P: Network speed drops significantly with Lightroom Classic open.

LRC 14.0.1 - Camera Raw 17.0

ProArt Z790 Motherboard

Intel Core i9-13900K

64GB Ram

Nvidia RTX 3090

OS & LRC are installed on a 2TB Samsung NVMe drive with over 700GB free.

Images are on an EditShare NAS, 30TB "partition" with 12TB free.

I was struggling with an import of a large number of images (about 750,000 from a multi-year time-lapse). The images are GoPro Raw (.gpr) and just over 5MB each. I initially thought that maybe trying to import them to an existing catalogue was causing the issues, so I created a new catalog. That didn't change anything.

I thought then that the issue with the long import time was just the number of images, so I left it running over my long holiday, about 4.5 weeks.

I came back today and it had barely processed 33% and was still going! Some additional troubleshooting I tried was in resetting the preferences (that didn't work) and then trashing the preference file manually (that didn't work). I thought maybe the cache was overloaded, but it's set to 200GB (the max allowed) and the cache folder is only 65GB large. I then thought to test my disk transfer speeds.

The images are stored on a NAS over a 10Gb fiber connection. The images are being imported in place (added). Build previews is set to Minimal and Smart Previews is checked. At the time of testing (and during importing) I was the only one using/accessing the NAS. With Lightroom closed, I ran Black Magic Disk Speed Test with a 1GB test file and was getting 346MB/s Write, 825MB/s Read. As soon as I open Lightroom (just open, it's literally doing nothing else. No importing, no editing, no preview generation) the disk speed drops to 10MB/s Write and 9MB/s Read. What's even more odd is that this persists after closing Lightroom, as Lightroom moves from the "Apps" to "Background Processes" in the Task Manager. As soon it drops out of Background Processes, or I End Task, the Speed Test results come back.

While idling in this catalog, LRC is using less than 1% cpu, 6.5GB Ram, 0MB/s Disk and .1Mbps network.

This doesn't happen with other Adobe apps we use, Premiere, Illustrator, Photoshop etc. (we use the same NAS for video editing from and no issues with disk speed). With other Adobe apps open I've run the disk speed test to both the folder where the images are stored as well as to other Media Spaces (what Editshare calls the individual partitions) and results are normal. With Lightroom open, the disk speed results drop to all folder locations, not just the image location.

I'm at a loss for what could be going on and why LRC (and only LRC) is trashing my network throughput when it's literally doing nothing.