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Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 4.x

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
March 6, 2012
188 replies
629827 views

Anyone else notice that lightroom 4 is slow? Ligtroom 3 always ran fast on my system but Lightroom 4 seemlingly lags quite a bit.

My system is:

2.10 ghz Intel Core i3 Sandy Bridge

8 GB Ram

640 GB Hard Drive

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

Message title was edited by: Brett N

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Victoria Bampton LR Queen

It's now impossible to see the wood for the trees in this whopping 43-page long thread. Many of the original 4.0-4.2 performance issues have since been resolved, and it's impossible to figure out who is still having problems, and what they can try.

I've started a nice clean thread to continue this discussion for 4.3 and later. http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1117506 Thanks to Bob_Peters for the suggestion. I'm locking this one, otherwise it'll continue to get increasingly unweidly, but please feel free to continue existing discussions on the new thread.

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Pulzar2

Participant

6-core AMD Phenom 3.4GHz, 8GB RAM, high-end nVidia graphics card, SSD, single monitor, and LR4 is almost unusably slow. Just browsing through pictures in Develop mode takes about 3 seconds per picture, WB slider is extremely unresponsive, and so are most of the other ones.

This is clearly not a problem that requires more computing resources, but some kind of a bug that's exposed on certain systems only. Hopefully Adobe figures it out quickly.

G

Gyldensgaard

Participant

I have an XEON 2,67GHz, 6GB RAM, Nvidia Quattro FX1700, WD Velociraptor HDD, Single Monitor and LR4 is almost as fast as LR3. No trouble browsing through photos, geotagging photos etc. But it is certainly EATING MOMORY compared to LR3. Starting with 300 MB rising to about 3.5-4GB. The CPU Fan is running a lot - so it's certainly rather ressource hungry. But not slow to use.

I have not installed the beta prior to installing release version of LR4

So it realy seems like LR4 is having some hardware compability issues

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Anonymous

I just want to add another message to Adobe that LR4 is extremely slow, but for me now there is no way back to LR3. I really hope Adobe is working on a fix for this problem.

Kjell Roar

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lightfirecreative

Participant

I just upgraded to Lightroom 4 on Saturrday. Yesterday, I took over 600 photos and have been simply trying to rate and keyword them. Lightroom is unbelievably slow. Switching images in the devlop module can take around 8 seconds. 1:1 views take at least 5 seconds to come up. Evebn selecting a photo and then havbing the develop settings come up for that selected photo takes 5 seconds. People have said the sliders are problematic. Mine appear to be jerky but the results come up quickly after adjusting.

I did clear the preview folder which improved the performance somewhat but it comes to a crawl later on during my workflow.

Lightroom 3 was never a problem and I could switch between photos really quickly and have its metadata and keywors appears virtually instantly.

I never have had Lightroom 4 beta and my PC is using the follows:

Asus P5T SE with 12GB RAM

Intel Core i7 920

Windows 7 (SP1) 64-bit

120GB OCZ Vertex Plus SSD system drive

and Western Digital 2TB SATA

I only run one monitor and am using the latest AMD drivers for my Radeon HD6870.

I think I'm going to have to upgrade Ligthroom back to version 3.6 as it'll take me forever to go through those newly imported 600+ images and rate or reject and keyword them.

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dwarfland

Participating Frequently

Lightroom 4 isn't *slow*, here it's *unbearably slow*. every single action takes 2-5 seconds. literally. press "D". wait. drag a slider. wait. press "R" wait. change crop. wait. drag a sider. wait. press "G". wait.

i have a resonably large catalog (almost 50k photos), but LR3 handled that fine. i've also freshly rendered previews for of the last years photos that im working on. the catalog wa simported from LR3, yes. but i can;t really be reasonably expected to start with a fresh catalog, when i have 50k images already i LR, can i?

also, this is a 8-core Mac Pro with 14GB of RAM.

this is ridiculous, i'll most likely have to go back to LR3 (and live with losing the bit of work i did in LR4, so far).

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A_C_G

Participating Frequently

Mark and dwarf,

Have you filed your bug reports......please.

Tony

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Mark Wycherley

Participating Frequently

Tony. Not posted any bug report yet. Still playing with various things to try and narrow down what it might be based on what I am reading around the various forums.

I just updated what I'd earlier said with more info related to it seems to be only those images brought in as part of a 3.6 catalog. Editing fresh images directly imported to LR4 does not seem to be slow.

I am also assuming that Adobe folks are monitoring this forum. I'd be pretty sure they are...

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dennishh

Participating Frequently

So disapointed in LR4 I just uninstalled it, will wait for fixes or version 5. So slow.

hamish niven

Inspiring

Have any of you tried converting some or all of your raw files to the latest DNG to see if there is any speed improvement?

I convert all my photos to DNG - a personal preference, but I'm in the process of converting the DNG's to the latest dng - not the lossy format.

