Participant

Answered

Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 3.x

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
June 9, 2010
102 replies
323785 views

Hi

I just upgraded from lightroom 2.7 to lightroom 3. I then proceeded to import my old catalog. this all went fine but lightroom is so slow, the thumbnail previews take forever to load if I manage to have the patience to wait for them.

is there a quick solution?? How can it be sped up?

thanks

Laurence

Message title was edited by: Brett N

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Tom Hogarty

Keith - that is part of the problem everyone is trying to figure out - why does LR3 work well for some and lousy for others. as MANY of us have posted - we have the SAME EXACT HARDWARE setup from 2.7 to 3.3 with VASTLY different results. If the only thing changing is the software then Lightroom IS the problem to be diagnosed...

If it is so offending then unsubscribe from the forum.

David - you clearly don't get the issue confronting those of us posting here.

LR 2.7 did everything we needed it to. The Beta was wonderful, and the ads for 3.0 certainly made it appear it would continue to be a set in the right direction. Your solution is for us to now go but other software? Hardly a reasonable one when 2.7 was great and we had every expectation that the new version would be an improvement.

If both of you are happy with the way it's running, then that is great but you are not at all helping discover why others are having legitimate issues.

If it's like groundhog day then why are you bothering to come back?

FYI, I need to lock this thread and start a new thread because I fear that customers will attempt to share valuable feedback in this discussion and it has become extremely difficult for the Lightroom team to follow the lengthy and increasingly chatty conversation. Please use the following forum topic to discuss the specifics of your feedback on Lightroom 3.3.

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/760245?tstart=0

Regards,

Tom Hogarty

Lightroom Product Manager

B

bob frost

Inspiring

laurencec wrote:

Why is Lightroom 3 so slow?

Summing up this thread - It isn't, but many computers are!

Bob Frost

T

thewhitedog

Inspiring

Bob, that's a piss poor summation of this thread. Perhaps you should start at the beginning and read it again. In point of fact, as reported by numerous contributors here, there appear to be a variety of reasons why Lightroom 3 runs slowly. Many have reported performance problems on perfectly capable machines. Others suggest hardware issues. I don't know anyone who knows for sure what the real source of the trouble is. Old catalogs is one possibility, and recreating the catalog(s) has worked as a solution for some people; image import settings is another (low resolution previews on import means longer rendering times when processing images). Software bugs is a popular scapegoat, in lieu of a clear and comprehensive response from Adobe. And, of course, some people are having no trouble at all. We simply do not know why Lightroom 3 performs well for some people and not for others. But given such inconsistent results, it's clear there are unresolved issues with the program. Blaming the victim (otherwise known as shooting the messenger and an ad hominem argument) is the oldest and lamest of rhetorical ploys. I suspect this thread will continue to grow (unless Adobe kills it) as long as Adobe leaves the questions unanswered and the issues unresolved. New users continue to find the thread as they search Adobe's forums for solutions. I suspect that Adobe's engineers don't yet know what's causing all the problems or they would have fixed it by now. Alternatively, the problem is so complex that it's taking them more time than seems reasonable (to us) to track down and squash all the bugs.

O

Odin1

Participating Frequently

Hi, I use Lightroom 3.3 every single day and I have never experienced any of the

issues that other people raise, indeed until I starting reading various

"threads" I was blissfully unaware of the problems. I just open Lightroom and

use the various tools until I get to what I remember seeing when I took the

photograph, it may have been the case that the various tools were not working

absolutely perfectly but as long as I was able to achieve the desired result it

didnt matter.

I have stopped counting the number of emails I receive because on one occasion I

mistakenly exercised bad judgement and got involved, LR3.3 processes my

photographs, it may not be perfect, it may not for some people work at

lightening speed but it does work and having tried the latest version of Canon

dpp yesterday by far it is the easiest program to use, tweak this, tweak that

have a good look, leave shots you have just worked on alone for a few days,

revisit the scene of the crime and fiddle with them again until they look right.

