Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 4.x

I am finding version 4 to be very slow also, I'm hoping building 1:1 previews of my entire library (doing it now, will take a few hours I'd imagine) will help out.  If it does I'll report back.

My LR4 system is an early 2011 Macbook Pro with 8GB RAM and quad 2.4GHz i5.  Every other CS5.5 piece of software runs silky smooth, just Lightroom being a problem child.  I am hoping the preview build will help, otherwise I'm stuck with a combination of Finder and Photoshop.

I was also experiencing unusable slowness in both the beta and final LR4. After the following tweaks, it's at least as snappy as LR 3, and a bit faster in several areas. First my computer specs.

AMD Phenom II X4 965 processor

8 gigs of ram

5600 RPM 1TB drive

Windows 7 64bit

Here are the things I did to my system to speed it up.

1. Add exclusions to my antivirus real time scan for *.lrcat, *.lrdata, and the location of the directory that holds all my catalogs. The steps vary between antivirus vendors, so check yours for specific steps. The idea here is that your AV is not reading every write Lightroom makes to scan for viruses. This speeds up disk IO in Lightroom quite a bit since there's not another program accessing the files at the same time.

2. Disable windows indexing down your Lightroom catalog tree. You can do this by right clicking on your main catalog folder, and then properties. Under attributes, hit the Advanced button. Uncheck the box for "Allow files in this folder to have contents indexed in addition to file properties". Hit the OK button. On the folder properties panel, hit the OK button again. A Confirm attributes dialog will pop up, Make sure it's asking to disable indexing, and the "Apply changes to this folder, subfolders, and files" radio button is selected. Then hit the OK button. It'll take a bit to process for large catalogs. The idea here is the same as the previous tip. You really don't want anything accessing your catalogs while Lightroom is trying to read/write them.

3. For desktop computers, disable CPU power throttling and hard disk sleep. For laptops, it can shorten your battery time when you're unplugged, and it's up to you if you want to make that tradeoff. You can always switch between profiles too. In the "Power Options" control panel, click on the create power plan link on the left hand side of the pane. Pick the High performance radio button. Name the plan whatever you like. Hit the Next button. Make sure the turn off display and put the computer to sleep dropdowns are set to Never. Hit the Create button. Now on the Power Options control panel, hit the Change plan settings on the right side of the new profile you just created. Then hit the Change advanced power settings. Hit the Hard disk twistie to open it, and then open the Turn off hard disk after twistie. Click on the blue part of the Setting: under the "turn off hard disk after" twistie. Set it to 0. That disables the hard disk sleep. Hit the OK button. Then on the Edit Plan Settings window, hit Cancel. (kind of counterintuitive, but it saved the hard drive setting.  Make sure your new plan is selected in the Power Options control panel, and close that window. This ensures your system always has 100% cpu resources, and the hard drive never shuts down. The default usually slows down the CPU to save energy when the computer is idle. However, there's a ramp-up delay that can cause things like sluggish sliders in lightroom. You also don't want to be waiting for your hard disk to spin up if it goes to sleep. 

4. When you start Lightroom, It's CPU usage at normal priority seems very conservative. Anything else that wants CPU time gets it, interfering with Lightroom. You can fix this by starting Lightroom, and then hitting control-alt-delete, and opening "Start Task Manager", Go to the processes tab, and click on the "Image Name" heading to sort the list alphabetically. Then find lightroom.exe, and right click on it and select Set CPU Priority in the popup menu. Then select either "Above Normal", or "High". Either one should work, but I use High. At this point Lightroom should be very responsive. The only problem with this step is you need to do it every time Lightroom starts. There is a way to save the priority however. I found a neat program called Prio Priority Saver. Google it. Once installed, it will save your priority choice you make in the above task manager step. I'm sure there are others as well. Prio is free for personal use, and $20 for your business.

I hope these tips help you, but as always; "your mileage may vary" These steps are what got me to the point where Lightroom 4 became fun again. The next thing I plan on doing is getting a SATA3 SSD to run my current catalog on, archiving to the 1TB drive whenever I switch catalogs. That'll remove any disk lag I've got from my slow slow hard drive.

Good luck!

