not to mention the frozen support to long document resources.
Of course, ID is the end of a productive line and it has to handle several kinds of data. No application could be really simple with such a target. But I still think ID could be less bloated. Maybe the approach brought by these simpler apps developed for tablets could help future improvements on complex desktop applications as ID.
Put simply, to make ID run smoothly one have to limit the resources used with the program, and this is not a good signal.
@Igor: While I agree that Adobe needs to do more work to make InDesign faster and reliable (especially across multiple documents in a book), I think it is important to point out that: All these features work fine in InDesign for many people. There are many users who never experience slow-downs with x-refs or preflight!
I am definitely not saying you should avoid these features. Use them! But if you are experiencing slow-downs, then these are areas where you should look for possible solutions.
Monitoring the situation in Task Manager said that ID used only 1 Core of 4 in my Intel i5 CPU on text processing (100% on 1 Core, 0% 3 others). When I monitored Photoshop (for example) all 4 Cores in use.
Thanks for the article David!
I think you can also mention if you link to files in your document that are on a slow medium (slow usb-stick, network share (especially AFP windows shares on a mac).
Thanks again,
Mike.
Ah, if I only I could keep to shorter stories and do without features! My bread and butter is work with 400 page plus books, often illustrated, with lots and lots of footnotes. I have so many workarounds: turn off the preflight tool, turn off keep options (minimum two lines top and bottom of page for both text and footnotes) and plan to go back and break footnotes manually later, break the file into pieces, change display settings, closer look at client-furnished art or fonts . . . In some of these projects I have lost hours of work in the past when ID stalls out and crashes. Over the last few weeks it no longer crashes, but after stalling goes directly to an error 5 “cannot be recovered” status, not just for the file I’m working on but for any other ID file open at the same time. This means my newest workaround is saving every ten minutes, once to an external hard disk with one name, once to the local disk with another name.
This is crazy. I love ID and what I really want is for it to do what I need it to do without so many workarounds, without having to predict what various features will do to complicate processing. I don’t think my work is all that exotic, so this is obviously a problem for a lot of users. I think of the general problem as a “heavy file” problem. As soon as you ask a lot of it, it can’t seem to cope. Now I am trying to decide between expensive solutions: upgrade to 5.5, even though some of my clients are not there yet? upgrade to a new computer with more RAM (I have 4GB on an older iMac, but I’ve been waiting for a new iMac to come out)? both? I’ll do what needs done as long as I can be convinced it will help.
Once again, good one David! .
Hi Dave and AM,
Have you heard of a conflict between Apple’s SPACES and IND 5.5? When working across different softwares and programs — and whilst waiting for a second monitor — SPACES helps to create some illusion of order, but I have a funny feeling IND CS5.5 isn’t liking it. Have you heard of anything? I’ve had several crashes, slow response-rates (lag) and even files getting damaged. This is what our IT department is suggesting.
Thanks.
I tried all of the suggestions mentioned above, and finally gave in and called Adobe support. A frustrating 45 minutes later, they said there was nothing more they could do for me and closed my case.
This problem was not solved by the support program, however, I was finally able to solve it myself, and it was not: 1. too many images in the file, 2. too high a resolution display, or 3. corrupted preferences (all of which were suggested by the support personnel).
InDesign was performing in a jerky fashion, and placement of the cursor was impossible to control, and highlighting and assigning styles had a 2 to 5 second delay. The problem proved to be some kind of corruption on a Master page (and any other Masters based on the offending one) applied to these sections of this particular document. Once I changed the items on the Master page, the performance issues disappeared.
I mention this in hopes that it will help the next user who confronts this problem.