P: LrC 12.2.1 fails to start/launch or is extremely slow launching.

When I launch Lightroom Classic it opens the splash screen then hangs with a spinning rainbow.  

I've uninstalled, deleted preferences, rebooted/. ALL of the things that I've found in similar threads but still am STUCK.  Please help!

Running latest Lightroom Classic (fresh install from Creative Cloud) on Mac Studio 2022, Mac OS 12.6.4

Hi,

TL;DR: For about a week, Lightroom takes 1h to open (and runs smoothly after) and I've run out of things to try.

Main Parameters:
Lightroom 12.2.1 and 12.0.1
Windows 11 on i7 and 32 GB RAM
Space available: 385GB on scratch and install disk (SSD NVME), 1TB on catalog disk (SSD NVME) and 3.8TB on picture disk (WD Black)
Almost 200k pictures in database
Took less than 2 minutes to open not too long ago.

Main symptom:
When I click to start Lightroom, I can see the process start in task manager. Process will take a few % (around 5) that will vary, memory will vary a lot staying between 2GB & 18GB, sometime the disk will go up to 20MB/s which is quite low for the SSD drive. It will be like this for about 1h before the app opens. All those values go up and down and none ever hit any limit the system has.

What I have tried:
- Reboot many times
- Update windows
- Update Video drivers
- Optimized catalog
- Disable GPU acceleration
- Disable all plugins
- Collapse all folders and collection
- Remove the catalog folder from the file indexing for search
- Create a new catalog - Yes, it takes 1h to open a 100% empty catalog
- Uninstall/reinstall Lightroom
- Uninstall/reinstall Lightroom while wiping all data & a reboot
- Interesting info, next time when it started, it took 1h to open THEN said it didn't find a catalog and asked me where it was. Pointed the empty one created above and it finished opening in seconds. Which probably means it's not catalog related.
- Uninstall and Installed previous version 12.0.1 in case it was the new version

I think this covers all my tests.

Only other symptom I see (but it might be nothing). While Lightroom is trying to start, the System process takes 1-1.5% on average where it had an average of 0% usually. Might be 100% normal.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
nick

Thank you so much it worked!!! Yay

Thank you so much. I lost hours trying everything, from starting + OPT-SHIFT to deleting/reinstalling LR Classis. Beware, rease json fil in Lightroom folder, not Lightroom CC folder. 

Shame on you, Adobe!!

Thank you! That worked perfectly - after a day of desperately trying to make Lightroom run again. - I would appreciate a notice from Adobe, when bugs like that appear, instead of making the client find out himself. 

Why did you write that? Is someone scolding Lightroom for its features? Here we are talking about a massive problem with slow operation after upgrading to version 12.1 +
I agree with you, the developers are good, Lightroom is much more convenient, I hardly ever use photoshop. But your message is not for this chat!

@evan.sante 

From my perspective as a user of Lightroom/Lightroom Classic since V2, I see NO evidence that LrC has been abandoned. LrC and Lr have been developed in parallel with fantastic new features with each update, especially the new masking functionality that works in both apps. Over the years, there has hardly ever been a new feature that wasn't extremely useful to me.

It's worse than useless to expect new features in LrC that aren't in Lr unless as a LrC user, you have a need to feel superior to those Lr users.

@jennifers64111699 and @EMSI68219, try deleting the "metrics.json" file following these exact steps:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-bugs/p-lrc-12-2-1-fails-to-start-launch-or-is-extremely-slow-launching/idc-p/13695275/page/6#M41952 

As much as I hate the way Adobe has abandoned the desktop version of Lightroom, in favor of the cloud version (except for the Develop Module witch benefits both, name one improvement exclusive to the desktop version).

But I digress you don’t want them to rush a fix that then causes a much bigger problem. As I’ve pointed out the last time, in my memory, we saw these kind of issues was with the 3.0 release on Windows it was 6mth before 3.1 was released witch fixed the memory utilization issues.

Just my 2 cents. - CES

Yes, I agree. It seems to take way to much time to solve the problem. 
But I that's a far stretch to say they don't want to solve it...though it doesn't seem to make Adobe look very competent.