Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 3.x

[laurencec]

Hi

I just upgraded from lightroom 2.7 to lightroom 3. I then proceeded to import my old catalog. this all went fine but lightroom is so slow, the thumbnail previews take forever to load if I manage to have the patience to wait  for them.

is there a quick solution?? How can it be sped up?

thanks

Laurence

Message title was edited by: Brett N

[csaager]

OK, unsubscribing from this thread is possible - but using Lr3 on a 4-core

6GB Vista64 machine is not.

Is there a way to get reembursed after buying this crap? Working with the

catalog and develop is rather OK, but now I tried to screen 200+ NEFs from

the card and after a couple of images it becomes painfully slow, stalling

the whole system and changing to next image takes 30" - some mentioned that

copying the card to hard-drive and importing from disk works for them, but I

am sorrry: This is another step to the workflow I am not willing to make.

Why the heck this gerbil of code needs 4+GB while not consuming any CPU is

beyond me - perhaps they "tested" their caching/multithreading with 10

files?

In my first post to this thread I mentioned that Adobe will need some effort

to buy another product from them. I have to correct myself: I'll never buy

anything from Adobe anymore and as soon as I find an alternative to Acoread

(can of worms), I'll be happy to get rid of this bunch of geniuses.

I had been completely taken by the beta, but what is going on now is ...

Short tip: Adding more cache and threads can make sense, but usually there

is a limit from there the same strategy just creates liveness problems so

that throughput goes to 0. Luckily my income doesn't depend on Lr's

performance, but on my skills to solve caching/multithreading issues:-)

This product has such nice features and delivers outstanding IQ and is

entirely compromised by 2nd level shortcomes. I don't believe Adobe will be

able to make a living from PDF alone

[areohbee]

csaager,

I don't blame you for being frustrated with Lightroom3 and even angry at or disgusted with Adobe - you're obviously one of the less-lucky Lr3 experiencers. And, I'm not an Adobe apologist or fan-boy or defender... but, I would like to encourage you to hang in there for a little while - Lr3.1 may very well fix most of the critical issues for you - it should be out fairly soon (based on comment by Julie Kmoch and other gossip). Then, if 3.1 isn't at least better in the most important ways, scrap it...

Obviously, if you've had enough, then you've had enough - just thought I'd try and encourage a bit...

Rob

[Guest]

Obviously, not everyone is having the exact same problem as you, and to this extreme.

Have you contacted Adobe Support? If you need to return the product, you can do it there.

[Guest]

Still not entirely sure what is going on. All hell certainly broke loose at the time I am upgraded Lightroom, when I was not having any problems before. However, updating from Leopard to Snow Leopard seemed to change the situation later on (when LR3 seemed to become responsive but a lot of program freezes started to occur) and I am not sure what else I may have updated around the same time as LR3. Also, I have been having a bit of a problem for a while with an external HD, which would not power down when the computer was shut down or it was ejected (but would if the computer went to sleep); however, this was not a drive that I used regularly, although it was regularly connected and daisy chained with a drive that contained some of my LR library. After thinking the problems might have gone away, I recently had the Finder freeze on me again a couple of times. I have now taken the possibly suspect drive out of the equation and have my LR library and its backup on two new external drives (partly because I needed more capacity and partly to change hardware to see if that effects anything). The Wacom driver is not on my system. And I have done an erase and install of the new OS. So, barring some bad luck with the new external drives, if problems continue to arise, I would have to conclude that the problem really is either LR3 or my computer's hardware. But, I repeat, I was not having any hardware problems with my computer itself before the installation of LR3. Could that little problem with the one external drive have caused problems? Other than the power issue, I had no problems using that drive.

[kobajaszi777]

speed test:

winxp 3,25gb    L2.7  raw --> jpg 85%   100 photos =time 5,30 min

win7 x64 8gb    L3.0  raw --> jpg 85%   100 photos =       6,16 min

hardware is the same phenom x4 9750 (100 the same photos)

why slower... !!??