With some help from CS5 you can cure almost any problem and be able to present

your work in a favourable light.

In summation I cant help but think that that is a huge number of individuals who

suppose they are photographers but how can that be when they appear to spend an

inordinate amount of their time whinging and complaining about products without

which they would not be able to survive in photography today without them. A

poor workman always blames his tools, for me I am just thankful that Adobe even

bother to take the amount of abuse that they do at the price they do it for

because most other programs I have used need a double first in 5th dimensional

physics just to understand exactly how they function before you even get to

process your photographs and the results you get are not better in any

perceivable fashion.

In life you always have choices even though at the time they may not be apparent

and if you need to spend 24hours a day whinging about they way in which a

product works then maybe you bought a product that was not suitable for you and

then you need to use something else and I bet within 24 hours you would be

whinging about that.

Instead of bitching among yourselves, write a letter direct to Adobe stating in

specific mechanical terms exactly what happens or doesnt happen when you begin a

specific task and why you think it doesnt work in the way that it should. I have

encounter a couple of issues but I just phone Adobe discuss the issue with them

and in every case so far it was my lack of knowledge that created the problem

not the way in which the software worked or was written.

LR3 is adequate for the task, if I feel that I am being exploited in a specific

way then no company would want me on their backs but before I complain I try

very hard to first understand the problem and second reconcile it myself and

third if one and two fail to produced the desired result clearly document the

problem and discuss it directly with those who have the opportunity and skill to

resolve it for me.

Example, I became concerned that LR was using too much virtual memory and

insufficient ram, so I discussed the matter the Adobe and found that this is the

way the software is written so that it can be used by people who have less RAM

in their system, they Adobe try very hard to make their produced accessible and

usable for the largest community, and why wouldnt they, how can you condemn a

manufacturer for trying to make the product usable for those who maybe cannot

afford expensive hardware, I dont really think they should be condemned for

that. Subsequently I put in more RAM and upgraded both drives. LR accesses C

drive for virtual memore so I used a WD velociraptor 10,000 rpm and a Caviar

black for the drive where I save all of my photographs and touch wood it works

very well.

There should be no difference whatsoever between the way in works on one system

or another, though if you have good hardware it should run a bit quicker but

Windows 7 is the first windows os that has worked quick and reliable and thats

taken 30 years, get a grip, take photographs, concentrate on the matter at hand

which is developing the shot and remember you could be covered in chemicals and

stuck in a dark room for hours being the only other viable alternative.

David Wells

G

George in Seattle

Known Participant

Over the last 5 months, I gradually upgraded my system from: 32bit Win XP 4gb TO: Windows 7 12gb I-7 processor & SSD drives (at no small expense). I am currently running LR 3.2. I can tell you that most of what people are complaining about performance-wise is hardware related. Lightroom now loads in 1 second and the directory counts, in another second. photos have sub-second 1-1 render time where before I was having freeze problems.

This is not to say there are no LR problems. But CPU GPU or RAM size is not the problem here. Lightroom appears to in fact not take enough memory because it gets a horrendous number of page faults while not doing much in particular. It could take 6 more gb of my free memory to alleviate that, but does not. And the Spot removal tool has a serious bug --it should be running fast on this system but slows way down after the 5th spot. With no processor activity, the only conceivable problem appears to be memory thrashing.

Just some observations.

D

DaveJDSP

Participating Frequently

Thanks George.

Your contribution is a big help here. Also to me it is very obvious that LR/ACR has a serious bug that is causing slow/jerky panning and balky spotting. (ACR in CS4 worked just fine) I could probably zero in on the problem and report it to Adobe, but I could only afford to take that time if Adobe would pay me. It is their problem and product and they have people who are paid to create a proper product. It seems to me that they have the responsibility to track this down and fix it.

Meanwhile I am continuing to get closer to dumping my 10+ years invested in Adobe products and move to a vendor that is not so arrogant/complacent.

