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crsouser
Known Participant
April 24, 2015
Question

Lightroom 6 / CC2015 - Facial Recognition Terribly Slow, not using all of CPU or GPU, still keeps going when paused.

  • April 24, 2015
  • 34 replies
  • 38815 views

This is actually a couple of issue but wondering if others are experiencing it and worked through it.

I am using a Dual Xeon CPU 3.2 ghz Mac Pro, Catalog on SSD, Images files on Mirrored Pair, Dedicated GPU (max I can install in my version of Mac Pro) and hardware acceleration enabled in Lightroom.

I watched the Lightroom 6 Facial Recognition tutorial which leaves out a lot of the bulk editing and says basically let it loose on your whole catalog.. NOT recommended.

I started out with a couple small portrait galleries that identified a couple hundred total people to seed facial recognition so it didn't suggest everyone is the first person I confirmed (which it will do otherwise). I have also optimized my catalog multiple times.

I have encountered the following serious performance issues and bugs with Facial Recognition.:

  • Lightroom Facial Recognition goes to a ridiculous crawl after about 2000 images to be confirmed. (i.e. 2000-2300 in a couple hours, 800-1200 in the next 12 hours)
  • Lightroom becomes largely unresponsive after having a fair number of images to be confirmed, even after pausing Address and Facial Recognition. So even selecting 4 rows of images can take 5 minutes with several long pauses.
  • Once I select and click confirm it takes up to 2 minutes to update the "to be confirmed" list again.
  • When I click on an individual at the top of the page, pause facial recognition and address lookup it still continues to "Look for similar faces" [BUG!!!!!!!!] even though all I want to do is just confirm some individuals more quickly in bulk with the images already identified.. not continue to look for more as a work around for the painfully slow responsiveness of the module.

The odd part is that with all of the performance issues Lightroom will not use more than 20-30% of my two Xeon CPUs, barely touches my GPU (<10% CPU, 30% memory), my and no more than 35% of my memory. Computer Temps are also barely above startup temperatures and 15-25 degrees cooler than when I run other applications which will consume my entire CPU and memory if I let it. I have explored Lightroom's settings but seen nothing further I can configure to speed it all up.  I have also attempted the operation on images on the SSD, my drobo (known to be slow), an independent fast disk I have, and a pair of raided disks and have the same issues.

I will also note that all of my other applications seem to continue to operate just fine.. the slowness seems to be contained to the Lightroom application itself.

Lightroom version: 6.0 [1014445]

Operating system: Mac OS 10 Version: 10.10 [3]

Application architecture: x64

Logical processor count: 8

Processor speed: 3.2 GHz

Built-in memory: 18,432.0 MB

Real memory available to Lightroom: 18,432.0 MB

Real memory used by Lightroom: 5,537.5 MB (30.0%)

Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 32,240.6 MB

Memory cache size: 4,342.0 MB

Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 8

Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2

Displays: 1) 2048x1152

Graphics Processor Info:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 OpenGL Engine

Check OpenGL support: Passed

Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Version: 3.3 NVIDIA-10.0.31 310.90.10.05b12

Renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 OpenGL Engine

LanguageVersion: 3.30

Application folder: /Applications/Adobe Lightroom

Library Path: /Users/DryClean/Documents/Lightroom_Catalog/MyCat_LR6.lrcat

Settings Folder: /Users/DryClean/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom

Anyone have any suggestions?

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    34 replies

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    K
    knipsefritze
    Participating Frequently
    July 4, 2015

    ‌Also, LR 6 was running very unstable and crashed quite often while having the use of the graphic card enabled. Once I turned that off in the prefs, LR was running stable again. Not a very good implementation of that feature either!

    R
    RyanMatthewBarrett
    Participant
    July 5, 2015

    I haven't noticed any problems with GPU acceleration turned on. But it's not even noticeably faster or different, come to think of it.

