P: Performance Slow on Large Catalog (540k images). Crash (9690382)

[Adam Steenwyk]

I am at my wit's end. I have been a LR user since Beta (2006), and have devoted tens of thousands of hours to creating and managing my catalog. But, in the last 4-6 months, performance (and stability) has reached unusable levels.

Here are my system stats (also attached)

• Ryzen 9 79503D
• 192GB Ram
• 32TB NVME Raid0 (Catalog + Previews) (17 GB per second sequential read]
• 96TB Thunderbolt 4 attached RAID 6 (Original Photos) [1.6 GB per second sequential read]
• Radeon 7900XTX w/ 24GB V-Ram
• 4X 27 inch 4k displays
• Windows 10 Pro for Workstations 22H2 - 19045.4894

Here are my lightroom settings

• Lightroom 13.5.1
• Full GPU Acceleration
• No XMP Autowrite
• 6.06GB Catalog File Size
• Catalog Optimized at every close (daily)
• 3840/High Previews
• Never Discard 1:1 Previews
• Replace Embedded Previews during idle OFF
• Sync OFF
• 200GB Camera Raw Cache
• Generate Previews in Parallel ON
• Enable HDR in Library OFF

Here is what I have tried to fix performance

1. Create a brand new catalog and import old catalog into it - no effect
2. Delete all 8TB of Previews and Cache and regenerate for current catalog - no effect
3. Optimize Catalog - no effect
4. Turn Off / On all options I outlined above - no effect
5. Check all local disk / network attached disk settings, INCLUDING spending $3k on a new thunderbolt 4 NAS - no effect
6. Reduce Preview Size down from 3840px - unclear effect
7. Full OS Re-install of Windows

Here are my complaints:

1.  LIBRARY PERFORMANCE - Scrolling in library, even with no images selected, is choppy at best. Scrolling library folders and performing basic operations is sluggish and error prone.
2.  PREVIEW GENERATION - Generating previews does NOT utilize all processors. Re-generating 500k previews is going to take 3-4 weeks, when in the past this has only taken a couple days. Why?
3.  SLOW IMPORT - Related to 2, importing images is almost impossible because generating previews slows the process down to a complete crawl. I have no idea why this is the case with a system like mine. It took me 4 separate NIGHTS of trying to import 1TB of images recently because the act of creating previews made the import process so slow, and then the program would crash.
   4. LACK OF STABILITY - Since everything takes so long, the numerous crashes the program encounters during normal operation cause deep frustration. Here's a pastebin of one such crash that occurred 10 minutes into re-creating the previews I had deleted in an attempt to solve the terrible performance issues of late. I have experienced numerous others crashes when batch merging HDRs and Panoramas overnight that require me to then slog through the terrible browsing performance to re-select the files and re-batch them, only for the program to crash again in another 2 hours.
   5. SLOW UI OPERATION - Example: setting labels, ratings, keywords, all drag on. Moving between images in library while doing this is barely functional.

I rarely post anything on any forum ever, but the fact that my decades of dedication to the program are now being thrown to the winds of "shove AI into everything" rather than focusing on the QUALITY and USABILITY of the tool makes me deeply sad and frustrated.

In my view, the execs at Adobe need to take a step back from the AI craze and look at their products. People spend their lives learning your tools. Take some pride in them and make them WORK WELL. If this continues for another half a year, I am throwing it all away for C1 Pro and never looking back. I'll have lost thousands of hours of work, but at least I will have a functional tool once again.

Unfortunately, I have worked designing and building software for 2 decades and I understand how prioritization and decision-making works in a large organization. I know this "bug report" will get zero traction because I am complaining of a myriad of issues with no clear repro steps. But maybe someone will hear my voice and decide to do something about it. But probably not. I will hope, at least.

[muzuzunga]

An interesting data point: running Optimize Catalog seems to revive things for a little bit.  An importa starts faster and a list of collections shows up for it, but come Build Smart Previews things grind to a halt again.

[HDelion]

Hello Adam, I have same issues than you on Windows 11 since May. Yesterday, I killed "Adobe Content sync." several times and LRC became faster. Very strange behavior. Could you check that from your side, please ?

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Greetings all, 

A new update for Adobe Photography Products has been released.  The October (MAX) update contains an update for this issue. 

If you do not see the update in your Creative Cloud Application, you can refresh it by hitting [Ctrl/Cmd]+[Alt/Opt]+[ R ].

Note: It may take up to 24 hours for your update to be available in your Creative Cloud app.

Thank you for being so patient.

[cadmium48]

Oddly the 14.0 update makes my medium sized catalog painfully slow in Develop.

[cadmium48]

To add a followup, restarting LrC didn't help, but rebooting my entire PC did help quite a bit with performance issues within Develop.

[juliottc]

I read this thread carefuly. I'm on the same page, same problems, same atempts to fix the issues. I looked for, found and read a lot of reports, and i think i found a pattern: Mostly of the issues about performance (pain) and unusability of the system, specially in the develop module is (i think) related to AMD systems.

My system has an AMD Ryzen 9 5900x, 64 gb RAM, 3080ti, NVMe Storage, and i tried everything. It is not the most powerful machine for 2024, but i dont think i need an upgrade yet. I thought for a while it was a problem when opened Chrome Browser (this is still happening, and is strange because the system becomes even more unusable so i tried to avoid it) but even when the system is freshly started, the problems persist.