D

DaveJDSP

Participating Frequently

This is VERY obviously an Adobe ACR bug. And it is Adobe's responsibility to track it down and figure it out, not the responsibility of those in the user forum. I'm not getting paid to fix their products. I have my own work to do.

I didn't post all my other system info, as it is obviously irrelevant, based on what we've seen posted by others. We've seen some folks post with very modest systems that seem to be running just fine. And some very high-end systems that are running horribly. I have Win7/64 8GB. GeForce GT220. Have tried every conceivable ACR & Photoshop & Display card setting, including running my ACR and/or Photoshop caches off of my SSD and all versions of ACR 6x. And it doesn't matter whether I host ACR in 64 bit (^O) or 32 bit (^R).
Because I need to get real work done, and I need the features of ACR 6x, I'll try testing a few display cards that have been posted as working properly (Nvidia 8600GT /512 & ATI HD4350). I'll post back when I can.

D

DaveJDSP

Participating Frequently

Has anybody eliminated display cards and/or drivers? Way back at the beginning of this thread, a guy said he was using Win7/64 and an ATI HD4350 display card (now buyable for $30), and that he had none of the described slowness and was very happy.

I'm using an NVIDIA® GeForce® GT220 and panning in ACR is brutally slow and jerky. But in Photoshop panning is perfect. I strongly suspect some bug related to display cards/drivers.

I'm not using lightroom, but I do use Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and Photoshop CS5.

I just ordered an HD4350 ($15after rebate) and will have it tested within a week and will post my results here.

areohbee

Legend

I tried eliminating my display card, but then I couldn't see anything (ha-ha).

I agree that display cards and/or drivers can cause issues beyond what one might expect (may make things slow that really don't demand high graphics performance).

That's true of any devices / drivers in the loop, but especially true of graphics cards / drivers.

Rob

K

katemac02

Participant

Is there a recap somewhere of this whole thread? My 3.2 is super slow too, especially after using adjustment brush. Is there a fix? Should I just trudge through the 23 pages of this thread and/or is there a response from Adobe that myself and future readers could be directed to?

Thanks.

B

Butch_M

Inspiring

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/742964?tstart=0

http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/

A

appcoop1

Participant

Yes, Lightroom 3.x is slow. Significantly slower than 2.x

Using the same machines and upgrading from 2.x to 3.x,

I immediately noticed a significant slowdown in response on BOTH

my laptop and my PC. The PC is a relatively new quad core 8g system with 2TB

drive and 1GB Radeon video card. That maching should fly. But it doesn't.

3.x is not nearly as efficient as 2.x, despite the notable feature improvements.

J

JayS_In_CT

Participating Frequently

appcoop1 wrote:
Yes, Lightroom 3.x is slow. Significantly slower than 2.x
Using the same machines and upgrading from 2.x to 3.x,
I immediately noticed a significant slowdown in response on BOTH
my laptop and my PC. The PC is a relatively new quad core 8g system with 2TB
drive and 1GB Radeon video card. That maching should fly. But it doesn't.
3.x is not nearly as efficient as 2.x, despite the notable feature improvements.

Appcoop1,

Your post doesn't give much info about where you're seeing the slowdowns and if you've tried any of the steps folks have mentioned. I know it is a long thread, but there are some "pointers" throughout, e.g. deleting the prefs file, making the cache larger, etc. Lightroom likes memory and while I still think they are working on it, 3.2 made it a much more acceptable platform. Keep in mind certain areas of LR3 are more CPU intensive, like the 2010 Process model.

Have you also tried it with a new (vs. converted) catalog? Some folks had problems with upgraded catalogs vs. new ones, have you done an "optimize" to the catalog, etc. It's harder to try and help without much info to go on.

Jay S.

DJ-G

Participating Frequently

My start-up catalog for 3.2 was the one I created for the 3 beta. My biggest pain was the images that had tons of healing spots, most everything else was fairly smooth and I could work with.

