Memory Leaks (Or what appear to be)

Just missed a call from Adobe support. (A week or so since I tried to get some support....) So I've e-mailed them. Thought I'd post that e-mail here too: 

Hi,

I was in a meeting when you called. Sorry about that.

Since raising this call I have spent a lot of time sorting out my catalog and investigating advice in the forums and on YouTube regarding performance settings to try and improve my installation of Lightroom.

I am an IT professional and have everything that people are suggesting covered. I do not subscribe to the common view (and the approach you have asked me to take) that I just need to uninstall and re-install Lightroom. There are too many people stating they have the same issue for it to be just a corruption somewhere in my particular build. Besides I have done this in the past and it made no difference.

It is clear to me, and a good many of your users that Lightroom is fundamentally flawed when it comes to performance and reliability. Adobe’s focus is on getting new AI features to market rather than supporting the hoardes of people that rely on their software to make a living. Every release seems to bring more bugs, quirks, performance issues and crashes than the last and Adobe’s senior management team, the people that should be concerned about the image of the company and customer satisfaction, don't care it seems.

I installed v14.0.1 as soon as it was available – as it was a critical bug fix for v14.0.0 that was rushed out before being fully tested. It has completely crashed on me twice and uploaded crash reports – that you guys just ignore. It still exhibits massive memory usage (memory leaks?) meaning I can process 3 or 4 images before having to close the application to release the memory and allow my machine to recover before opening it again. Do you have even the remotest idea how unbelieveably annoying that is when you have 300 or more pictures to get through?

I’m no longer interested in speaking to you on the phone as I honestly believe you won’t be able to resolve my problem. The only way you’ll be able to do that is to release a truly re-thought, vastly re-engineered and tested (ever heard of testing???) version of Lightroom Classic.

I am so disappointed that I have to pay you on a subscription basis for this software and that you think it is acceptable to continue charging me for something that simply isn’t fit for purpose anymore. Before v13 I loved Lightroom. Since then you’ve broken it and appear to have no plans to fix it again.

Please escalate this issue to a relevant director within your company so that I know they have at least heard my view (shared by many other customers too). It would be interesting to see what response they might offer. I won’t hold my breath though. Adobe does present itself as a faceless behemoth with absolutely no care for the little person other than getting money out of them. A quick look at your ratings on TrustPilot speaks volumes about your customer ‘care’.

Regards,

Andrew

[abuse removed by moderator]

I am suffering the same memory leak problem with LRC 13.5.1. This started a week ago. Since then on 4 occasions the OS (MacOS Senoma 14.0) has popped up the Force Quit window and told me I am out of system memory and I need to close some applications. I need to close enough to restart my mac.

I am using a Mac Studio that I bought week one. It has been working great ever since. As I said, the current problem just cropped up in the last week.  From time to time in the past things have gotten slugish as other have noted, and a reboot would fix it, but nothing like this which appears to be a sever memory leak with LRC. 

I just restarted my mac and an hour later, Activity Monitor was showing LRC using about 70 GB of system memory and it has been sitting in the dock the whole time. Now, not quite 2 hours later LRC is using 105 GB and still climbing. With 128GB of memory, I figure the system will lock up in another 30 minutes. As I said, LRC has been sitting in the dock doing nothing but eating memory since my restart.

Here is the LRC system report

Lightroom Classic version: 13.5.1 [ 202408271704-d15d09cd ]
License: Creative Cloud
Language setting: en-US
Operating system: Mac OS 14
Version: 14.0.0 [23A344]
Application architecture: arm64
Logical processor count: 20
Processor speed: NA
SqLite Version: 3.36.0
Built-in memory: 131,072.0 MB
Dedicated GPU memory used by Lightroom: 67.4MB / 98,304.0MB (0%)
Real memory available to Lightroom: 131,072.0 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 114,044.6 MB (87.0%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 828,184.6 MB
Memory cache size: 40.4MB
Internal Camera Raw version: 16.5 [ 1954 ]
Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 5
Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2
Camera Raw virtual memory: 213MB / 65535MB (0%)
Camera Raw real memory: 214MB / 131072MB (0%)

Cache1:
NT- RAM:0.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, Combined:0.0MB

Cache2:
m:40.4MB, n:0.0MB

U-main: 152.0MB

Standard Preview Size: 2048 pixels
Displays: 1) 2560x1440

Graphics Processor Info:
Metal: Apple M1 Ultra
Init State: GPU for Export supported by default
User Preference: Auto
Enable HDR in Library: OFF

Application folder: /Applications/Adobe Lightroom Classic
Library Path: /Users/Lightroom/Lightroom Catalogs/LR Catalog/LR7 Master/LR7-Master-3-v13.lrcat
Settings Folder: /Users/cvdunton/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom

Installed Plugins:
1) AdobeStock
2) Aperture/iPhoto Importer Plug-in
3) Flickr
4) Nikon Tether Plugin

Config.lua flags:

What the heck is going on? And why did it start just in the last week for me?

