OS version?

How long does the beachball last?

Any 3rd party plugins?

Files on a network server?

Seconds? Hmm, do you have time, then, to get over to Activity Monitor, select InDesign, and click Sample Process? (I guess, you would want to have Activity Monitor open already and InDesign selected already, so you just have to hit one button). Then save the output and upload it to http://pastebin.com/ and post a link here, we should be able to tell you what is going on.

If there's not enough time, well, it gets tricky. Do you have a laptop handy and are you comfortable with Terminal.app or ssh? [feel free to say No.]

I don't think it has as much to do with processor and RAM as much as with video card and drivers. I've seen reports of bad performance with Live Screen drawing on a variety of high end machines. Now that I think about it, 27" iMacs had a rash of poor performance complints a few months ago, too. You didn't mention what actual hardware you have.

Tracy, all your replies to go the same place. No real point in 4 replies, just post one with all the info -- we all see them.

Too much RAM... Is there such a thing?

Well, there was a smiley-face for a reason. While I would be lying if I said there was never a bug or a problem from having too much RAM, such problems are extremely rare in modern systems, and you should look pretty much everywhere else for the cause, first. For one thing, your not-the-right-item process listing shows:

PID    Process Name              User       CPU      Real Mem        Virtual Mem

1256   InDesign                  TheBeast   2.3      1.34 GB         2.33 GB

InDesign is only using 1.4 GB of your RAM, though the InDesign process thinks it might be using 2.4 GB of RAM.

One thing it does mean is that your OS X kernel is running in 64-bit mode (well, with 64-bit addressing), which need not have been the case if your machine had less than 4GB of RAM. But there are plenty of people who have InDesign running on such powerful machines. Maybe the problem is your Beast? Again, just kidding.

By the way, you mentioned CS5 in an earlier post. I hope you're aware that CS5.5 files are not backwards-compatible to CS5. If you wish to do work in CS5.5 and open it in CS5, you're going to have some issues. The workaround is to Export the CS5.5 file as IDML, which CS5 can then read.  This isn't really a favored workflow, though. Hopefully you don't plan on doing very much movement between CS5 and CS5.5...

I'd encourage you to read Peter's post at No.4

1.34 GB of real memory for InDesign is a red flag. InDesign does not usually use that much memory unless something is wrong...

How long way InDesign running before it used that much memory?

Peggy/Tryingtodothis: Can you please supply us with more narrative about what's going on?

Is InDesign slow all the time? Is it slow for a particular operation?

What exact maintenance release of CS5.5 are you using? (If you hold down Cmd and select About InDesign, whats' the 3-decimal version?)

What was your perception of what was going on when you ran the Sample Process command? Was InDesign giving you a beachball? Was it doing more than one thing?

Looking at the sample process output you provided is not definitive. But over 1895 samples, 319 of them appear to be spent determing whether you have adequate disk space:

That seems a bit peculiar (It could also be a red herring).

It's also spending measurable time loading images, as for a dialog box (under SuppressProgressBArDisplay):

I'm not sure why that would happen either.

Note that these two only add up to 30% of the activity, which leaves the remaining 70% unclear...it appears to be miscellaneous filesystem activity.

Is a network involved?

Please try to tell us a lot more detail about what is going on.

Thanks!

Tryingtodothis wrote:

 

 

CS5.5  Version 7.5.0.142

First thing is to update to 7.5.3