But I decided to bite the bullet and create a brand new catalog in 3.2. After importing everything back in (around 15000 images) I'm in the process of recreating the collections, which I'm doing a bit reorg on. Now a mega-spotted image (over 200 heals) that used to take ~ 1:30-2 minutes to load takes ~30 seconds. I'm also not getting "LR has stopped working" when doing lengthy batch jobs, e.g. making previews, etc.

I'm on Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, i7 980X w/ 12GB, RAID 0 and RAID 10 volumes.

Message was edited by: DJ-G - changed "recreating catalogs" to "recreating collections"

A

Anonymous

I don't have time to search through the forum (3 days looking up this problem is enough) to see if this has been answered. I upgraded to Lightroom 3 and then 3.2 and man, what a slug. Previews whether in grid or not were painfully slow (have a nap time) and then I saw how many photos I had in my library, thinking that since I'm just looking at a single photo with 1,391 photos in it (I'm a horse show photographer, so this up to 7,000 photos is normal for a show) that it's gotten painfully slow slow slow.

So, I went back in time and realized that the more photos I added to my catalog, the slower it got, so I changed the preferences to ask me which catalog to load and removed my ginormous one (981,657 photos) and decided to catalog my catalogs and now I have 2010 Reining Horse Shows, 2010 Arabian Shows, etc. - each being a separate catalog. It's easier to search, add keywords, metadata, etc. and now it's fast like when I first started. My biggest catalog has 35,000 images in it and it's still fast. They're all RAW files (5D MKII) and TIFF's, so the size of the photo does not matter, nor does the format. I am on a PC with 9 GB of RAM, 64-bit system, with a quad four processor and lots of peripherals and things are flying along (again) after much frustration.

Don't know if this'll work for anybody else, but it sure did for me.

A

Anonymous

Here's what I finally discovered after my last post on the forum. In order for Light room to load your previews with the adjustments and metadata first it must be a catalog you have created previews for. The stored previews will be in the same location and have the same file name as the catalog (highlighted in the screen shot below).

If you load a catalog and your previews are loading greyed out until you scroll down in Grid view and the development setting load next one preview at a time you must have loaded one of your backup catalogs Your backup catalogs do not contain any previews. If you load a "Backup catalog" It will work but very slowly as it has create standard previews on the fly as you are looking at your thumbnails. After viewing a backup catalog the previews are not saved after exiting Lightroom unless you have created them. So backups are just that a back up of the catalog without the previews. If your catalog has become corrupted in some way, you would have to load your backup catalog and create standard previews for it.

Hope this helps. I was going to add to my post but was so frustrated by the process of discovering what exactly was wrong that I didn't. Also somewhere in Lightroom's help files it is mentioned what the backup catalog does not

contain but for the life of me I couldn't find it for you the second time around.

Dale

M

Mvox

Participant

Well this is an epic thread..are we going for some sort of record?

I can confirm that 3.2 runs well on my average machine again, just like 2.7 did. I was one of those that had the whole thing reduced to a crawl.There are a couple of small glitches, but I imagine they will get ironed out in time, meanwhile I've finally moved away from 2.7 and 3.2 feels quick and responsive in all modes. So...panic over...still got another 1200 images to process from the last shoot and I've sort of been keeping it going through all of this. I guess the result of this lesson is that I'll be far more cautious in future when there's a major upgrade..

I must say though, all you guys here helped immensely with your input right through this thread. I never have the time or the inclination to delve around inside a computer program, like I don't delve around in my car engine, I just use them, photography to me isn't a scientific process.

So thanks and all power to you who have the interest and the knowledge and the grace to share. You've been most helpful, directly and indirectly, to those of us who end up all at sea when things go tits up...:) .

R

Rmurrayphoto

Participating Frequently

I would have to agree with most of this! I too had been reduced to a crawl and was unable to even use the software. I too am experiencing much better performance and I too will shy away from converting to the latest version of software until it has been put through the paces.

