Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 3.x

I've gradually worked towards getting a machine that works well with Lightroom. It's important to bear in mind what we are dealing with nowadays e.g I shoot with a Canon 5D mkII in RAW so each file is in excess of 21mp. A shoot may consist of 500+ images. That's a lot of rendering etc. I use dual 24" & 30" screens so previews are large. Now have a system that flies with very little lag rendering full res and almost none in adjustment brush even with auto masking. System spec. Rampage Extreme II, i7 930, 12GB 1600 RAM(triple channel), dual ATi cards in Crossfire (which are working perfectly with dual monitors and separate calibration profiles..), hd's in striped RAID and LR/PS caches on dedicated drives. I can run PS alongside Lightroom happily - and yes if make both very busy it will use ALL the ram! For me a faster processor & more/faster ram has made huge improvements in LR responsiveness.

I've found the final release version of LR3 is snappier than the beta's(which is to be expected).

Some suggest that it should not need such a high spec system to get good performance which is probably valid, but the lag used to drive me crazy when editing through large shoot so now having got it sorted I'm happy!

Jon

Hi,

Are you able to reproduse the slowness?

Can we help you out by running a debug-version that is logging whats happening to help you out here? I would not mind doing that.

- Terje

Greetings,

I upgraded from 2.5  as well as CS3 to CS5 last week. Initially, I had no problems at all. I am on 8x core Nehalem OSX 6.4 now, 32 Gig. The upgrade was still on OSX 6.3. My LR pictures (650Gig) and Catalog reside on an external not very fast hard drive, WD My book studio II connected via eSata, setup as Raid-1.

Since yesterday all kind of oddities happen which I can not reproduce on purpose, you call it intermittent errors I guess. Three times now I had to force quit LR, there was no other way to continue. This is really getting scary to me, I need to be able to trust LR with my assets, that I make a living from.

Using the correction brush started to act up first. Here is what I did: K- Burn in areas on a picture, K again, and the cross circle cursor would stay on the screen and not disappear. Back to Grid and choosing another picture, same thing, the K cursor still is on the screen.

Other oddities such as in Slideshow, the first SS I created to check the music features went just fine. The second and every following SS did not work anymore. I was not able to select new pictures from a collection, every time I did that and started the slideshow after prebuilding it, the SS started with the Intro Screen as desired, but stopped right there and did not play. Only by pressing space bar it would start to play, which of course messed up the timing with music.

On the issue of sluggish to slow performance, I can confirm what many said before.

I have a question for you folks:

When LR crashes, where would we send LOG reports to in an effort to help the developers with information? What else can we do to help on that front?

Thanks

Georg

We need a standard speed test for Lightroom like they have for FPS games. Maybe a standard batch of 100 images which could be imported, have previews rendered, moved through, some standard adjustments made and then exported in a variety of formats. It would all have to be automated so human response times wasn't an issue.

Ideally with a log of performance, I/O etc. as this all happens.

Is that possible?

Question or thought

I tried the update database to LR3, then this forum suggested that it was probably better to start from scratch. So i did just that.

My LR2 prieviews was ±12 Gb, the current one is only ±1.6 Gb., that means many many non created previews AND thumbnails, so LR is making these up for me on the fly, and yup, tis slow. (Worth rendering 100s, and 1,000s of my 80k or so images with the the better noise and lens correction IMHO though)

Could the speed issues be in part to the new catalogue rendering the previews for the 1st time?

I have made the habit of selecting the folder I am about to work on and create all the standard size previews and go make a coffee when I start a new folder I've not used in  LR3.

I'm sure this will be an issue effecting some people. Others will have made all their standard and 1:1 previews and just bogged down with a system that is .... s l o w   on mondays and for tooo many variables for Adobe to have yet acertained - for some.

Just a thought for a few of the agrieved 7800 avid readers of  the above post and rising

One thing that came to my mind this morning was the fact that Windows 32bit does have problems with directories containing more than 10.000 files (something to do with available handles?). Also other programs have trouble accessing directories with that amount of files.  This is noticeable with my Avid media composer software. There, when a directory becomes filled up, a new directory is created automatically.

While I do not have a directory with more than 10.000 pics, the cache certainly has more than 10.000 files in it. I wonder how much impact that has on the slowing down of LR.

I have converted to 3.0 from 2.7 and have significant slowdown problems.

For the record, let me state what isn't the problem so we can get down to what may be:

1.   My system is not the problem - a core i7-975 12 GB with 4 TB of raid 0 HDD holding my database of pictures.

2.   My OS is not the problem - 64 Bit Windows 7 PRO

3.   My HDD does not require defragging.

4.   etc.

I say all this because LR 2.7 runs without problem on the same system, the same OS, and the same picture database.

The symptoms of the problem are:

1. LR 2.7 runs fine, LR 3.0 does not.

2. Some people experience the problem, some don't.

3. LR has a new preview engine.

4. My entire system runs slow when LR 3.0 is active.

5. LR 3.0 performance problems are widespread, does not matter what feature is being utilized it would seem.

I submit the following:

   I believe that Lightroom 3.0 is rendering previews in the background in order to convert to their new engine.  It slows down the entire system. My core i7-975 with four cores and hyperthreading shows constant heavy thread activity across all 8 threads.  I submit that when all this is finished, that 3.0 will be just fine.  Those with small databases (or none) are already at that point and happy.

   As I type this I am experiencing excrutiating responsiveness as I have LR 3.0 rendering my entire 27,000 previews at the same time on this system.

   If I am correct on this, then 3.0 should be fine when it finishes. We will see.

   By the way, if I am correct on this (a big if!) - shame on Adobe for not chiming in to this forum and helping us out!

Best Regards,

Sherlock

I suspect it has something to do with the videocard drivers. I'm on a modest rig: Asus P5n7A-VM mobo, with nividia  geforce 9300 integrated graphics, intel E5200 duo core at 2,5ghz and 8gb ram,  but I see no lag at all, when scrolling through my images. There are 20446 .nef files ( some layered tiffs of about 200mb too ) in my catalog.

Its strange that LR seems to work very well on my modest machine, while on higher spec'd boxes, it seems to run so slow?

It seem like typical example of marketing trick. On Adobe website we can read:

"Accelerated performance! NEW

Get your digital photography tasks done fast and have more time to shoot and promote your work. Already quick performance has been dramatically accelerated in Lightroom 3, saving you time from first look to final image."

But the truth is opposite. New Lightroom 3 is aproximatly twice slower than older version. To be honest I must say the new output image quality is much better and the speed is possibly caused by this complicated processing. But it can't explain slowiness of scrolling in grid view, switching betwwen pictures in develop module or switching between modules... I don't know any program (including 3D CAD/CAM, FEM analysis, Photoshop atc.) with slow user interface like this.

Well, the main difference between 3b2 and 3.0 is the lens correction.

People with problems: Are you using profile based lens corrections? What happens if you completely disable the lens correction panel for all your photos?