My Mac Studio has an M1 Ultra cpu, 128GB system memory, 8TB SSD storage. The only thing I didn't max out was the extra 10 GPU's. 

Thanks,

Charlie

So I have a brand new apple studio with the M2 Ultra chip and 8tb of ssd with about 5.5 tb used. The "running out of application memory" error appeared after Lr had been crawling and I tried to close down and back up.  I closed a bunch of tabs and deleted a bunch of stuff and the problem occurred again last night, 3 nights after the first incident. 

In an apple support call I opened Lr along with ON1 and just having Lr open and not using it the memory pressure built substantially over the course of ten minutes on the call. No other applications or processes were consuming much memory at all. Thus the technician suspects a memory leak. 

I wanted to give everyone an update. I have tried a ton of things, switching out memory, upgrading the PSU, reinstalling drivers, updating BIOS, upgrading CPU, but none of them fixed the problem. I even tried disabling GPU support entirely in the performance options. 

BUT I did upgrade from a Vega 56 8GB to a 7900GRE 16GB and my crashing has stopped. I can simply power through editing and the program works fantastically, though Lightroom easily uses up 15.5GB of VRAM at any given time, sometimes it pops up to 16GB, pauses and then drops back down to 15-15.5 GB. 

I now have no crashes when syncing AI masks, and I'm able to do denoising and seemingly everything else without problems. Please note that I have none of these problems on my slow Mac M1 (7 core GPU) with only 16 GB of total shared memory, while I was having crashes on my much faster pc with 8GB of VRAM and 80GB of RAM. Is this an okay solution to spend $560 USD on a GPU due to a programming error in lightroom, no. But did it solve it? Yes. And truthfully it was worth every penny to be able to just get back to work again. 

Here's an update....

I have recent replaced my older AMD graphics card with an NVIDIA RTX4070 and it's made a world of difference to denoise, but no difference to the 'memory leak' issue.

I have around 27000 images in my library (which I don't consider to be that many compared to some professional photographers) which is taking about 30GB of disk space. After reading a few articles I decided to split this into two. My personal images in one library and my commissioned images in another. The commissioned image library is around 6GB and is working more smoothly than before. The memory issue still persists but the unbearable lag during editing operations has improved.

It'd be interesting to see if anyone else experiences any improvement if they do the same....

I'm having the same issue on MacBook Pro M1 Pro.

Been trying to make my way through a big edit and every 4-6 photos it just starts to grind to a halt, taking a minute or two just to paste a preset. It's making editing a real chore and taking me forever to get work done. Adobe really needs to test this stuff before pushing updates to paying working professionals. 

I've tried downgrading the version, clearing caches, optimising catalogs and turning off gpu accelleration yet nothing is working. If anyone has any solutions it would be massively appreciated.

I cannot wait for someone to come out with a good alternative to Lightroom where I can port my catalogs over. I'm so done with this constant mess when just trying to work. 

I am having the same problem. Win 11, Nvidea RTX3070ti. As soon as  I use any AI-Masking, AI-Denoise, Lens Blur memory usage will go up after 2-3 images to 15 GB and will not go down lower than 10 GB even when return to the Library and leaving the application idle for a couple of minutes.

Tried deinstalling LR and reinstalling including resetting the preferences. Made sure the graphics driver is up to date.

Catalog and previews are on a local SSD.

Example:

LRC is started: Memory usage is about 1.5GB

Change to Develop Module: Memory usage is about 2 GB

Aktivated Lens Blur: Memory usage jumps to 12 GB.

And I am not using large files. I am talking about 20MP Raw files.

Deactivating GPU acceleration does not change this behaviour.

This makes LRC almost unusable lately which is really annoying, since it is my preferred raw editor.

Do Adobe take any notice of anything that anyone posts in these forums? I feel we're all just having a chat about appalling software performance but that the people that SHOULD be having input to this and reacting to it are just not there and couldn't care less. They're getting their subscription fees so why do they need to bother....   I'm hearing a lot of people are starting to move away from Adobe now.

Hi, I wanted to jump in on this and say that I'm having the same problem. If using my gpu at all, the performance starts significantly quicker than without using it, then eventually slows down and then fails completely after an undetermined amount of time. If I use several masks it fails quicker, if using very little masks it could go hours without problems, but nomatter what it fails and causes my GPU to crash. Using denoise almost always causes instant crashing.

I have reinstalled windows multiple times, used different driver sets, used different GPU settings in AMD's software (even turning off all "extra" features), and still no luck. 

I have a Mac M1 that performs significantly slower than my PC but has never failed in this way before. Has anyone found a solution other than turning off the GPU in Lightroom Classic?

If I read the system report correctly you are running a very old driver version for this card (23.1014). The newest driver is from July this year and has version 24.7.1. I would try updating the driver first. Also from the info I can find this is a fairly old card with only 4GB of memory. Windows doesn't automatically update this driver. From what I read there is also a setting you're supposed to do to make this run well but I have no experience with these cards.