Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 7/29/2008

Question
I have recently worked on an Illustrator (CS3) project that required a background made up of Illustrator generated circles used as a texture stroke fill across an A4 landscape page. The circles count got to be about 200 circles for each background. For various reason the background of circles had to be duplicated, (different colours), onto differnet layers ending up with about 5 layers of these circles.
I found that the system became very slow, almost unusable..Im assuming that Illustrator was slowed because of the number of circles in total across 5 layers (though there are a total  30 layers with differing objects on them)....
Now to my question: What would be the best way to approach this type of project..Would it best to have this multi circle background as an EPS. Or swatches. Is there an upper limit to the number of layers in an Illustrator document or is it RAM hungry?
My system (3Ghz Xeon with 1Gb Ram and 4GB virtual Memory)

Answer
Hi Leigh,

Your issue is your RAM, not how many layers, swatches, etc. your file has.

1 Gig of actual ram and 4 GB of virtual is way too little for CS3. The 1 Gig that Adobe recommends is to get the app running.

If you look at your memory usage via the control panel, you will be surprised as to how little available RAM you actually have. PCs are notorious for sucking up memory with add-ons, hidden apps, etc.

My CS3 uses an average of 2-3 Gigs just processing normal sized files. If yours is very intense it will wear down, however even if you strip this down to bare-bones, you will still run into this issue eventually.

My suggestion is to upgrade your RAM to at least 3 Gigs actual RAM.

Thanks

Kevin