P: Library Module slow performance: FIX found!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I've found a solution to a problem many others seem to have reported - but it does involve a work-around, suggesting the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom team need to fix a bug.

When a large number of Develop Presets are loaded into Lightroom (in my case, over 500), the Library Module, and strangely, to a lesser degree, the Develop Module run very slow.

Having performed some troubleshooting, I discovered the reason for the slowness was a CPU spike. On my iMac 3.4GHz with 32Gb RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX with 2GB, and 1TB Fusion Drive, the CPU would go over 100%, while the disk and memory allocations were low. I run Mavericks 10.9.2, so it's not a matter of an out of date OS. This occurred whether I had 10 images or 10,000 images in the catalog (I tested various scenarios).

I read on a forum that the number of Develop Presets could affect performance, so deleted the majority of them (backing them up first) to see if it would make a difference. I reduced the number of presets to less than about 100, and the performance increased INCREDIBLY and INSTANTLY.

So, it would seem to me there is a bug in the way the Develop Presets are being indexed in Lightroom. Hopefully, this is something the team can find and fix very easily, as it should be easy enough to identify the root cause and reproduce the problem.

Please, Adobe - release a fix for this in the next point release. It is disappointing not to be able to keep all my Develop Presets in a single session. My work-around is to exit Lightroom, copy in the Presets I need for a job, then start the program again. Obviously not ideal.

Many thanks,

Matthew

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Found this threat through google search as I'm having slowdown issues as well.

I'm running LR 5.6 on a state of the art iMac. Biggest I could order at Feb2014: 3,5Ghz i7, 32G RAM, 750GB PCIe SSD on board, which houses all the files including the library.

I have been migrating all my images, a few 100's GB's worth from Aperture to LR and at first I did not notice any slowdown at all. It's a super fast machine and it behaved that way with LR too. But then I also discovered the great nr of presets available for LR and bought a bunch. After installing them over time I became very much aware of the slowdowns: SBOD each time you click the n'th image. SBOD when switching between views, or between images. In fact SBOD nearly all the time in both library and develop module. SOOO annoying really I started googling about it.

Tried the suggestion stated in this thread and removed ALL my presets, rebooted and Loo and behold: all as zippy as on an Indy racetrack again. What a difference! Clearly this is the main culprit.
To be fair: I just checked and turned out I had about 3293 files in de presets folder!! wow... a lot of those by VSCO as they have multiple versions of certain film presets AND I also own several camera's for which I also installed the customised presets. All this easily quadruples your nr of preset if not more...

So I will be toning down the nr of presets gradually, but I do hope that Adobe finds a way to address this in a future version. Presets are just too much fun 🙂

[Benjamin Warde]

Hi Geoffrey,

Thanks for confirming that this workaround helped you as well. In my "official" reply up top, I mentioned that fixing this may not get top priority. Since I wrote that, however, the team has decided that this is actually kind of a big deal, so I'm hopeful for a fix sooner or later (fingers crossed for sooner!).

Thanks,
Ben

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

fantastic to hear that and thanks for the quick follow-up. Keeping them crossed as well 🙂

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

This also works for LR5.6

[bachernivsky]

Benjamin - this is kinda ridiculous that Adobe ignored this up to this point. I just upgraded to a 15" Retina because my LR libraries were chugging along, even with an upgraded SSD. It was literally driving me nuts. I blamed everything except for my trusty LightRoom Library and the developers.

I'm glad that Adobe is going to focus on this, but I have to add to this discussion because of my frustration. I literally spent $1700 upgrading my machine before I found this thread. I cut down my Develop Presets from about 2900 down to about 1400 and it's all - ALL - good now. Fast, zippy, etc.

I'm happy to have a 15" Retina, but just a bit bummed that there was never some kind of reminder to users when the problem was known. I've been processing an entire season of weddings with this bug since April. I can't tell you how many hours could have been saved.

But thank you again for acknowledging the issue and helping Adobe understand it's something that needs to be fixed.

Ben

www.thisisfeeling.com

[bachernivsky]

I can confirm that reducing the amount of Develop Presets in my library fixed the spinning wheel issue with my all my Lightroom applications.

Was using a 13" Retina w/ SSD
27" year 2013 iMac
15" Retina w/ SSD
15" 2010 Macbook Pro with SSD

ALL of them suffered from the slow down except for the slowest 2010 Macbook Pro, which was my employees computer that only has about 500 develop presets installed. I was totally at loss trying to figure out why his ran faster than all the other faster computers.

Anyway, really glad I came across this. Very frustrating to discover this after months of challenge.

[bachernivsky]

Mark, are you saying to ADD the Lightroom folder to spotlight privacy, or remove it if you have already aded it to the privacy tab? I have nothing in my privacy tab and it still suffered from this issue.

When you Lightroom Folder, which folder do you mean? Can you be specific?