My conversion from LR3.5 / LR4 beta has been

back up catalog
delete the previews file
convert / upgrade the catalog
Edit>Convert Photos to DNG, turning off the only convert RAW files and making sure the lossy conversion was off.

As I'm converting 500 images, it's going to take a while, so until then, the question stands

Does converting to the latest verstion of DNG help with speed improvements?

J

JamesS1981

Participant

I'm running Windows Vista 32bit on a Q6600 2.4Ghz (OC'd to 2.7Ghz) with 4 gigs of ram (Vista 32 only recognizes 3.2 gig of memory) and LR2 and 3 always ran fine but as with most in this thread I'm experiencing the same slow, laggy, slugish behavior. As others have stated I assumed that it was the beta and the LR4 gold would correct the problems but it hasn't other than being a little more polished.

Something that I've been trying with what seems like a positive effect has been going into LR4 Library Module and selecting a few images or even an entire directory that has already been converted to the 2012 Process and going to Library, Convert Photo to DNG. Even though all of my images are already in DNG format (from as far back as LR2) it appears to do something to the DNG existing images. In previous Lightroom versions when you ran the converter on existing DNG files it said it was done immediately but now it takes a little bit to complete. After the the Convert process is done the Develop module seems to run much more smoothly. Any Mask options like the Brush or Healing tool work fine also untill I get over a dozen history states then they start to slow some. The develop slider (for me at least) respond almost instantly as opposed to directories where I have't run the Convert to DNG option on. I have the Convert options set to default as far as Only Convert Raw Files, Delete originals, and Embed Fast Load Data are the only boxes checked and my JPEG Preview is set to None. I don't know if the Embed Fast Load Data is really being generated after the fact since the files are already DNG but something seems to be helping as compared to the files and directories that I have not 'Converted'. I've also played with the Update DNG Preview & Metadata but that didn't seem to have much effect.

If anyone else cares to give this a shot, let us know if it has any effect for you.

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geoFHP

Participant

Like so many on this thread, I too found Lightroom 4 unusably slow. Picking up on what Jeff 2011 said, I went into one of my folders and selected a single Canon cr2 raw file and converted the image to DNG...that's right, just the one image. Somehow this seems to have flipped a switch in Lightroom 4, because now (so far) everything is running much, much faster-more like Lightroom 3 behaved. This is true for all of my Canon raw files, Fuji raw files and iPhone jpegs, including images using either the 2012 process version or the 2010 version . I'm running on a 2011 MacBook Pro with 8 gigs of RAM, under Mac OS X 10.7.3.

I still have to run it through some more paces, but Lightroom 4 is now very responsive for me, even with all of the modules active. I'll post a follow-up if I find anything changes. It's really very bizarre to me that converting a file could change the behavior of the program, but it does feel like somehow it fliped a switch or changed a mode that the sofware was running in when first installed. This really is something Adobe needs to address right away.

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A_C_G

Participating Frequently

"converted the image to DNG"

Sorry to be dim George. I never use DNG so don't know where to find the 'convert' command.

Tony

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mrboyd

Participant

I too am experiencing slowness on even an SSD drive with 16 g of ram, i7 2600k 3.4 ghz, i built this machine to be a lighroom dominator. I will wait another month or two before i upgrade. Maybe they will work it out. I only have burning software, lightroom 4 and CS5 on this machine.

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Anonymous

I built a PC in Dec 2011 - 16GB ram, i7-3930k (3.2GHz)., etc.

The other day I was doing an import using Lightroom 4, and somehow it used 100% of my memory. Yeah, Lightroom 4 chewed up 16gb of ram. I never saw anything like that with Lightroom 3.

Adobe, please, please refine the engine in Lightroom 4 to make it perform better. Right now, it's slow, sluggish and resource hungry, even for basic tasks.

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jason almeida

Participant

Same here ... I face the same sluggishness issue with LR4.... I expected the final release would fix the problem but it takes so much time rendering compared to LR3.6 ... I hope Adobe fixes this soon ... was actually planning of upgrading to LR4 but will hold for now

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Kaur_100

Participant

I run i5@4.5ghz, 8GB ram, W7sp1. Initial impressions with LR4 beta were also general sluggishness in navigating around and when switching between 100% pictures to build the 1:1 previews. For me it improved when I deleted the folder "Previews.lrdata" (but kept the catalogue file!) and had LR4 rebuild the previews/100% views from scratch not relying on old database import from LR3.5 (appx 25000 pics). Also, the thing which I noticed is that in Library mode initially zooming into 100% view to build full view takes a bit more time than in Develop mode. But as it is currently only about 1.5 seconds for LR to build full 100% view, then it is not too bad compared with LR3.5 (roughly 1 sec). Sliders move around very smoothly and adjustments appear instantly as well.

Just in case, CrapCleaned the registry and installed fresh set of video card drivers as well. Did not make much difference but made me feel a bit better

Probably the reasonable thing to do is first unistall 4 beta before going for 4 full (I did not do that) but when looking at the installation of LR4 full, seems it unistalls beta anyway.