[Lee_Jay-0I6no4]

kobajaszi777 wrote:

speed test:

winxp 3,25gb    L2.7  raw --> jpg 85%   100 photos =time 5,30 min

win7 x64 8gb    L3.0  raw --> jpg 85%   100 photos =       6,16 min

hardware is the same phenom x4 9750 (100 the same photos)

why slower... !!??

That's rendering.  Completely separate issue.  The new, improved rendering algorithms also require more processing cycles to complete.  It's the price you pay for improved image quality.

[Wanchese_West]

Wow....my RAM useage has gone through the roof w/ LR3. I

just checked my CPU meter and I was at 79% constant RAM use, with

peaks in the mid 80s. Never saw that number over 40%

before. I have 8gb now, looks like it is time for more!

I exited LR3 and then reopened and the RAM use is down at 37%. It will be interesting to see how and when it starts peaking.

[Mikkasa]

Yes, it's very RAM hungry by design. I thought PShop was a memory hog, but if you check the min specs on the Adobe site, PS5 requires 1GB minimum; LR3 wants 4Gb... if you're packing more than 4, my guess is LR will hog as much as it can without degrading your system performance.

[areohbee]

Mikkasa wrote:

LR3 wants 4Gb... if you're packing more than 4, my guess is LR will hog as much as it can without degrading your system performance.

4GB minimum? I have 4GB on my system and Lr3 averages about 1G +/- a few hundred K.

Rob

[Mikkasa]

Ok, so I exaggerate a little. it's actually 2Gb. nothing wrong with a little dramatic license...

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/systemreqs/

But still twice the PS5 requirements. That makes it a proper gas guzzler in my book.

OTOH, wassa point of having 8gigs if you never use it?

[areohbee]

You can't get away with squat on this forum - gotta check your exagerrations before hittin' the "Submit" button .

I would guess Lightroom would "never" use more than about 1.5GB of RAM, when its functioning correctly, and if it ever tops 2GB - you got a leak... Somebody correct me if I'm full of hooey...

The other Gigs are for keeping another dozen programs open... Not too many programs even know how take advantage of massive quantities of ram when they're available - or at least that's been my experience so far.

Rob

[Mikkasa]

You're probably right. Still, if you're running a 40k+ image library and are possessed with the need to simultaneously run two multi-tabbed browsers (who, me?) you'll quickly run into problems.

I've noticed this over the course of three versions of LR and two new computers: the best upgrade you can hope for is a memory upgrade.

Seriously, I traded up my hardware in anticipation of LR3's reported performance hikes.

[areohbee]

I would think if any of the programs your'e running are ram starved, then more ram helps, but if all of your programs have as much as they can possibly use, then more ram would not help.

But yeah, programs are getting hungrier and hungrier (couldn't find a "hungry" emoticon).

PS - Sometimes people mistake memory leakage for memory hunger.

Enjoy Lightroom,

Rob

[bob frost]

I've seen LR use over 5GB of my 12GB of ram, but I'd like to see it use more.

bob F.

[areohbee]

bob frost wrote:

I've seen LR use over 5GB of my 12GB of ram, but I'd like to see it use more.

Be careful what you wish for (consider you may have a memory leak).

Mac or Win?

PS - I'm pretty sure on Win7/64 if I added more memory Lightroom wouldn't use a bit of it - there's free memory right now that it doesn't use. I mean it "used" it when I had a memory leak, but ever since I optimized my catalog it doesn't use it. Well, occasionally it "uses" it, but its generally a precursor to a slow down followed by a crash...

Rob

[Guest]

It probably depends on your platform. If a single app asks for 8Gb of memory on my Mac, it will get it, either as real or virtual memory.

[Mikkasa]

clvrmnky wrote:

It probably depends on your platform. If a single app asks for 8Gb of memory on my Mac, it will get it, either as real or virtual memory.

Yeah, I was going to post sthg like that but didn't want to sound like a mac fanboy

however..