I'm finding LR4 is running reasonably well, compared to LR3. However, is it just me that's finding 'waking-up' the sliders a problem?

For those of us who remember up-grading from LR2 to LR3 (at least I think it was that up-grade?), one of the things we had to contend with was re-educating ourselves to 'wheel-click' the slider triangle (or whatever we are supposed to call them) to activate it. I now can't quite remember how it worked in LR2 - I think that by just hovering over the slider (or triangle) it became active if you wanted to simply roll the mouse wheel to make adjustments. Nevertheless, I'm now finding with LR4 that wheel clicking on the slider triangle is hit and miss (more misses than hits). Time and time again, I'm finding that I'm accidentally scrolling up or down the right hand panel. So, I'm now having to re-educate my brain to left click on the triangle before moving my finger to the wheel to begin any adjustments.

I know it's only a matter of an additional move of my finger of about 10mm and takes a fraction of a second, but it's disproportionately frustrating. I hope there is a fix that will come bundled with other 'responsiveness' fixes in due course.

Otherwise, I still remain a huge fan of Lightroom.     

I had very sluggish LR4 after upgrading from LR3. I tried dng conversion trick, deleted preview file and cache. After rendering all previews again LR4 runs like LR3. Especially process 2012 photos seemed to require a long time.

I followed suit and upgraded my NVIDIA win-64 drivers moving from 280.26 to 296.10.  They can sure release a lot of updates in 6 months.  Like other posters, I don't play games so usually don't screw with what works and LR3 and Adobe CS5.5 have had no video issues.  Following the driver update, performance in all regards, returned to near typical LR3 levels.  But I am not sure that Video drivers was the true cause of trouble.

I later realized while upgrading my 2nd Catalog and renaming it that I had forgotten to rename the origional upgraded Catalog properly (I had failed to rename the 11GB preview cache).  Of course LR4 built a new cache without any indication that it was doing so and I suspect that is what I was fighting while perfomance was so sluggish. I properly renamed the 2nd converted Catalog (containing 47,727 RAW Nikon Images) and performance remains smooth - almost as smooth at 3.6 (moving between modules remains slower than I am accustomed to but no more show stopping slider and cropping issues. 

No way for me to be sure if any of the above truly addressed the problem and I am avoiding the import module untiI I get a few backlogged projects out the door but perhaps my experince and mistakes may help someone.

I too was experiencing extremely sluggish performance.  I had 147,000 images in my catalog from LR 3.6.  I did have the beta installed and when I installed the final release version of LR 4, I just upgraded my original LR 3 catalog to the new version.  After some frustration experiencing slow everything including switching between modules, adding labels and flags, adjustment brush slowness, metadata updating, aquiring thumbnail previews, etc.; I decided to create a brand new catalog, then did a File> "Import from another catalog..." and imported from the catalog  that was originally converted from LR3>LR4 and things are way better now.  Everything now seems as snappy or snappier than before running LR 3.6.  All of my metadata, flags, labels, develop history remained intact.  Granted it did take several hours to import that many files but it seems much better now.  Not sure if this will help anyone else out, but maybe worth a try for those that are at their wits end on this.  I'm running an iMac Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, 6 GB Ram, OS X 10.7.3 if anyone cares or needs this info.

Too many people are just posting the specifications of their PC's/MACS. Anyone with an ounce of common sense can tell from reading this forum that LR4 is running slower than it should and that Adobe are looking in to it.

It doesnt matter if you have 10 "Top of the line" SSD's or a dozen core processor with 64GIG of RAM or the NASA space station. Use LR3 in the mean time, afterall 2 weeks ago thats the only option you ever had!

I can assure everyone that LR4 is leaps and bounds above LR3.X for RAW editing.

I have noticed that preview and applying presets are super slow. Probably the slowest thing about lightroom 4 besides the initial switch from the library to the develope mod.

I installed a big update from Nvidia ( 130 Mb ) in windows update.   After that it´s working smooth again.   Before I was just like many above has explained. 

I am on a Quad 4GHz machine w/ 12GB of ram.  My catalog & images are on 550MB/s read/write SSD drives.  Yet LR4 is very sluggish.  LR3 was responsive (still slower than I would like, but worked fine), LR4 is almost like running a Java app at times.