    K
    Kim Letkeman
    Participating Frequently
    July 4, 2015

    It's like it was written by high school kids. No separation of GUI and worker threads, no proper status on each face so that you can click ahead and feel safe that you are not doing random stuff. Terrible use of the system yet the ability, no matter how low you set the thread priority, to cripple the mouse. All in all, probably the worst implementation in any of the many modern and very expensive applications I use. That team should feel ashamed.

    Note: 8 core 8150, separate striped cache and scratch disks, large and fast image disk. 24GB RAM. SSD boot drive. About 120k images in the folders. Can't leave it running as it bogs down. May have to give up on tagging as I don't have the time to baby sit this piece of junk.

      B
      barnao
      Participating Frequently
      July 5, 2015

      I think you kinda nailed it regarding the coding practice... it's astonishing.  I get the roots of the application (older architecture) but there have been years that have passed without any significant REAL improvement.   It's inexplicable why so many of the core routines (not just Facial Recognition) use 1 or 2 of my available 5820k/4GZ/16GB/SSD Boot/Raid0 system.   (Facial recognition only being the latest).  I'm not sure if this app is just so nitch (no one using?) or just lack of focus on the team or whatever.  I work on development of large scale applications for a large enterprise with thousands of applications in our portfolio.   Where i work this would be grounds for team swap.

        R
        RyanMatthewBarrett
        Participant
        July 5, 2015

        I would feel very foolish if I bought an 8+ core Mac pro, and it hung on facial recognition.

        8 'core' AMD worked fine, but it clearly wasn't optimized by Adobe.

        R
        RyanMatthewBarrett
        Participant
        June 13, 2015

        53k

        liquid cooled Fx-8350, 16gb ram. Library is on an average SSD, but images on quite an old drive.

        The thing is, its not like it is even thrashing the CPUs or HD.  Its just plain slow. Like it is crippled.

        And I had one crash after finding about 600 faces in an unknown number of photos that even managed to unmount the drive where the library resided.

        Other than that, it does stay usable during, which is a plus. Definitely designed with some multi-tasking in mind, compared to the performance of previous versions.  I just wish it were a bit more dynamic in its allocation of resources.

        Edit:

        Definitely using all 8 cores.  LR is only using between 18 and 24 % of the CPU, and only 1.9gb of RAM, at the moment, while detecting.

        R
        RyanMatthewBarrett
        Participant
        June 13, 2015

        Complete.  Not sure when.  I ended up with 13k faces from 53k images.  I think there are about 2000 of my wife that it couldn't stack together. 

        K
        knipsefritze
        Participating Frequently
        June 3, 2015

        I let my machine run over night and it is crunching numbers for Lightroom's face detection now for 15 hours straight. Still about 20% left to go as far as the progress bar is concerned. So I guess for 15000 photos, LR needs about close to 20 hours to go through them all. That calculates to roughly 5 seconds per image! So that is a rough number to calculate the time needed to get the face detection done. LR is unusable while that is running.

        LR is running over 50 threads on my machine, uses 130-200 % proceessing power at a constant rate, leaving two cores at idle, is sluggish as can be and shows the beach ball for almost 5 seconds after every click I try to do. Very, very frustrating for a pro App! I am not a programmer, but I thought multiple cores and multithreading would let a machine do multiple tasks at once without completely blocking the program?

        K
        knipsefritze
        Participating Frequently
        June 2, 2015

        I really doubt, that this fesature will ever be usable in real time! It reminds me of the brushes, that are still kind of sluggish at times, sometimes they are ok. That has been like that since LR 1 for me, switching to an iMac i7 with 12 GB of RAM didn't take care of the problem either.

        My family photo library consists of 15000 images and for days the facial recognition progress bar hangs at around 1/3rd with my machine plowing on with an average 130% CPU load. And who programmed this feature? I have now verified ober 1000 photos of my daughter at all age levels and LR is still suggesting almost any face it can find in my photos as "is this your daughter"? I mean, how pathetic can you get having over 1000 pictures of my daughter to analyse the face and still not getting it right?