Thanks Adobe and all the folks who I'm sure have been working hard to correct this for the fix. Do know however that you have lost a lot of trust.

Ronn

Sent via AT&T Mobile

L

laurencecAuthor

Participant

I too have had great success with the new software release and since starting this thread I have learnt so much from all the comments made but I am finally happy that I can work efficiently again.

L

labungo100

Participant

What is the Operating System installed in your Computer?

Try restarting the computer with Selective Startup from run>msconfig and check if it works.

DdeGannes

Community Expert

Maybe some one who is having problems with the latest version Lightroom 3.2 should start a new thread "Why is Lightroom 3.2 so slow"

and let this thread be put to rest. Just so we can focus on the existing problems.

Regards, Denis: iMac 27” mid-2015, macOS 11.7.10 Big Sur; 2TB SSD, 24 GB Ram, GPU 2 GB; LrC 12.5,; Lr 6.5, PS 24.7,; ACR 15.5,; (also Laptop Win 11, ver 24H2, LrC 15.0.1, PS 27.0; ) Camera Oly OM-D E-M1.

areohbee

Legend

Or if not, at least make sure the version you are talking about is specified exactly. Everybody will assume now

that recent posts are referring to Lr3.2, but it will be a lot less clear to people going back and reading them after 3.3 is out...

T

thewhitedog

Inspiring

I just downloaded, installed a tried out Lightroom 3.2 (final). I can't find much in the way of release notes but my preliminary experience is promising. When rendering previews now Lightroom uses all 4 CPU cores (as shown in MenuMeters) on my quad-core 3GHz MacPro. This indicates, if I'm not mistaken, that Lightroom is using multi-threading more efficiently. RAM and virtual memory usage are moderate, under 1 GB each on some medium sized JPEGS; on RAW images RAM and virtual memory use are higher, around 1.4 GB - which is less than Safari is using while I'm writing this. All this is, of course, very preliminary, but it does seem to render images faster. In a more critical test, where I was having problems with earlier versions of Lightroom 3, rendering thumbnails in the import dialog in a folder with thousands of images, 3.2 does much better, not freezing or crashing, as it had done before, and rendering the thumbnails much more quickly. In this process RAM and VM use rose to over 2 GB, but this is still reasonable, given that I have 8 GB available. Later I'll take a look at how well Lightroom does with Photoshop CS5 running in the background. I'm hopeful that this means most of the grievances that have been aired out on this forum thread are resolved. I look forward to what others of you have to say on the subject.

J

JayS_In_CT

Participating Frequently

thewhitedog wrote:
I just downloaded, installed a tried out Lightroom 3.2 (final). I can't find much in the way of release notes but my preliminary experience is promising. When rendering previews now Lightroom uses all 4 CPU cores (as shown in MenuMeters) on my quad-core 3GHz MacPro. This indicates, if I'm not mistaken, that Lightroom is using multi-threading more efficiently. RAM and virtual memory usage are moderate, under 1 GB each on some medium sized JPEGS; on RAW images RAM and virtual memory use are higher, around 1.4 GB - which is less than Safari is using while I'm writing this. All this is, of course, very preliminary, but it does seem to render images faster. In a more critical test, where I was having problems with earlier versions of Lightroom 3, rendering thumbnails in the import dialog in a folder with thousands of images, 3.2 does much better, not freezing or crashing, as it had done before, and rendering the thumbnails much more quickly. In this process RAM and VM use rose to over 2 GB, but this is still reasonable, given that I have 8 GB available. Later I'll take a look at how well Lightroom does with Photoshop CS5 running in the background. I'm hopeful that this means most of the grievances that have been aired out on this forum thread are resolved. I look forward to what others of you have to say on the subject.

Whitedog...

Great to hear that you're not only seeing benefits in terms of "look and feel" but you're seeing it in the underlying structure as well. +1 for the post for sure.

Jay S.

Show more replies

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded