Performance Degradation After Lightroom Update HDR Merge Slow and Unstable, Batch Processing Crashes, UI Freezes

Performance has significantly degraded after the recent update. Lightroom CC is now frequently freezing and crashing, with HDR merge being especially unstable and slow.

This is occurring on a high-end system (Ryzen 5900X, 64 GB RAM), so the issue does not appear to be hardware-related. The bottleneck seems to be within the HDR merge pipeline and overall memory management.

Key issues:

• HDR merge often causes full application freeze or crash
• Noticeable performance regression compared to previous versions
• UI becomes unresponsive during batch processing
• Resource usage spikes without proportional performance gain

Please prioritize optimization and stability improvements, particularly for HDR processing and batch workflows, as this significantly impacts professional use cases.