P: Performance Slow on Large Catalog (540k images). Crash (9690382)

So I made a new catalog and repeated the import... It finished in less than 30 minutes. Previously it took 16 hours.

It definitely seem to be some issue with large catalogs where performance just utterly collapses after a certain point. I don't know how you mess up a SQLite db so badly that it performs like that but Adobe has found a way!

I have the exact same issue. Brand new AMD 9950X system, 64GB RAM, 10GbE network to a 16-bay Synology NAS that can sustain 1GB/s, ~500,000 photo catalog on a SSD. Importing is painfully slow and only seems to use 1-2 cores. Lightroom is never over 5% CPU usage and rarely goes past 0% network usage. The UI is completely unresponsive during import. I can literally watch it while it draws the individual UI elements when I switch modules. It's crazy, I've never seen anything like that in the past 25 years.

I feel the same way. Somehow, LR Classic has become slower under the hood (creating previews) and crashes often during while this is happening (passive preview generation, from embedded to standard). I don't receive a crash dialog, just a swirling blue circle (Windows) which I have to use Task Manager to hard-exit out of the process. Unfortunately, upon restarting LR, there isn't a pop up stating that LR had crashed (like Ableton Live will, for example). So I'm not sure, exactly, why this is happening. 

13700KF, 5070 ti, 64GB RAM. More specs upon request.

For fun I also compared Threadripper results. In LcR 12.x a 7970x (32-cores) rips through the preview building process: 20-25 seconds for 500 previews. In LcR 13.x it takes about 4 (four!) times longer. Same for the i9 14900, building smart previews takes twice or even four times longer with 14.x and 13.x compared to 12.x. This is for all benchmark entries I've checked (https://www.pugetsystems.com/pugetbench/results/compare/PugetBench%20for%20Lightroom%20Classic/)

It is like bringing your car to the dealer for maintenance and updates, and getting it back with over half of the spark plugs missing. Don't have to explain what that means for performance? I want my spark plugs back!!

Meanwhile we're at LrC version 14.3.1 but the issue still exists. During import the building previews process is very light on my cpu, a 5950x, just 15-20% cpu load and LrC becomes unresponsive to any other input/activity, till the previews building is done. It is just as LrC has become limited to a few cpu cores - in the past LrC cpu usage during import and building smart previews was substantially higher.

This is a real issue: I've looked at the Puget bench database (online, everybody can access the data) and went trough old and new LrC entries for the 5950x cpu: till version 12.x it was all good (30-50 seconds for 500 building smart previews), since version 13.x the building smart preview process took at least twice as long (70-100+ seconds and even longer), for all entries I checked in the database. 

For newer cpu's like the Intel 285 there is less historic data available but some LrC 12.x data is to be found: building smart previews on post 12.x versiosn takes also twice as long! So it is not cpu specific, it is very clearly a Lightroom issue. When will this be fixed? 

Note: I don't have any other performance or stability issues with LrC. Also, when comparing Puget bench data between pre and post LrC version 12.x it is really only Building Smart previews performance that has been impacted, a lot.

It's so sad to see so many people suffering from the same problem. My system is 13900K , NZXT Kraken 360 , 96gb ram , z790 aorus elite , sn850x 2tb. (3840x2160 resolution)

I've checked with the CPU stabilization tool several times and confirmed that my system is fine, but when I just create a 1:1 preview in Lightroom, the CPU load rate fluctuates and never stays at 100%.

It briefly locks on to 100% right after generating a 1:1 preview, my CPU temp was 70-80C at the time, and the load rate fluctuates, with a very low average effective clock, and the preview takes a very long time to generate. This really interferes with my photo editing during my weekend breaks, and it's been like this for almost a year now. I'm tired of replacing parts on my computer, and I'm very disappointed in adobe programs for not fixing this one problem. If there is a program that is free from this problem, I would give up my association with photoshop and move on to another program.

Since v14, I have had a terrible time with freezing and then crashing (no crash reporter even after ensuring it is set to do so).  One thing I did that cleared up the extrememly so interface time (49 minutes to load my library of 207K images), was I ran the Windows Memory Diagnostic.  After a couple of reboots, the catalog was almost at instant loads and navigation so long as I stayed in the Libray module.  So, hopefully, this can help the original poster and others with the slowness. 

But on to the crashing.  I have tried everything that I can find to try short of completely rebuilding my system.  Disabling the embedded graphics card, ensuring everything (Windows, Nvidia, LR Classic) are all up to date.  I've created a new catalog and ported my images into it.  Ensured my cache is set much higher than default (80GB).  And like so many others, the issue comes when navigating in the Develop module.  Something is broke in LR.  It is unsuable at this point for me.  My crash log on my drive tells me nothing but file not found.  I assume because it cannot even do a proper crash dump.  Event viewer gives me:  Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Lightroom Classic\Lightroom.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll evey time.  This seems to point to a graphics issue, but like I said, I've tried everything I can find on this error to try.  I'm not sure what else to do at this point.

I'm working on a MacMini M1 with LrC 14.0 and also tried 14.0.1 and I have also mayor issues with speed (again) when I want to import photos into Lightroom Classic to edit. I had these issues several times over the years from the first Lightroom Versions to the current one. A very slow import occured with different Macs, different Lightroom Classic versions, different catalogues, different external and internal harddisks. And since some days it began again. I have an external Western Digital Hard Drive (6TB) and at the beginning import was rather at normal speed, but now it takes about 30 Minutes for like 5 photos to import. In the catalogue are actually 500 photos (I create a new catalogue for each photoshooting) and I have to import about 1000 more. Import from the internal harddisk work, but I can't put my large photofolders onto my Mac, as it would need to much space. I've allready contacted the Adobe support, but nothing helped. The last advice was to format and restore my external hard drive, which I'm definitely not going to do. I don't know how often the Adobe Support advised me to reinstall my entire MacOS or hard drives, when the problem was within Adobes Software. I have the same opinion like in the precedent comment: Instead of adding always new features, Adobe should took a serious look at the performance issues of Lightroom, that have never really been fixed and return on a regular base, no matter what hardware and operating system you're using.

Thanks for the response. It was my quick assumption from reading a lot of comments, but thanks to that and this thread, now we can assure that is not a hardware issue, nor a lack of  processor cores, of RAM or raw power from a video card (wich I suppose we all have), and it's an absolutely huge and painful software issue.

I cannot understand how open source software are not presenting any lack of performance. This is bad and dirt code, a software that we are paying for and we can't make anything. And we are not getting a refund.

We are alone, and waiting for a miracle, that's how it feels, while Adobe are presenting new and unnecessary features that we cannot use also because our systems "can not handle" Lightroom Classic.

It's very annoying.

Fully agree with @muzuzunga for the debug.  I dont' think poor performances are due to hardware ,but software.

Something is wrong coded for several users. Algorytms must be reviewed by developers.