Lightroom 3.3 Performance Feedback

Tom,

It may be necessary (reading the trail below) to start another thread entitled - "Definition of a release candidate - discuss..."

I for one had terrible trouble running LR3.0 (the LR3.0RC was fine), so whatever changed between the LR3.0 and the LR3.0 final caused all measure of upset with my image processing on my machine.

I had -

     Video flickering - particularly when moving from library to develop with large tiff's (80MB) selected

     Very slow rendering

     Adjustment brush very slow to update, causing over runs while using it

     Random lock-ups and reboots

Since the upgrade to LR3.2 things are better, I get the occassional flicker, rendering is still slow, as is the adjustment brush but the occasional lock up's seem to have disappeared.

I'm running Windows 7 ultimate, 4GB Ram, AMD Athlon dual core and have lightroom loaded in 64 bit mode.

If you want to know anything about my hardware, drivers, set up or otherwise, just e-mail me. I have not updated to LR3.3RC yet as I believe it cannot run alongside LR3.2 on a windows machine.

Best Regards

Phil

for me working with keywords is really hopeless. Adding or deleting a keyword, assigning a keyword to one or more pics is slow and in the course of adding seems to get slower. I wonder if it has to do with requering and reindexing the whole keyword set after an action.

On a brand new MacPro, 16 Gb internal, 8 core, 8 Tb internal HD's. Catalogue, scratch disk on its own HD

I wasn't going to download the LR3.3 until it officially came out but I just acquired the new Nikon D7000 and I found myself having to download the 3.3 so that LR could read the RAW files. It worked beautifully for that but when I tried the Camera Calibration under Develop the only choice I had was Adobe Standard and I was shooting in RAW. Did anyone else have this problem and is there a fix?

Memory Allocation Issue.

Tom,

I'm on a Macbook Pro, 2.1 with 4GB RAM installed (gains dual memory optimization and some additional real above 3GB limit).  Just started LR 2.7, CS5 Extended, Bridge for CS5, and LR 3.3.

Looking at Apple Actviity Monitor I see the following:

LR 3.3  1.16 GB Real  1.30 GB Virtual - One 7D image Processed and Exported to JPEG

LR 2.7 557.1 MB Real  727.9 Virtual - Same 7D image (different catalog) processed and exported to JPEG

CS5 Extended  276.1 MB Real  272.0 Virtual - Exported Image basic USM filtering

Bridge CS5 - Launch CS5 Extended - 70.7 MB Real 77.7 Virtual

Firefox (Idle) - 89.9 MB Real 83.7 Virtual

Not sure why the added Memory Footprint by total of 1 GB (combined) for LR 3.3?

Jay S.

Tom,

Thanks for starting a new thread.  Hopefully we can all keep this thread to constructive feedback.  I also posted this information on a similar thread relating only to the spot healing tool so sorry for the duplicate information.

I am running W7, 64-bit, 12GB RAM separate, internal raid arrays for OS, Cache and Images, and dual quad-core processors with hyper-threading.  I designed the machine specifically for LR 2.  Still, with both 2.5 and 3.3RC loaded for testing, the time to process images is at least twice as slow for me in 3.3RC and that is without problems with the spot healing tool.  This is a non-scientific measure of how long I am sitting at my computer to finish a set of a similar number of images.  If I have scans with many spots utilized, the cost in performance is exponential relative to 2.5.  Everyone's machine is of course different.

I have filed a bug report for this when 3.0 first came out and have been in contact with Adobe providing information to help isolate the problem.  Adobe did improve the problem with 3.3RC (at least for my machine) in that it is now less likely to freeze, but it still slows down to a point where the spot tool is unusable after a large number of spots are implemented.

Recently I opened a CPU monitor to watch when doing spot healing and noticed that when it "hangs" only one of the 16 cores is being used (other than a couple at say <5%) and it is stuck at 100%.  When the spot tool become useable again, it is immediately after the core usage drops below 100% again.  It is as if the multi-core ability of LR somehow fails when using the spot tool and therefore it becomes a noticeable problem when a large number of spots are placed on a single image.  Not very scientific but may be a lead.  I also find that it hangs more likely when accidently changing the size of an existing spot when intending to add a spot instead.

In any case, LR is my product of choice and I am patiently awaiting 3.3 or 3.4 to get some performance back.  With the number of views on the old thread and the probably number of posts and views here, I have to assume that Adobe is still working on this issue.  Having the noise reduction overhaul of 3.0 is the feature that keeps 99% of my images non-destructive and thus I am not likely to return back to 2.5 unless Adobe simply states that this issue cannot be resolved - in which case I will have to consider that possibility.

Also, some have suggested that hardware might be an issue.  If indeed it is a component of my hardware that is no longer compatible when moving from 2.x to 3.x, I am more than willing to change-out that component - just need a little insight as to what to replace

Jeff

I haven't searched to see if anyone else has this experience and I'm not sure what the cause is.

