Drop shadow in a Symbol?

I'm new to Illustrator and would love to get some help on something I'm working on. I hope the solution is simple enough. I have created a symbol and have added a drop shadow to the symbol. In a separate project, I loaded in the symbol and had to create several instances of the symbol (approx. 100-200). What I've run in to now is my computer has bogged down drastically and I think it has to do with the symbol's drop shadow. I am wondering if there is any way to "flatten" the symbol to simplify it, or if I need to get rid of the drop shadow altogether? It was my understanding that symbols allow you to duplicate complex vector art without having the huge file size. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

i don't think symbols improve performance. illustrator still has to render each one and every effect across your whole document. the blur in the drop shadow effect is very taxing - symbol or not. there is a person in my office that drives me up the wall because she throws gaussian blurs in everything, but that's another story.
anyway. you can reduce the document's raster effects settings to 72dpi, if it isn't that already. you could rasterize the effect and that will hep too.
eDIT: i forgot. if your happen to be using illustrator's new rectangle, the one with the round corner options etc. it tends to slow performance down for me a lot. it's best to expand it to a regular path shape.

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