Lightroom 3 Freezes On Dust Spot Removal

I am upgrading my memory soon (2 GB to 4 GB) so hopefully that helps! 

This in advance: I'm running WIN XP SP4 with all available patches; have 4 GB of RAM; have a dual-core processor at 3 GB.

Apart from my drive C, I have two internal hard drives in Raid 0 configuration (thus they show up as one drive). I also have an external hard drive that's in Raid 1 ( "mirroring') and is connecte by fire-wire 400.

Yes LR "freezes" when using the dust spot tool and also when using the adjustment brush or - but to a lesser degree - when using the grad filter.

My observation though is that it's not a true "freezing", because if I wait long enough LR starts working again. So when using these tools, LR gets extremely busy und just doesn't have enough resources left to respond to further commands right away - but it "stores" the comands and acts on them eventually.

If I turn on my task manager I observe the following when using these tools: the CPU gets extremely busy (i.e. the green bar is at 100%)  while the RAM usage is high but not to the max. The "freezes" occur when and as long the CPU works at 100%. If the CPU is below 100% LR responds sluggish and the response is normal again when eventually the CPU usage is at 0%.

Also, in my observation, this behaviour of LR is compounding, i.e. the wait-times for my CPU to get back to 0 are increasing, the longer I work with these tools or the more photos I work on. Re-starting LR does not bring change: the behaviour establishes itself when using the tools again. It is as if LR needs to do some work in the background and that this background work piles up the longer I work in LR.

I am not a software or hardware specialist, so the following observations are somewhat subjective and not really quantifiable.

In Photoshop I observed a similar behaviour (although never as bad) when working on files of 500 MB and above. It was particularly bad when working on photos residing on my external RAID 1 hard drive. I had a hunch that it might have to do with the reading and writing from a drive that a)  is external and b)  is  in RAID 1. It is known that RAID 1 has slower writing (and also reading) speeds than RAID 0 (or no RAID at all). So in Photoshop I managed to cut down on the unresponsiveness by moving large files to my internal RAID 0 hard drive and working from there.

From this experience I come to the assumption that some of the "busy-ness" in LR (or of the CPU) is due to reading/writing to/from the hard drive.

To test this assumption for LR, I moved some photos from my external (RAID 1) to my internal (RAID 0) hard drive and did some "intensive" work: first some "fancy" lens correction, then a few grad filters, and a "final touch" with the adjustment brush. I thought that LR could handle these tasks somewhat better when the photos were on the internal drive - so some of the "sluggishness" or " freezing" is due to the reading/writing from/to the hard drive.

Acually I cannot explain why this should be so: In my naivete I thought LR writes everything only into the catalog (?), that - by the way - is on my internal RAID 0 drive.

I think it would be good if Adobe could look into this and maybe give us some recommendations, just as they do for Photoshop by saying that the scratch disk should be on a different drive than Photoshop.

But it seems also that local adjustments - spotting, adj. brush. etc - are a very high "number-crunching" business for LR - independent of where the photo is located on the drive. (Interestingly the grad filter is not as bad as the adjustment brush). The clone-tool in Photoshop hardly registers on my CPU and if at all only with a very short spike, while the clone tool in LR sends the CPU through the roof for 10 to 30 seconds- even when the photo in question is on the internal drive.

I'm sure loots of people will now tell me that this is due to the difference between pixel-based adjustment and non-pixel-based ones. OK, I acknowledge that. But still ...

It seems some guys are still in denial about this (or maybe they have two quad processors and 16 GB of RAM):

But it's a fact: LR has a hard time with localized adjustments. There must be by now 100's of complaints to that respect, and that can't be dismissed by blaming it on the hardware specs alone.

I just hope Adobe is working on that.

LR3 is a fantastic program that I would not want to work without. Often I have to work on a lot of photos with a very tight deadline. Without LR it would be impossible.

Thank you,

ErnstK

Just purchased Lightroom 3, the dust spot removal simply does NOT work. Spending the 299 and finding this basic fault is a great disappointment and after 12 hours of trying everything I am going to return this new release. This is not Beta this is a supposed finished product.

Oh yeah -- it doesn't matter whether I've used the Adjustment Brush before. It's just as slow with images that have no previous Develop adjustments at all.

This problem isn't limited to Windows -- I'm experiencing it on my MacBook Pro. This is an old model -- 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo, with 2 gigs RAM. But I tried Spot Removal with the LR3 Beta 2 --- it still works until the end of the month --- and it works fine, despite my pokey machine. Yet with the final version of LR3 Spot Removal is excruciatingly slow. Click on a spot and it takes a good three or four seconds for it to choose the spot it wants to clone or heal from, and in the meantime my mouse is frozen. It's even worse when I try to move the spot it's cloning/healing from -- that takes about 15 to 20 seconds to render.

So something changed between the beta and final version, and not for the better. Whatever it is I hope they fix it soon.

I hope this gets fixed soon as well.  I got the latest drivers installed for my nvidia card, changed the settings as suggested in another thread, but it has not helped.  I returned to an image I was having difficultly with before (froze LR) and tried to add a few new spots--that worked fine (albeit slow) but when I tried to move a spot slightly (and this spot had been problematic before) LR froze again...bummer.  FYI, it's a RAW file I'm working with.

I think this is the same problem, and a little bit more info there; http://forums.adobe.com/thread/660718?tstart=150

I was going through the same frustrations until I found this thread.  Reading through the posts made me think that working on JPEG files might be the  problem.  I rebooted Lightroom and opened a RAW file and the dust spot removal worked just fine. Then I tried it on another JPEG and it froze again. That's not enough for a scientific judgement, but it does seem to help. Saving in TIFF files might help as well. 

Is anybody at Adobe listening?

Reading your post again, I notice you use dual ATI cards. This FAQ from Adobe (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404898.html), concerns problems with Photoshop (CS4&5). One "fix" is to remove one of your video cards. I have no idea if this will cure your problems, but you might give it a shot.

Graham

I'll add (since you are talking about it) that I did not do any lens/perspective correction on the photos where LR froze.  Also, I updated my video card drivers yesterday and there was no major difference...still very slow and I just basically didn't push it to avoid the program freezing on me again.  I'll try doing the spot removal brush edits first, but honestly that is kind of annoying because one of the great things about LR is not having to do edits in a special order.  I hope someone gets this fixed!!!