Illustrator CS5 Mac OS X 10.6.7 terribly slow

Question

Hello,
I have an iMac 27", Intel I7, 8 GB of RAM and use Mac OS 10.6.7.
Using Illustrator CS5 on my machine is not really fun since it is slow, cannot work fluently.
I designed a simple A6 page double sided. Using the hand-tool to move inside a zoomed view is terribly slow.
The screen is updated not real time but only arround once per second.
Every few minutes I save my changes to prevent any loss (e.g. AI crahses, Mac OS X crashes etc.).
But thsi is also very slow, it takes arround one minute ore more.
My drawing just consists of a logo, a background object (using an effekt), and a few images (already sized down in PhotoShop).
But as I told you, it is really slow. One more: If I scale the background square (that one with the effect), Illustrator starts to recalculate the effect, which is again, slow, slow, slow! May I should mention that I use arround 1200 fonts, is this a problem?
I heared that since OS X this should be not a problem. If yes what can I do (I really need lots of fonts)?
I already read the Adobe help to improve performance in OS X and Illustrator, but on my machine everything is already done, still slow.
Just to let you know, on same Mac I have a virtual machine using Parallels. The machine consists of Windows 7 and Corel Garphics Suite X5.
Corel works really fast.
Is this typical that Illustator CS5 is slow on Mac? What can I do?
Thanks for any help in advance!

Answer 1

Hello again,
Thanks for sharing the file. I checked it out in Illustrator CS5 on my system,
which has less memory and a lower-performance CPU than yours.
Yes, you are using a lot of memory-intensive effects, but the zoom and
pan performance on my system seemed fairly smooth, and I wouldn't
say it was sluggish. In fact, it seems pretty usable for a 66 MB file, at
least as far as I could see.
I did notice a few things you might want to check on your end:
You are linking to several image files. I can see the preview images but obviously not the originals at this end. (That's OK for now.) The link to the black-and-white photo of the old car is apparently referencing an unusual location. You might want to confirm in the Links palette that the file ("2BJWW1.tif") is linking to the correct original file at the proper location by relinking the file. (It might be a good idea to have all of your assets in the same folder as well, for organizational purposes.)
The composite effects that you use on the "Bei Vorlage..." message at the bottom of artboard 2, "Rückseite" seems a bit complex and slow to render, and could be rasterized to display faster. Select the object, choose "Object - Rasterize" from the menu bar and set the options as necessary. (Actually, I'm not sure if this will have a great impact, but you could try it and see.) If you use this option, be sure to (a) keep your original object, preferably in a separate file; and (b) rasterize at the PPI setting that you will be printing at.
Likewise, the bottom "Hintergrund" layers could be rasterized as well. You're using the Sponge ("Schwamm") effect on artboards 1 and 2, which is fairly performance-intensive and requires a redraw whenever you touch other elements of the appearance. 
Finally, I noticed you are using some unusual fonts, which is of course fine if the font files themselves are installed and working properly. As an experiment, try selecting all objects on the document and run the Type - Create Outlines command. (Do this on a copy of your file to be safe. You should be able to undo, however.) This will render all of the text as vectors, but it will also remove all dependencies of document to specific fonts. If this results in significant speed improvements, it's possible that you have some corrupt or incompletely installed fonts.
As for the document raster effects settings, that is found under the Effect menu in CS5. (Perhaps you have a German version of AI... ?)
Changing this to a lower number (like 72 dpi for screen) will not harm your document and may speed up performance (it only had a very
small effect on my system, however), and you can always change it back to the original setting before sending it to the printer.
Do you notice slowness in any other applications besides Illustrator?
Also, is the file stored on your hard disk, or are you accessing the file from an external hard disk?
Finally, have you changed the location of your scratch disk? Go to Illustrator - Preferences - Plug-ins and Scratch Disks.
The default primary scratch disk should be your startup system drive.
There are some other tips on optimizing performance as well in the following article:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/403/kb403884.html
They do mention using a font manager...
Hope that some of these things help!
Jeff