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Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 3.x

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
June 9, 2010
102 replies
323783 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

Show previous replies

A

Anonymous

I just want to report the LR 3.2RC is working much faster on my system than 3.0. Importing of files is much faster and no observed slowness with brushes.

One bug I did notice, and if someone already reported this, my apologies, in the web module, applying a drop shadow to a watermark renders the shadow above the watermark. It looks like 2 separate watermarks being applied. This shows up in both the index and image view. When uploaded, the watermark looks fine on the web site.

.

2drumstix

Known Participant

I'm seeing the same thing here with watermarks, the shadow is offset and looks two different marks.

S

snahphoto

Participating Frequently

I am amazed about the numerous views & responses and wonder what Adobe will do about this issue.

Yes, I am experiencing the same problems.

Meanwhile we know that this issue is NOT due to a specific OS or Machine setup (even though Windows machines seem to be the majority).

We also know this problem since early versions of LR and that Adobe has not resolved it.

There are only a few clues that might ease this issue, not basically, but a bit.
It seems as if the graphic-card (GPU) being used is an important factor.

I believe that many of us pay attention to and do follow Adobes HW recommendations.
Unfortunately it seems as Adobe is not so much paying attention to this important issue raised in its forum.

It makes sense that the values for
- Real memory used by Lightroom,
- Virtual memory used by Lightroom,
- Memory cache size
vary in size continously, when importing files or manipulating them.

But it does not make sense that Real Memory available to Lightroom is only a fraction of the Built-in memory (System).

Furthermore the specs for LR require 2GB, but LR is not able to address half of it.

Interestingly enough this does not seem to be a problem for Photoshop CS5 and the other memebers of the Photoshop family.

Adobe should really focus on getting this fixed and allow LR3 to make full use of the Built-in memory similar to the way its done in Photoshop.
Again, by counting the numbers of views and replies to this thread Adobe should step forward and provide some information what Adobe is going to do about it.

I personally feel that Adobe is not really taking the question of this thread and its contributers (defined as mostly advanced users) not very serious.

Else it would not hurt Adobe to speak up and provide a clear statement - in contrary, we'd appreciate such a step.

Just two more System Info examples:

PS CS5:
Built-in memory: 3582 MB
Free memory: 2152 MB
Memory available to Photoshop: 1688 MB
Memory used by Photoshop: 65 %
Image tile size: 128K
Image cache levels: 5

LR3:
Built-in memory: 3581.7 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 716.8 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 679.4 MB (94.7%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 720.3 MB
Memory cache size: 106.3 MB

That was my penny.

L

Lee_Jay-ZyZk56

Participating Frequently

snahphoto wrote:
I personally feel that Adobe is not really taking the question of this thread and its contributers (defined as mostly advanced users) not very serious.
Else it would not hurt Adobe to speak up and provide a clear statement - in contrary, we'd appreciate such a step.

There are many posts from the LR team in this thread.

ChBr02

Participating Frequently

Am I the only one? My head is spinning with all this discussion about opening TIFF's, DNGs, RAWs, JPEGs, 16bit, 8bit, etc. in Photoshop, AND trying to relate how this has anything to do with resolving why Lightroom 3.0 & Lightroom 3.2RC1 is slower than Lightroom 2.7 in an apples to apples comparison.

It is obvious that Adobe falsely advertised that LR 3.0 was faster than previous versions. Some on here have given hints as to how we can overcome the slowness of LR 3.0 / LR 3.2RC1. Some of these hints have helped me personally even though they didn't totally resolve the issue.

Shouldn't all this stuff about how to open & which file types to use in Photoshop CS3/CS4/CS5 be on another forum, or I am just too dense to understand how all this esoteric (to me) discussion will help me regain the speed I had in LR 2.7?

J

JayS_In_CT

Participating Frequently

ChBr02 wrote:
Am I the only one? My head is spinning with all this discussion about opening TIFF's, DNGs, RAWs, JPEGs, 16bit, 8bit, etc. in Photoshop, AND trying to relate how this has anything to do with resolving why Lightroom 3.0 & Lightroom 3.2RC1 is slower than Lightroom 2.7 in an apples to apples comparison.
It is obvious that Adobe falsely advertised that LR 3.0 was faster than previous versions. Some on here have given hints as to how we can overcome the slowness of LR 3.0 / LR 3.2RC1. Some of these hints have helped me personally even though they didn't totally resolve the issue.
Shouldn't all this stuff about how to open & which file types to use in Photoshop CS3/CS4/CS5 be on another forum, or I am just too dense to understand how all this esoteric (to me) discussion will help me regain the speed I had in LR 2.7?