MacBook Pro 2.33 3gig ram

3.3 rc

Two problems:

When I use the right and left arrows to scroll the film strip, and I hold down the arrow for a few seconds, after I release, it continues to scroll until the end of folder is reached. I hit the opposite arrow to try to stop the auto scroll, sometimes this stops it, sometimes not.

2. If I click on a folder in either the Collections or in the Folders it may take quite a while (I know, vague) to see images. 'loading...' is all I see for up to a minute?

Also, if I select 2 folders to search, LR will sometimes crash.

Been using since LR1 beta. Cat. size is around 60K.

All images on external drive. All cats on main drive in MBP which is 500gb.

Thanks for listening.

I'm still seeing significant performance issues with the 3.3RC, which I've previously reported in a bug report.  I have my catalogue on a 2 drive mirrored array and if I leave Write to XMP turned on in the preferences, every change I make to a RAW/TIF image causes a full screen refresh.  As soon as I turn off the write to XMP option the problem goes away but then I have to hit Ctrl-S for every image I make changes to.  It was never an issue in LR2.

To follow up what is still cropping up on the old thread, I agree with TK2142's latest post that Lightroom 3's default balance of real to virtual memory seems to favor older computers with limited RAM. But limited RAM is of diminishing importance these days, even on laptops, where 8 GB is not uncommon. As a result, the program cannot make efficient use of systems with plenty of RAM available. Designing for the lowest common denominator seems to me to be a short-sighted strategy at best. For some time now Photoshop has enabled people to allocate resources according to their own workflow needs. Indeed, Photoshop CS5, in 64 bit mode, finally enables us to access more than 3 GB of RAM. Likewise, it has been possible for many years in Photoshop to designate the drive to be used for application swap files (virtual memory). In my not so humble opinion, users would benefit immensely from such capabilities in Lightroom. Certainly many of the problems people are reporting on these forums would be less severe if Lightroom could be directed to better utilize available resources. I can't imagine this issue hasn't occurred to the Lightroom engineering team. Apparently, though, they are reluctant to address this matter. I suspect perfecting the code alone cannot solve all the reported performance problems. We need the same kind of flexibility in allocating resources for Lightroom that we enjoy in Photoshop.

Greetings Tom,

   I still see swapping/memory issues when viewing/rating quantities of images ( > 500).  LR does not appear to reuse preview memory; exiting the program and restarting does not "solve" the issue.

   I too have been an LR user since early beta release pre-1.0.  My machines have increased in power the entire time; and they have switched back and forth between PC and Mac.  Right now, I'm running a dual-quad core Mac Pro, 16gig of ram, internal SCSI Raid arrays and Nvidia Quadro FX5600 display driving two Eizo 24" monitors.  I have recently upgraded from 10.5.8 to 10.6.5, with no change in the symptoms, so does not appear to be related to OS version.

   LR can not handle importing and sorting a days shoot of images without having to stop and reboot the machine partway through because 16 gig of memory is not enough.  If I am spending the day editing only a few dozen images, arranging collections, cropping, etc, then there is no problem.  It appears to be previewing (or some relation to it) that causes the problem.

  I can reproduce this issue without effort (just a bit of time to page through 500 images) repeatedly.  Some where around 500 images, every 3rd image will cause a page fault and swap starts growing.  This is silly!  I understand if you wish to keep memory around for images that you have already seen, it speeds things up.  But when you reach the point where you start swapping rather than reusing memory, you are losing far more than you gain!

  In other problems, I too tend to do heavy retouching in PS, because I have noticed that a lot of spot corrections ( > 100) cause the response to slow down massively.  To the point where I click and wait a couple of seconds before another dust correction circle shows up.  So for images that have a lot of dust (I had one set that i was shooting a harvest, dust everywhere, darn it!) I do what I can in LR, as far as corrections go, then export to PS so it doesn't kill off LR.  But of course, doing that, I lose the raw functionality.  Ah well.  Not sure if that is an actual issue, since 99.99% of my images don't require dust correction like that; just mentioning it if you think it is an issue.

Cheers!

I am a user of Lightroom since the Beta v3 before the release of V1. I have always upgraded to the latest version up to the present version LR 3.3RC.

My main operating system has been Win through XP to Vista and now to Win 7 64bit.

Info on my existing system is as follows.

I have followed the forums since the use of the original Lightroom betas and while I have not experienced any major problems I can accept that some users experience major performance issues.

My main use of LR is for developing my raw files from Olympus E300 and E510 and I must say that the improvements over the past few years in the process engine, particularly process version 2010, has been very good. During this development period of Lightroom I have also used and continue to use several third party raw processing software including SilkyPix  versions 2 through 4 and Bibble Pro versions 4 and 5. These products all have their individual strengths and produce very good/excelent output files.

Presently I use Lightroom as my main raw processing software but I recognize that the processing of raw data from Digital Cameras is still in a rapid development stage. The main reason for the use of Lightroom is the quality output of version 2010 and the improvements to the sharpening and noise reduction features in version 3.x.