Participating Frequently

P: Video Cache is out of control

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
October 19, 2015
148 replies
3274 views

I recently upgraded to Lightroom 6.2.1 So far there has been a lot of fuss over the import dialog... ok, well sure, it has a few issues, but they can be either worked around or just revert back to 6.1.1

I would like to report and ACTUAL bug in 6.2.1

My D drive recently ran out of space... I tried deleting some stuff I didn't need, but still it kept running out of space... So I finally ran windirstat and had a look at it.. Nearly HALF of my drive was FULL of D:/temp/Adobe Local/Lightroom/caches/video/media Cache Files. Now here's the kicker... NONE of these video files are even on the hard drive that has my catalog on it. My lightroom database is on drive L:\ all my lightroom photos and very few lightroom videos are all on L:\ I have a few scans on drive K:\ that I import to lightroom... but these videos are ALL on Drives E:\ and F:\

here's another thing.. I knew Adobe wasted space caching videos, and I do have a GOPRO and I record a little video,.. .VERY LITTLE, maybe 1 video a year... so I don't really want ANY of the video cached.. I will wait for it to load... SO a long time ago, I set my video cache in Preferences>File Handling to the minimum of 1GB (It's was always a BUG to not allow 0GB) I don't want to cache any videos!!!!!!!!!! but here it is.. NEW BUG It's STILL SET TO 1GB!!!!!!!!!!! How is it gobbling up almost 1TB of space when I have it set to 1GB??????????????? So.... here's another problem... I have Cache files that are 4GB for a movie that only takes up 2GB on my hard drive.. what's up with THAT??????????????? I randomly checked a few, and the worst one was a 5GB cache file for a movie that only takes up 750MB on my hard drive... two things, first of all... you NEVER EVER EVER need to cache an entire movie... caching more than 1 minute of a video is useless... if you're going to watch the video in lightroom, it can just play the video on the hard drive fast enough that it doesn't need further caching.. second... DON'T CACHE THE VIDEO AT ALL!!!! just capture the thumbnail of it so you don't have a blank square on the catalog and call it a day... if someone wants to play the video, it will load and play plenty fast enough, Lightroom Can't work with video files, only play them, so WHY BOTHER TO CACHE THE WHOLE THING?? come on Adobe, some COMMON SENSE please!!!!

so now ANOTHER BUG, it's already set to limit video cache to 1GB, so I figure, the new import thing must have built this RIDICULOUS Cache, so I will just Purge it, that will bring it down to 1GB right??/ WRONG!!! It pops up a message saying "Video cache is being purged, this message will be dismissed when the purge is finished... I wait 5 Seconds, and the message disappears, I have NO hard drive activity, and well... I STILL have 1GB of Video Cache files!!!!!!!!!!! Ok, maybe it didn't take.. let me set it to 2GB, then purge.. NOPE! let me set it back to 1GB then purge, NOPE..

ok, so I suspect how to fix it will be, (I Hope) click import, and select the movies folder and then select Ignore source... by the way, how do I add my E:\scans folder as a legitimate source.. I just removed a source, how do I add a nice shortcut button for a new one? ok, now that source is removed, I hope it won't scan it again... now that it will HOPEFULLY not scan that hard drive again, I'll manually delete the offending Video cache.. ok manual delete complete, Ahh my drive can breathe again.. Lets open light room and see what happens.... ok.. open.. lets open the Import dialog because eventually I'll need to import something... oh-o..... What's this??? Scanning Common Locations... OH-NO!!!!!!!!!! first of all E:\Moves and F:\TV are NOT COMMON LOCATIONS FOR PHOTOS Second, I REMOVED THOSE LOCATIONS.. It has a valid location listed, WHY IS IS LOOKING FOR SOMEWHERE ELSE????? Yes it's now scanning VIDEOS and the only reason for it to be taking so long is it went back to my E and F drive... lets look at the cache folder... oh yes, MediaCache already has 3,876 files in it.... not looking very good. Why is it caching files that are not even imported into lightroom??? and why is the cache for each file taking up more space than the entire video??? If you want to make a video cache.. just cache the THUMBNAIL ONLY!!!!! we don't need or want anything else cached.. a thumbnail is all we need cached for our few relevant videos so we don't have a black square in our catalog.

Crap, I'm going to be FORCED to revert to 6.1.1 even though I had every intention of working around the other 6.2.1 issues. TEST TEST TEST Test your software!!! the monkeys you have testing it are not doing a good enough job! send it to me, I'll test it for you, It needs to be tested on a real computer, one that is used for other things.. that way you would KNOW it's finding stupid things like CD cover art and every movie and tv show on my hard drive. I seem to find glaringly obvious issues within one day of using the product. I've been developing software for the last 28 years, I know how it should be done, and how things should be tested, and this is NOT being done AT ALL. Your programmers are sub-standard and are missing the mark, and your non-existent SQA department is NOT testing even the simplest of functions.

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F

FeedbackCommunityMember

Inspiring

And I too have the same problem as others. Video cache max size being ignored, system drive becoming overwhelmed (SSD).

My setting for that max is 5GB.
WindDirStat is currently listing the cache folder as 46.7GB
System drive currently showing 1GB free...