ChBr02,

This recent discussion about different formats does have a bearing on working quicker and is related to a problem I reported to Adobe formally. In my case, I need to get my export times down on large groupings of files. It turns out that DNG (if you are going on to work Photoshop) works a lot faster and smoother than exporting to JPEG or TIFF out of LR. There are also direct linkages between LR and CS3 - CS5, so there is relavence. All that said, like a lot of folks, I feel some of the same sting you do about parts of LR not fixed yet, or in some cases things feel a bit in limbo. We may have drifted off topic about about how much each format retains of the original RAW, but for some, even that is useful in figuring out which format they want LR to export to and for what reason... Again though, it's hard not to hit frustration points on some things I 110% agree.

Jay S.

O

Odin1

Participating Frequently

Hi I have a Dell workstation with two 2.83 quad core xeons now with 8 gb of ram and is OK not superfast but remember LR is designed to access raw files and jpegs may have an effect.

What you need to do is tell LR to render all photographs with standard previews - mine is sent to medium - and then select all photographs and run through the complete file the first time you convert from one version to another and then LR will know where all of the data is then it will run a lot faster.

With 16000 separate files thats a lot of data to access and it may seem slow but even if you have sata 2 thats lots of files to find if the sequences are not already in cache on your hd.

Hope this helps!

ChBr02

Participating Frequently

@odin1

"What you need to do is tell LR to render all photographs with standard previews - mine is sent to medium - and then select all photographs and run through the complete file the first time you convert from one version to another and then LR will know where all of the data is then it will run a lot faster."

I have done that to no avail. Was this problem prevalent as well in converting from 2.6 to 2.7?

O

Odin1

Participating Frequently

No, I must confess that I have not experienced any issues with slow running but

maybe I never expected it to be quicker than it is.

A

Anonymous

See these two links:

Application support for multiple CPU cores:

http://macperformanceguide.com/Optimizing-Grades.html

Optimizing Adobe Lightroom:

http://macperformanceguide.com/Optimizing-Lightroom.html

The article points out certain things you can do to increase Lightroom's CPU utilization and therefore increase performance.

The point is that even the latest versions, Lightroom 3 and Lightroom 3.2 RC1, don't make the best use of a multi-core processor. The issue lies in the software codes. We could all collectively ask Adobe to better optimize the code for multi-core processors.

I am however happy to see that Adobe has partially fixed the memory leak (?) issues. Lightroom no longer hogs every ounce of my system's RAM.

Here are some suggestions while you wait for Lightroom to work:

listen to music

watch youtube videos

get out of chair, walk around and stretch

cook up a snack

BTW I am running my Lightroom Catalog from RAID 1 external hard drives via eSATA and FW800.

If you happen to have a iMac 27" this eSATA upgrade/hack may help you:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/turnkey/iMac_2010_27

ChBr02

Participating Frequently

@LRbeta91

Thanks for the info, but I have Windows systems. My catalogs are on an internal Raid 1 with WD Raptors (10K). I have external eSATA and FW800 drives as well.

It is a little disturbing to me that LR 3.0 doesn't use multi-core very well. I wonder what % of LR users are still using single core systems???

ChBr02

Participating Frequently

After I tried several approaches to speed up LR3.0 that were suggested on here, preview settings, deleteing preferences file, etc., I did get significant if not totally acceptable slider speed. I "upgraded" to LR 3.2RC1. The slider speed is now almost acceptable. Unfortunatley, a lot of the other rendering became significantly slower.

I know that I'll probably get slammed on here for being so stupid to believe or criticize Adobe, but; I got an email from Adobe on 6/22/2010, with the subject: New Photoshop Lightroom 3 for accelerated performance.

Then in the body of the email it said, "Create incredible images even faster with the world-class editing tools and intuitive controls included in Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 3 software."

