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Question

4gb to 8gb ram: Big help for LR?

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
May 13, 2012
5 replies
28495 views

I am running LR 4.1 RC2 on my Win7 64-bit 17.3" laptop. Here are the basic specs:

i3-330M 2.26ghz, 4gb, 500gb hd, 17.3" 1600x900 screen, Intel graphics (with latest driver)

Fortunately, I have not had the terrible performance problems that some people report, but it is still somewhat sluggish. Occasionally, even when I am not doing anything the ram usage will go from 450-550mb up to about 2gb for no apparent reason. Also, the cpu usage will go up. It only does this from time to time, but something is going on in the background. Maybe some of the times it is building previews in the background, but that is just a guess. Also, I discovered that any use of luminance NR really slows things down,. Now I wait until the last step before exporting an image to do that so that it doesn't interfere while working on that image in the develop module.

My laptop works well and except for LR is fast enough. I am wondering if going to 8gb would be the biggest bang for the buck change I could make for LR? Often that is the case, but looking at the task manager I usually have quite a bit of memory available, although when LR is really busy like exporting an image to a resized jpeg file the memory of the PC can be up to 95% usage. That drops down though when LR is done. The raw files I am working with are from 16mp and 18mp cameras and I don't do batch processing, just one photo at a time.

This laptop is 2 years old, but still running fine so I would only get a newer one with a faster cpu and more ram if I really thought it would help quite a bit -- or this one develops problems. Changing from 4gb to 8gb though is relatively inexpensive. What are your thoughts? Thank you.

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areohbee

Legend

I think, on Windows, having 8GB vs. 4GB is not a big help for Lightroom, *if* Lightroom is the only ram-hungry app running. The additional ram comes into play more to keep other ram-hungry apps from competing with Lightroom for memory...

B

bakuboAuthor

Known Participant

Thank you for all the responses!

I just checked newegg.com and see that for my laptop they have a 4gb ram module for $21.99. My laptop only has 2 ram slots and they each have a 2gb module in them now. I might just buy the 4gb module and replace one of the 2gb modules. That way I would up the memory to 6gb (not as good as 8gb, but better than 4gb ). It is okay to do that, right? I don't have to have matched 2x2gb or 2x4gb modules, do I? I am not really a cheap person, but the laptop is 2 years old and from my experience with laptops over the years they seem to always start having problems around 1.5 to 2.5 years old so, if possible, I don't want to spend much money on this laptop since I may discover in the near future I have to replace it anyway.

Todd Shaner

Legend

Your processor supports two memory channels for dual interleaved operation, and provides a performance boost over single channel memory architecture. It also has Intel Flex Memory architecture supporting dual interleaved operation with unequal memory capacity in the two channels. So yes using 1 @ 2GB + 1 @ 4GB will work, but with reduced performance:

0GB - 4GB Address Space =Dual Interleaved Channels (your current setup)

4GB - 6GB Address Space = Single Channel (i.e. reduced performance)

Since your objective is to maximize LR performance, I recommend replacing the 2 @ 2GB modules with 2 @ 4GB.

Two 4GB DDR 1066 (PC3-8500) speed SO-DIMMs are compatible and will provide the best performance. It shouldn't cost you more than $45 for the pair.

Todd Shaner

Legend

trshaner wrote:
BTW - I ran a check on cache file size for LR3.6 versus LR4.1 using a fresh ACR cache purge and they are identical in size. For my Canon 5D MKII they are running about 600 KB for both LR3 and LR4. Before purging the cache initially last week I noticed there were lot of ~1.2 MB cache files, so I assumed LR4 was creating smaller files. It looks like that actually happened with one of the LR3 updates.

Lr4 uses a different file type for acr cache files. So, you can expect them to be a fair bit smaller than previous versions, and that the size of your cache folder need not be a large. Typically, 20 GB is more than ample for caching upwards of 40,000 raw files.

I agree with your statement that 20 GB is probably ample for caching up to 40,000 raw files in LR4 and LR3.6 (see why below). Even using large 21Mp raw files that will hold up to 33,333 images before over-flow (20,000/0.6).

I know this is going off topic, but I'm sure it's of interest. I also thought that LR4.1 PV2012 stores different ACR cache information than LR3.6 PV2010. What is interesting is that the "file size" of LR3.6 PV2010 created ACR cache files are identical in size to LR4.1 P2012 created files. Below is a screen shot showing a purged cache snapshot for three (3) Canon 5D2 MKII 21Mp CR2 raw files processed first in LR3.6, and then in LR4.1 in the same order.

Cache0000000001.dat = Picture 1 in LR3.6 (530KB)

Cache0000000002.dat = Picture 2 in LR3.6 (608KB

Cache0000000003.dat = Picture 3 in LR3.6 (590KB)

Cache0000000004.dat = Picture 1 in LR4.1 (530KB)

Cache0000000005.dat = Picture 2 in LR4.1 (608KB)

Cache0000000006.dat = Picture 3 in LR4.1 (590KB)

What is more interesting is that the ACR cache .dat files are not being updated after making multiple changes to the images in LR3.6 and/or LR4.1 Develop module, only the 1 KB 'Index.dat' file is updated. I had always thought that changes made in the Develop module were updated in the ACR cache, but apparently that's not the case. I went back and hit 'Auto Tone' on each of the pictures, with no change even after zooming in to 100% on each picture. I also tried switching to the Library module and back to the Develop module, hitting 'Reset' on image, and repeating the same 100% viewing. You can see below that the 'Date Created' for the .dat image files is same as the 'Date Modified' (i.e. NOT modified), only the tiny 1KB 'Index.dat' is updated.

Double click on the picture to see full-size:

C

CSS_Simon

Participating Frequently

With my i7-930, logical units of memory go in 3s - 3, 6, 9 etc. Upgrading 6G to 12 made no noticeable difference to LR (that's W7 64-bit).

Ian Lyons

Community Expert

4GB is always going to be better than 2GB on any platform compatible with Lr4. On the Mac platform going from 4Gb to 8GB makes produces a fairly noticable performance improvement, less so with Windows versions at present. I can't say a lot, but I would expect to see the final version of Lr4.1 (64bit Windows) making better use of 8GB than current versions. That being said, in many situations your processor is going to be a limiting factor. Laptops based on the Intel Sandy Bridge or recently released Ivy Bridge are signficantly better than earlier processors.

ShotRu

Participant

The more RAM the better, and if it's cheap I'd say: go for it. Especially if you rely on LR's local retouching or happen to run it parallel with Photoshop - both are memory-hungry pieces of software, 8 GB isn't too much for the beasts!

From my own experience on a not-so-fresh laptop (Intel C2D, W7x64), the biggest change regarding LR's fluidity (or responsiveness) came from a 4-to-8 GB RAM upgrade, and not from using a SSD as my system drive.

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