LR version: 6.3 (I hardly used Lightroom at 6.2 because the import box meant I couldn't do what I'd become used to doing.)

BTW, but as there's some devs and other smart people here: how do I turn off the "log into LR mobile" alert that comes up every time I start LR? Driving me just a little mad at it's insistence

jamesr33423836Author

Participating Frequently

I would not have found it myself if my drive did not become totally full. Adobe has an obligation in my opinion to clean up this wasted space on hundreds of people's hard drives... they should purge the cache without asking during the installation of the next release... people who use video and want it cached will rebuild the cache soon enough.. for the VAST majority of us however, we will suddenly have TON's of space recovered. Unfortunately MOST computer users don't really know what a cache is, or how to manually navigate to find it, nor do they even know how to find out what's gobbling up all the space on their hard drive. I wonder how many people have re-formatted their hard drive and re-installed because they could not figure out what was eating up their hard drive and figured it was full because of something they did wrong.

F

FeedbackCommunityMember

Inspiring

I happened across this thread as I was running low on space on a 1tb drive on my mac. I was pretty certain that I shouldn't be almost full as I store all images on external drives.

Anyway, using Omni Disk Sweeper I came across a folder ( library/caches/adobe/lightroom/video ) that was 270gb!! I have never *intentionally* imported any video into lightroom. A few weeks ago, when trying to navigate the new!! & improved!! lightroom import dialog I accidentally imported some videos (nothing like 270gb though!) and this is where I found various versions of each video, totalling 270 gb. I went into lightroom prefs and purged the video cache which brought the folder size to 3kb.

I'm writing this because in all likelihood many users don't realise they have this problem.

jamesr33423836Author

Participating Frequently

Information Update:

I tried my test in Lightroom 6.3: and get the same results.

Test Procedure:
Open Lightroom
Open Import
Select a location with movies and videos
Close Import
Close Lightroom

dynamiclinkedmediaserver.exe is remaining active and builds a huge gigantic cahe with the above mentioned huge files that er 3-4 times the size of the original movies

I also happened to have lightroom 5.7 installed on my old computer.. I fired it up and did the same test as above. With 5.7, it does launch dynamiclinkedmediaserver.exe, but a few seconds after I close the import dialog, it closes as well.. Also PLEASE NOTE: with lightroom 5.7, while it does cache all the movies in a folder that I was just looking at in the import dialog.. and that I never actually imported.. something I don't believe should have been done... at least the files are all very small, 3K my total Cache folder was only 1 few MB after this test, not 900GB, I believe the behavior on 5.7 is what is intended, however I think that it should be modified to only cache files that are actually imported, I suppose it builds the cache to improve performance of the import dialog, but the theory is wrong, because it actually takes longer to read the files and build the cache instead of just reading the files... the cache would only be helpful if the files were viewed a second time, not the first time, but if the files were imported, they don't need to be looked at again in the import dialog, and if they were not imported, they probably never will be... so caching after import would be more useful. At least 5.7 does not gobble up all remaining drive space, so the real bug was introduced with 6.0

I hope this information is helpful

J

J453

Legend

I may have spoke too soon. Simon and the video eng are still investigating.

jamesr33423836Author

Participating Frequently

Great. I'm glad to be of help. Lightroom is one of my favorite programs.

If I can make a suggestion: You have a LOT of customers with a gigantic amount of space wasted in this video cache because of this, however, they do not know it because until their hard drive runs out of space, they just keep going. In fact, even after the drive runs out of space, they do not realize what caused it, so they go deleting other things to try to make some space, the only reason I found it at all is because I deleted 20GB of files and less than an hour later I was out of space again, so I knew something was wrong. My suggestion is, during the next release, before you even install it, run a procedure to wipe out the caches.. they will re-build to the correct size soon enough. A good percentage of your customers do not technical people, and they will not know or be comfortable with manually checking or purging the cache.

S

simonsaith

Adobe Employee

Thank you for reporting this. A bug was logged and the developer is investigating this.

jamesr33423836Author

Participating Frequently

Ok, Hopefully You will be able to cure this once and for all in another future release. I know to watch out for it, And I won't have a problem because all I have to do is stay off my media server drives, however Even with 6.1.1, if someone just tries to import from a folder on their C drive and has subfolders turned on, while they are on their way to the target folder they want, they will start with C:\ and if somewhere, anywhere on their C drive they have a lot of videos, this is going to launch and fill their C drive.

In fact, I did a quick test, and if I just try to Sync folders, and say it's my gopro folder, which I legitimately want the videos to sync, If I tell it to show the sync with the import dialog, the same thing happens.. it caches ALL my gopro videos, ignores the limits and caches every single one of them.

S

simonsaith

Adobe Employee

Understood, The next Lr updates would behave the same way as Lr 6.1.1.

jamesr33423836Author

Participating Frequently

The bug exists in 6.0, If you just click on a drive that has video on it, it will launch dynamiclinkedmediaserver.exe and cache every single video, until the drive is full, even if you close lightroom.

The Problem is worse with 6.2 because it starts this caching process on it's own, even if you don't click anything.. it does this while it's looking for content in common locations, however F:\ anything is not a common location

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