Was it unreasonable to assume that LR3 would be faster, not slower than LR 2.7?

areohbee

Legend

You are not the only person who was disappointed in the speed due to expectations created by the marketing claim. I have suggested that Adobe "soften" the wording of that (others have suggested getting rid of it altogether). On the other hand, I'm not sure the claim isn't true for some folks, and there is just a multitude of bugs that keep it from being true across the board. Maybe it will be true for everyone by v3.7 (just before 4.0 comes out) - ha-ha.

For me, once I got around a develop-cache bug that exists in 3.2RC, 3.2RC seems about the same as 2.6 - not scientific at all, and in fact I'm not sure I remember very well how 2.6 is - I still run it occasionally for quick tests but never done a side-by-side comparison...

P

peterberra

Participant

I'm not sure if this has been already addressed, is your Lightroom catalogue stored and accessed on an external USB hard-drive? If so you might want to try making a copy of it on to your computers internal hard-drive instead which should help the performance. I run Lightroom 3.0 on my machine using windows 7 64-bit and have no problems so far. However I did encounter slow performance when one of my my catalogues was stored on a USB external hard-drive, and when after copying it over to my internal drive I no longer had any performance issues.

J

john Nall

Known Participant

Peter, I do store my pictures on an external hard drive, but that's because if I store them on my internal drive, I'll exceed its capacity. But thanks for the tip.

John

A

Agnus1

Participating Frequently

John, in my opinion it doesn't make sense to have to move your images to your main hard drive. Yes I understand how it would improve performance. BUT there were no such speed or performance issues using external hard drives and Lightroom 2.7 etc. Many photographers keep their catalogs on external drives as part of their work flow between partners/associates etc. I could have two catalogs and sync them so I can bring one to my associate and keep one on my main hard drive just so Lightroom would perform better. But should I have to do that? I don't think so.

A

Anonymous

Did anyone try the 3.2 update yet? Does it improve the speed?

J

Jasonized

Participating Frequently

Yes, I have downloaded and installed 3.2RC... Preview speed is fast as before now, I don't wait forever when

looking through images.

However, I'm reporting a bug that memory is still out of control... 20 minutes of browsing images, updating keywords, and such pushed me over 9gig of memory usage, and started swapping.

I have not tried any of the adjustment brushes yet.

Cheers!

ChBr02

Participating Frequently

>>"Yes, I have downloaded and installed 3.2RC... "<<

Okay, I've looked and can't find 3.1, 3.2, or 3.2RC; or anything beyond the original 3.0. From within LR3, I have tried to update, but it says there are no updates available.

Link please.......

W

www_iqtestforfree_net

Participant

I'm using Win7 64bits with a quad-code laptop and 4Gb of RAM. I'm using latest

NVIDIA driver directly installed from NVIDIA web site.

I have no slowness, LR3 is quite fast for every thing I ask him to do.

Are you using the lastest driver for your graphic card? It has been suggested many times

so maybe it is the way to fix this slowness...

http://www.iqtestforfree.net

http://www.iqtest.vn

skyrunr

Inspiring

I had the same problem, Windows users should use the 32bit version. I could not use the 64bit version on a Quad Core Dell with 8GB or RAM running on SSD hard drives. The clone tool would spike my processor usage and prevent the mouse from moving. Not cool.

F

fwampler

Participating Frequently

skyrunr wrote:
I had the same problem, Windows users should use the 32bit version. I could not use the 64bit version on a Quad Core Dell with 8GB or RAM running on SSD hard drives. The clone tool would spike my processor usage and prevent the mouse from moving. Not cool.

My 64 bit win 7 Quad Core HP Q9300 8 gb mem works very fast converting my 50d raw images. The Q9300 is just a medium fast processor(s). No problems at all. My point is that it is hard to generalize about 64 bit systems and tell people not to use them.

skyrunr

Inspiring

@fwampler Sorry that was my bad, I meant the 32bit version of Lightroom 3 launcher, NOT the entire operating system which I agree, would be rather silly. The clone tool is not functional using the 64bit Lightroom launcher, but it works fine when you use the 32bit version. You have to install them separately, but can switch between them as needed. I couldn't find ANY other solution to this problem ANYWHERE so I had to share it. Adobe certainly needs to address this issue.

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