..a lot of these slow performance reports seem to originate from win7 x64 users, very well-specced systems at that. I'm tempted to point a shaky finger at things like openGL optimisation / hardware integration, rather than outright RAM & processor muscle, as the source of the difference, and GPU rather than CPU performance in general. Mel's post above is the sort of thing I'm on about.

Any thoughts? Have macs still got the edge for graphics/rendering work or not?

For mac users, it's maybe of interest to note the next mac OS release will address 3rd party app openGL issues as a priority item: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/06/mac_os_x_10_6_4_to_tackle_issues_with_opengl_iphoto_dv...

[Larry Loos]

All I can say is.. I am not having any issues at all with the new release. I am using WIN7 64 and I can use iTunes, DxO AND Lightroom3 all at the same time without any problems. All the features work as advertised and I am one happy Windows7 camper.

Has anyone considered that an AntiVirus program might be the cause? I use Microsoft Security Essentials.

... my two cents, thanks.

EDIT: I don't know why my system doesn't show up on my posts, but here it is:

Win7 64-bit; HP Pavilion Elite Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200, 8gig RAM, Radeon HD4350; Lightroom 3; EOS 7D

[jboyer43]

Anti virus?

That sounds an interesting line of thought. My problem is that Beta 2 was VERY fast compared to LR 3 release. I wish Adobe would shed some light on what they fixed in LR 3 that was not broken in the Beta.

In many ways, CS5/ACR is much faster that LR... makes no sense to me...

[awimaging]

I have 3G and it does say it needs 1G min.

I have found that LR3 crashes when running in 64bit (as does LR2 which I didn't realise I was running in 32bit)

I now have put LR3 back to 32 bit and it seems to work (it loads ok anyway- and I can develop etc)- not sure how I can get over this problem

I have an imac and my max ram I can have is 4.

Loepard 10.5.8

2.4 GHz

3G ram

[Mikkasa]

It won't harm performance running LR in 32bit as opposed to 64bit if you have less than 4Gb RAM. No idea if (or why) 64bit mode might provoke a crash, but it's almost certainly not going to do you any favours.

I came across a bookmarked blog post (by our very own Ms Bampton) that really helped when I was tweaking LR2: required reading for anyone troubleshooting LR speed issues... http://www.lightroomqueen.com/blog/2009/05/02/hurry-up-lightroom-the-best-speed-tips/

Maybe not common knowledge that you can now allocate as much as 200Gb to the ACR cache. Not sure what the default is; I have mine set at 50Gb, which seems to be plenty. As this is the main 'fuel tank' feeding the Develop module, it's worth a look (Preferences > FIle Handling) to see what yours is set to. Bear in mind you can elect an external drive if internal disk space is an issue.

Hope something there is of some help to someone...

[shirkov]

It seems the reason is memory leak in 64bit version. I've installed 32bit and it works just fine.

The issue was dramatic performance loss while browsing raws in library mode. Free memory ceased to zero after 200 pictures viewed and lightroom slows very much. Reopening helps, but it;s better to use 32 bit version until 64bit version is fixed.

Lightroom version: 3.0 [677000]
Operating system: Windows 7 Ultimate Edition
Version: 6.1 [7600]
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Physical processor count: 8
Processor speed: 2.6 GHz
Built-in memory: 6142.4 MB

[Lou_Gonza]

Ok. Totally silly question. Where do I find the 32 bit version? I log in to my adobe account and it won't allow me to download another version. It won't allow me dowloand ANY version for that matter. It says Not applicable in the download cloumn. Wonderful. Is there some other way to get the 32 bit version? What am I missing?

When I attempt to download it, it must be auto sensing my PC setup as it downloads the 64 bit version automatically. Hmmm. Any hints?

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

It's in the same install package, but when you go to install it, check the 'show the files' checkbox (or whatever it says!!) in that installation dialog and find the setup32.exe file and double click that.

[Lou_Gonza]

Thanks Victoria!