Ben

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I had at one point added the Lightroom folder (~/Pictures/Lightroom) to the Spotlight Privacy tab, and it seemed like removing it from there fixed my Library slowness issues, but I now think that that had been a bit of false equivalency on my part. What really fixed the issue for me was removing all those develop presets I’d installed.

[zeraphoto]

After searching around in search of an answer to months of dealing with a frustrating degree of overall slowness with LR, I stumbled across this thread, and decided to give the suggested solution a shot.

FWIW, I have 2,897 develop presets, all of them purchased in various sets from VSCO.

I quit LR and removed all of them from the presets folder. When I relaunched LR, it was as speedy as I fondly remembered.

For now, I'm going to leave them uninstalled - increased productivity is a far greater concern that the convenience of those presets.

I'd venture a guess that having a couple thousand presets is probably a more common circumstance than Adobe realizes, though.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I absolutely had the exact same issue. I troubleshooted with VSCO's support people and they confirmed they could easily duplicate the issue.

The only presets are have are the default ones, VSCO Film 01-05, Replichrome I & II, and about a dozen of my own creations. This works out to be over 1000 presets, which I do not think falls into the "edge case" scenario seeing how popular both VSCO and Replichrome, and given how many preset packages are available for purchase.

My current workaround is to figure out which presets I want to use with a given wedding (each wedding in its own catalogue), then delete the presets I am not using. This means I can only work on one catalogue/wedding at a time.

This is a major bug in Lightroom. It is obviously doing something in the background (or foreground) that is does not need to do. I get the beach ball of death just switching between images in Library view. What does that have to do with the number of presets installed, especially if none are actively being used on the photos and I'm just doing a first cull without any edits applied.

I hope this is being passed on and being worked on. Thanks.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I found another workaround for this problem that I hope might give Adobe more to go on in solving this.

I too have the lag problem in the library when clicking from photo to photo. I too can make the problem go away by removing VSCO and ProLost develop presets.

But I can *also* make the problem go away by removing the original Raw files while leaving the presets in place. So if I make smart previews for all photos and remove the drive with the originals, the problem goes away.

Neither workaround is much of a "solution" so I hope Adobe can figure it out.

BTW: I had 1,260 presets in addition to what I think is defaulted in Lightroom. Removing those fixed the issue. I put back 403 ProLost presets and still no problem. So somewhere between 403 and 1260 (in addition to the ones that come with Lightroom) is where the lag comes in.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I can also confirm that I had the same problem on a mac running Maverick with 16 gb of RAM

I zipped my whole user preset directory and trashed the original. Voila great performance! I'm so happy I could dance.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I have been suffering with this issue for the last few months starting to blame my ageing Macbook Air for the slow performance, but after digging deeper I can also confirm it is entirely related to the amount of user presets.

An alternative solution to deleting all your presets is to simply remove the "Quick Develop" module from the Library sidebar. Right click on the sidebar background and un-tick the "Quick Develop" option. You may have to restart LR but with any luck original performance should be restored!

Adobe developers: if you are reading this please investigate how the quick develop module is scanning for presets, there should be no need to do this every time we switch between images.

[moonquiet09]

SBOD is continuous I cannot do anything here! I'm totally fed up and not that many presets to blame. ZERO workflow and no time to keep removing and adding presets.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Clever!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

If you’re getting lots of beachballs, check your hard disk. You don’t want a dying hard disk to corrupt your photos. I’ve had that happen.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

How does Lightroom manage to render preset previews in the "Navigator" so quickly while I'm hovering over presets? Does it prerender previews for certain/all presets whenever the user switches photos in Library or makes a change in Develop? That

[johnrellis]

The Navigator preview is only about 350 x 490 pixels (on my screen), or 167K pixels, 73 times smaller than a 12 megapixel image, and 122 times smaller than a 20 megapixel image. Processing time is surely directly proportional to the number of pixels, so if it takes 1 second (say) to apply a preset to a 20 megapixel image, it would take about 10 milliseconds on the Navigator preview.

[J453]

This should be fixed in Lightroom CC/Lightroom 6.

[Cameron Braun]

Any word on whether this issue has been identified and/or resolved in Lightroom CC? I'm having terribly slow performance in CC, especially when switching to the Library module from the Develop module. I get the beachball and a weird black rectangle on my screen for about 3-4 seconds when trying to switch modules.

I have about 400 presets in my normal workflow, and I just reduced them down to about 20 to see if it would help. It seems that performance increases a bit, but the process of switching modules still causes my fans to kick on momentarily, which is usually due to a CPU spike.

I've tried disabling the Quick Develop panel, which didn't help. It seems as though you guys are aware of the issue, but it's not clear whether it's been addressed yet.

Any insight would be welcome.

For reference, I'm on a Retina Macbook Pro 2.6GHz i7 with 16GB of RAM on version 10.10.3. Lightroom Version 1014445.

Edit: After reducing the number of presets to 20, the lag is still very pronounced.