Illustrator CS3 performance woes: 35% CPU usage on my G4

I am sure this is a technical issue that will be worked out (I have a ticket in with Adobe support as of 15 minutes ago). But man is this frustrating. Illustrator CS3 is almost unusable on my desktop. And the rest of the Creative Suite isn’t so snappy either.

It’s odd too, because right after installation things seemed OK, but as I mentioned I didn’t have time to dive into anything.

I know my machine is old, but it’s supported by the Adobe CS3 specs, and it’s one of the faster machines built towards the end of the G4 lifecycle, also maxed out with 2Gb RAM which has been more fine for CS1 for years now. Not the fastest, but more than workable.

I have been hounding the forums and burning through browser tabs trying to sort this out. Did all the usual fixes: log in with clean user account, trash preferences, cleaned out the font caches (with Font Nuke), restarted, etc. No luck.

Even after a clean reboot, and Illustrator as the only application running, it site there chewing up 35% or more of the CPU. There is clearly a problem. None of the other CS3 apps do this at all.

The positive thing is that this experience has made the performance on the MacBook appear to be double what it was yesterday!

I’ll be keeping things updated here as I find out more. This is sure to be a handy tip for someone else out there once I get it fixed.

Update: Wade Z. over at the Adobe forums was helping out with some advice and one of his suggestions was toÂ trash the Settings file [ Users/Username/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator CS3 Settings]. So far so good! CPU is down to 3 to 5% when idle, which is much more reasonable.

I was always aware of the trashing of the Preferences file as part of your troubleshooting routine, but not the Settings files. Glad to have this piece of info now.

I think I am going to also take his advice of setting up dedicated internal scratch disks, oner partition each for Illustrator & Photoshop. And I still need to validate my fonts with Font Book as well – although it’s never happened to me, I have read over and over that corrupt fonts can wreak havoc upon your system.

Now if I could just get InDesign to speed up a little more… looks like I better start saving for that MacPro now.

by George Coghill -
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