Spinning Beach Ball in InDesign?

[OwenGibbons10]

Hi

I have been having the same problem as everyone above. Was working fine on my old Mac Air with 2017 but as soon as I moved to my new Mac pro and InDesign CC 2018 it hasn't worked. Everything is slow and there is a beach ball every 30 seconds to a minute.

I have followed these steps and this hasn't changed anything. This is very annoying as I am trying to complete exams with strict deadlines and this is piling on a heap of pressure.

I was able to change these:

~/Library/Preferences

~/Library/Caches

~/Library/Application support

But when I tried to add an account on these three:

/Library/Preferences

/Library/Caches

/Library/Application support

I didn't have permission. I went onto the root account and still didn't have the permission to complete the task. My indesign is still terribly slow so please can someone fix this. It is costing me a lot of money for pretty much nothing.

[Srishti Bali]

Hi Owen,

Sorry for the inconvenience caused. As you have already tried sharing permissions from root account and it's not letting you add your account. Could you please confirm how was the performance in root account?

Also, please try resetting preferences for InDesign

• Close all Adobe applications.
• Go to Locations:
• ~/Library/Caches
• ~/Library/Preferences
• Delete or rename Adobe InDesign and com.adobe.indesign
• Launch InDesign from the CC

Regards,

Srishti

[jürgene39880032 · Accepted solution]

We experienced the same problems with Indesign in all CC versions - after a while the spinning beach ball took over - and I think I found both the reason and the solution:

The slow performance only happened at our iMacs with Fusion Drives. We usually buy iMacs in the lowest configuration (1 TB Fusion Drive + 8 GB RAM) and upgrade the RAM ourselves to 32+ GB... however, there is a reason, why Apple doesn't allow this configuration in their own web shop: the 1 TB Fusion drive only has 32 GB SSD. When this 32 GB space is full, the performance goes down rapidly... Blackmagic Disk Speed Test demonstrates this nicely after the 2nd or 3rd run.

So, my guess was that Indesign can't cope with the speed differences of the Fusion drive. I ordered an external SSD drive, shifted the whole OS on that drive and boot from it now. The result: no spinning ball in Indesign, full performance even with huge documents.

[Srishti Bali]

Thanks for sharing this Jürgen.