I don't have any crash report because the system never frezzes, it all works, but at very, very, very, totally unacceptable, slow speeds. And this affects any other task i could be doing (forget about listening some music while working on Lightroom Classic). The most strange thing is that the CPU, GPU or RAM usage is very, very low (15-20% each), which makes everything even stranger.

I tried other photo editing software, Darktable and RawTherapee, and both were perfectly smooth (no catalog, but still), but i don't understand those software. I started to think that migration is the definitive solution. Davinci Resolve, smooth and quiet until export time (as spected). Lightroom CC works, no mayor issues, but it not the same workflow. I paid basically for Lightroom Classic.

I really think this is a problem with AMD (or my specific processor) and i don't what to go Intel (bad times for Intel). Mac is not an option because i use my system for a lot of things.

I hope this message serves to address the definitive solution. 2024 has been a bad year for Adobe and my system. I hoped that the version 14.0 solved the problems, but it doesn't.

Thanks (and sorry for my poor english)

[HDelion]

@juliottc, not sure this is due to AMD because Im using Intel and im facing same issues since May. I have to wait several mintutes when I click right on a picture .. and sometimes this is fast. It seems there is some process on background but I don't find the bug. sometimes when I killed "adobe content synchro", it works , but sometimes not ... strange behavior. I did not update on LRC14 because im afraid this will be worst

[muzuzunga]

It's certainly not AMD because the terrible slowness exists on a Mac.  My Lr Classic machine is an Intel iMac Pro from 2017 that has an 18 core Xeon, which is plenty even compared with the M series.

The Smart Prevews and regular previews take forever for some reason.  Upgrade to 14 did not make it worse or better.  At least the sync was done and stayed done.  That's really the crux of the matter for me, that synced collections end up in the cloud.

Last time performance dropped for my setup it was due to some silliness where the developers did not anticipate large numbers of albums or existing previews and probably flunked their CS 101 and used a wrong O(n^3) algorithm.  I suspect the same thing isa going on now.  We need the developers to look where the slowness is.  Can we get a debug build and share logs?

[HDelion]

Fully agree with @muzuzunga for the debug.  I dont' think poor performances are due to hardware ,but software.

Something is wrong coded for several users. Algorytms must be reviewed by developers.

[juliottc]

Thanks for the response. It was my quick assumption from reading a lot of comments, but thanks to that and this thread, now we can assure that is not a hardware issue, nor a lack of  processor cores, of RAM or raw power from a video card (wich I suppose we all have), and it's an absolutely huge and painful software issue.

I cannot understand how open source software are not presenting any lack of performance. This is bad and dirt code, a software that we are paying for and we can't make anything. And we are not getting a refund.

We are alone, and waiting for a miracle, that's how it feels, while Adobe are presenting new and unnecessary features that we cannot use also because our systems "can not handle" Lightroom Classic.

It's very annoying.

[MJ Photo]

I'm working on a MacMini M1 with LrC 14.0 and also tried 14.0.1 and I have also mayor issues with speed (again) when I want to import photos into Lightroom Classic to edit. I had these issues several times over the years from the first Lightroom Versions to the current one. A very slow import occured with different Macs, different Lightroom Classic versions, different catalogues, different external and internal harddisks. And since some days it began again. I have an external Western Digital Hard Drive (6TB) and at the beginning import was rather at normal speed, but now it takes about 30 Minutes for like 5 photos to import. In the catalogue are actually 500 photos (I create a new catalogue for each photoshooting) and I have to import about 1000 more. Import from the internal harddisk work, but I can't put my large photofolders onto my Mac, as it would need to much space. I've allready contacted the Adobe support, but nothing helped. The last advice was to format and restore my external hard drive, which I'm definitely not going to do. I don't know how often the Adobe Support advised me to reinstall my entire MacOS or hard drives, when the problem was within Adobes Software. I have the same opinion like in the precedent comment: Instead of adding always new features, Adobe should took a serious look at the performance issues of Lightroom, that have never really been fixed and return on a regular base, no matter what hardware and operating system you're using.

[donnab15030387]

Since v14, I have had a terrible time with freezing and then crashing (no crash reporter even after ensuring it is set to do so).  One thing I did that cleared up the extrememly so interface time (49 minutes to load my library of 207K images), was I ran the Windows Memory Diagnostic.  After a couple of reboots, the catalog was almost at instant loads and navigation so long as I stayed in the Libray module.  So, hopefully, this can help the original poster and others with the slowness. 

But on to the crashing.  I have tried everything that I can find to try short of completely rebuilding my system.  Disabling the embedded graphics card, ensuring everything (Windows, Nvidia, LR Classic) are all up to date.  I've created a new catalog and ported my images into it.  Ensured my cache is set much higher than default (80GB).  And like so many others, the issue comes when navigating in the Develop module.  Something is broke in LR.  It is unsuable at this point for me.  My crash log on my drive tells me nothing but file not found.  I assume because it cannot even do a proper crash dump.  Event viewer gives me:  Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Lightroom Classic\Lightroom.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll evey time.  This seems to point to a graphics issue, but like I said, I've tried everything I can find on this error to try.  I'm not sure what else to do at this point.