        Adobe, I think it would be faster to manually go through all the 15000 pics and use the spray brush to tag the faces myself. Reminds me of the map disaster that Apple faced, when introducing it first. This feature is just not ready and in Alpha stage! But without it, LR6 would be missing a key feature to justify the upgrade price. I guess that is why they put it in anyway.

          D
          davidh93831741
          Participating Frequently
          June 2, 2015

          knipsefritze I totally agree. The facial recognition is a joke and I'm surprised so many seem to be taking it so well. I only upgraded to LR5 a few months back, and later discovered LR6 with face recognition was about to be released. Adobe weren't prepared to offer me a complementary or reduced cost upgrade, so I bit the bullet and paid for another upgrade as I really wanted face recognition. Now I feel completely duped with this practically useless feature.

          G
          genefama
          Known Participant
          June 2, 2015

          ‌I'm amazed how few threads exist about how bad this feature is. I'm thinking of starting one about best practices because at this point I've become somewhat of an expert and have developed some workarounds.

          But the fact remains that face recognition is the only new thing to justify renumbering the version and would be the only reason to buy an upgrade, if it worked. Since it doesn't, people are better off staying in LR 5.X.

          Herinto
          Herinto
          Participating Frequently
          May 26, 2015

          This facial recognition feature has been a disaster for me.  Replaced a perfectly good MacPro with a newMacPro and 1 tb SSD for catalog and photos.  Still horribly slow.

          Hope that Adobe fixes this quickly.  What a mess.

          P
          ptr727_1
          Participant
          May 17, 2015

          Same performance problem, the feature is next to useless.

          It took 3 days to identify faces, now I'm trying to catalog them, getting ready to tear my hair out.

          Click, wait wait wait, click, wait wait wait, drag, nothing nothing, try again.

          The UI is so unresponsive that the feature is totally useless.

          M
          mwillems
          Participating Frequently
          May 17, 2015

          Yeah. It's been what, three weeks? At this rate I will have named the faces in two months time, IF that. I keep hoping that when this is done, it will be usable from then on. Biut I don't see it.

          And as a result, LR6 is much (much) slower for me than LR5 was, in spite of the supposed performance enhancements.

          I'm sure there will be a fix. Right, Adobe? Please?

          M
          mwillems
          Participating Frequently
          May 16, 2015

          Same. It has taken me the several weeks since release to index my faces. When I now look and I want to name some of the question marks, after everything I do (I name a face, or I confirm a guessed name) I get to wait 30-60 seconds until I can do anything else. Spinning beach ball meanwhile.

          Groan: I do hope updates, and speedy updates, fix this. I do this for a living and while hobbyists with 1000 photos will not notice this speed loss, I certainly do and it's hard top swallow.

          K
          Klozaw
          Participating Frequently
          May 15, 2015

          I'll add my machine to the problem:

          Windows 7

          intel i5 processor

          16 GB RAM

          Forever to respond when tagging when anything more than a few dozen faces are in the group.

          Also, it seems to randomly highlight people after the name assignment is done. The result is that  sometimes random people are assigned random names making the it even harder for the face recognition to work properly. Its confused.

          NEW FEATURE REQUEST: The ability to use the paint tool to tag people.

          P
          Pixellated
          Participant
          May 12, 2015

          Same here., although I am using a PC running Windows 8.1.

          Locating the faces took three days, and recognition is dreadful; far less accurate than Google Picasa!

          Worst of all, since I turned on face recognition and pointed it at my whole catalogue, the Catalogue now takes an absolute age to start up, whereas before it was pretty instant.

          Unless Adobe come out with a fix in the next few weeks, I shall probably write off the time spent setting up face recognition and revert to an earlier version of my catalogue.

          Very poor implementation, because not only does it not work very well, it makes the entire application less productive.

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