I have traced the effect that is having the biggest impact on the time Illustrator is taking to render my map shapes. I have an Outer Glow effect (fx) on the land form shapes. When I toggles it off for all of the shapes it took under 15 seconds to redraw, when I toggled it back on it took about 50 seconds. It makes a substantial effect on the map though so I don't know if I should find another way to get the look or just put up with it.

In the image below the left is with the glow on and the right it's off. For those who don't know Illustrator I have selected all of the land shapes which you can see because the points of the lines are highlighted. The appearance panel is open showing the fill and 3 strokes applied to all of the shapes, along with the fx and Opacities of each stroke and fill.

OuterGlowCompare.png

The biggest difference is obviously the fill color almost disappears. There next is the scroll pen stroke also almost disappears. I have some ideas to fix it but it will take some trial and error.