LR CLASSIC 10.3 is VERY SLOW

thanks for all the excellent advice. I just changed it to 'custom' yesterday to see if it made any difference. It had been on auto.

I will try increasing the cache as you recommend. Of course this slow performance I am seeing was with the settings as you see. I had not changed them in a year or more so I believe it must be related to the latest software release.

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@GoldingD wrote:

Please do not attach screenshots, many members absolutely refuse to trust attachments.

Don’t attachments work better now that the forum software displays picture attachments in a pop-up window, instead of downloading them?

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@GoldingD wrote:

That being said. One thing that stands out looking at your screenshot is the default Camera RAW CACHE setting of 5 GB. Way too low for most catalogs. Bump that up, More like 70 GB.

That will effect performance in the Develop Module .

see: https://digital-photography-school.com/10-tips-to-improve-lightrooms-speed-and-performance-without-additional-hardware/

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The linked article from DPS is out of date, going by the comment dates there it looks like it was written 7 years ago. Several of the points in it no longer apply to the current version. Some are corrected in the Lightroom Queen article Lightroom Performance — Debunking Myths. The DPS article recommends generating minimal previews and 1:1 previews (but in the current version, the new Embedded option is better for quick culling), using many small catalogs (that has nothing to do with performance and using one large catalog is better for many reasons), and making a huge Camera Raw cache (see the Lightroom Queen quote below).

We still see lots of posts saying to enlarge your cache size to 75GB, or even as much as 200GB. For most people, it IS worth enlarging the cache from its 5GB default. The number of photos 5GB will hold depends on your preview size. For example, 1440px will cache approx. 11,100; if you use a preview size of 2880px, then 5Gb will hold 2,275. So, 75-200GB is overkill for most people. You’d be better off with a 5GB-10GB cache on a fast drive (e.g. SSD) than a much larger cache on a slower drive.

But there’s one more thing. If you’re slowly stepping through the photos consecutively in the Develop module, the full resolution data is preloaded in advance, negating the need for the Camera Raw cache. So it’s only really helpful if you’re skipping around in Lightroom, or you don’t have enough RAM to hold full resolution cached data.

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One point in the linked article that has some merit in this thread is inspecting the size of the Standard Previews that are being generated for that 27" iMac screen, because that is a lot of pixels, and the bigger the Standard Previews are set the bigger the Camera Raw cache should be. But I don’t think even that would address the main complaint which is responsiveness in the Develop module…that should be addressed by the GPU, so there is still an unusual problem there to figure out. Because I get good Develop responsiveness on my much weaker Mac.