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Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 3.x

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
June 9, 2010
102 replies
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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

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Tom Hogarty

Keith - that is part of the problem everyone is trying to figure out - why does LR3 work well for some and lousy for others. as MANY of us have posted - we have the SAME EXACT HARDWARE setup from 2.7 to 3.3 with VASTLY different results. If the only thing changing is the software then Lightroom IS the problem to be diagnosed...

If it is so offending then unsubscribe from the forum.

David - you clearly don't get the issue confronting those of us posting here.

LR 2.7 did everything we needed it to. The Beta was wonderful, and the ads for 3.0 certainly made it appear it would continue to be a set in the right direction. Your solution is for us to now go but other software? Hardly a reasonable one when 2.7 was great and we had every expectation that the new version would be an improvement.

If both of you are happy with the way it's running, then that is great but you are not at all helping discover why others are having legitimate issues.

If it's like groundhog day then why are you bothering to come back?

FYI, I need to lock this thread and start a new thread because I fear that customers will attempt to share valuable feedback in this discussion and it has become extremely difficult for the Lightroom team to follow the lengthy and increasingly chatty conversation. Please use the following forum topic to discuss the specifics of your feedback on Lightroom 3.3.

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/760245?tstart=0

Regards,

Tom Hogarty

Lightroom Product Manager

Show previous replies

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borisZelsky

New Participant

I'd like to add my vote to the OP. LR3 is unbearably slow - and I am comparing to performance of LR 2.7.

The thing that annoys me is slow response of the interface in Real Time mode - for example browsing through photos in Develop Module takes about 15 seconds. The pop-up "Loading" comes up, the circle on the left is spinning and I am left waiting. It goes away after 15 seconds. I could live with longer response time of tasks that happen in the background - such as import/export or thumbnail building. But having to wait 15 seconds every time I move to a new image is really unacceptable, especially if the previous version worked fine.

Such tasks as paintbrushing are also much slower than LR 2.7.

RAM does not seem to be an issue - LR is taking 700Mb (combined physical and vm) and I have about 800mb of physical ram available.

My system stats:

Panasonic Toughbook W7

Windows XP, SP3

Intel Core Duo U7500 @ 1.06Ghz

2 Gig ram

M

Martin_Ingle

New Participant

Before committing to purchase the full version of Lightroom 3 I have tried the trial version. Currently I have a dual core E6600 @ 2.4GHz and 4G Ram with Windows 7 32 bit.

I have a Canon 5D2 DSLR and generally shoot raw files. I find that switching between images takes around 16-20 seconds with raw files and about 4 seconds with jpg files. General operation can best be describes as sluggish. I created a new catalogue with only about 100 images in it. Memory usage only goes up from 1.2Gb to 1.6Gb when Lightroom is started so from what I can see memory is not an Issue. Both CPU cores on the other hand run flat out.

Switching from the default 2010 process profile back to the old 2003 profile seems to make an enormous performance difference. Raw files seem to open about 4 times faster.

I got so frustrated with the slow performance that I have tried installing Windows7 64 bit onto a spare drive and only loaded Lightroom 3 - about as clean and uncluttered OS as possible. I was disappointed to see that there was no noticeable difference in performance.

I also did a Windows performance bench mark on both OS's and was a bit surprised to see substantially lower processor and ram bench marks on the 64 bit version given the same hardware.

32 bit 64 bit
Processor 5.8 4.4

RAM 5.5 4.8

Graphics 5.9 5.9

Gaming 5.9 5.9

Disk 5.9 5.9

My son has a new(ish) Mackbook Pro with 2.8GHz dual core processor. We loaded the Mac version of Lightroom and the same images. The overall experience is much smoother with raw files loading about twice as fast. Once rendered switching between images was almost instantaneous – a significant difference compared to the Windows version considering similar spec processors.

I'm now starting to think that it may be the time to switch to a Mac. Before committing to a hefty investment in hardware I want to be sure that it will have a significant effect on performance. Does anyone have a real feel how much faster a new quad core 2.8Ghz i7 iMac compared to a dual core 2.8Ghz Mac Book Pro when using Lightroom 3?

Is it realistic, with today’s affordable technology, to expect 20 mega pixel + raw file images to be rendered and displayed in Lightroom with the 2010 process profile enabled in 1-2 seconds or do we just have to accept the penalty of slow speed for improved IQ?

F

FeatherLightStudios

New Participant

Thanks for taking your time trying to isolate this slow-down - I too am disappointed.

I know in the past the nVidia drivers required special settings for LR2...

When's someone from Adobe going to respond to all of our posts, or does this require a phone-call to tech support?

-David

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Mikkasa

Participating Frequently

Reading between the posts, tech support looks like a good option for mac users with directory or system issues, some (at least) of which appear to be fixable in the main.

Looks like Windows users have a more hardware-related issue, in which case tech support will do you no good. Assuming, of course, you wouldn't feel better for verbally abusing a complete stranger over something completely beyond his control

What you need in this case is a dot update that fixes some wintel hardware-addressing bug(s) and posting here is as good a place as any to shout for one.

W

Wanchese West

Participating Frequently

My catalog is 190,00 images and navigating among folders and searching the catalog is much, much faster than it was with any previous version of LR.

However, my LR3 gets sluggish after multiple brush strokes on consecutive images that I have been exporting to CS5 and reimporting post tweak. The first sign is a sluggish mouse wheel that makes changing brush sizes a real adventure. When I check my CPU meter, I see RAM utilization has gone through the roof and the CPU is beginning to sweat. Closing and reopening LR3 temporarily solves this problem.

My box is a dual monitor Dell workstation with dual quad core Xeons and 8gb of RAM running Win 7 x64.

Victoria Bampton LR Queen

Community Expert

Wanchese West wrote:
I see RAM utilization has gone through the roof and the CPU is beginning to sweat.

Have you optimized your catalog since upgrading? There have been reports of that solving similar problems.

_______________________________________________Victoria - The Lightroom Queen - Author of the Lightroom Missing FAQ & Edit on the Go books.

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Wanchese West

Participating Frequently

Ha! Reminds me of the doctor who asked the patient

complaining of shortness of breath..." Have you tried breathing?"

I optimize and backup my catalog daily.

D

davidnaylor83

Participating Frequently

I don't understand why everyone is complaining about speed.

If you have X thousand images, all 10+ megapixels, all with their own set of adjustments (a million sliders, local adjustments, camera profiles, lens profiles, etc). Its gonna take a few seconds to 1) render them 2) load the rendered image (due to sheer size). That is sort of the price you have to pay for non-destructive raw image processing. Lightroom is still making you very much more efficient than you would be without it. And you're getting superior image quality.

That said, I wish Lightroom were even better at caching the thumbnail previews. If you scroll too fast in Library, you're still going to see the thumbnails all fuzzy before they become sharp. Perhaps that is the price you pay for having the very flexible thumbnail handling. But I'd almost prefer it if I had less flexibility and faster loading thumbnails.

areohbee

Brainiac

davidnaylor83 wrote:
I don't understand why everyone is complaining about speed.

There are a multitude of issues:

1. Some people expected it to be faster than Lr2, but its not, or at least not much, or at least not accross the board... (because the marketing people have over-stated performance improvements).

2. Some people are having problems that it runs waaaaaaaaaay slower than it would if it were running properly - like orders of magnitude in some cases.

3. There are also a multitude of bugs that are affecting performance in a variety of ways.

If its as fast as Lr2 for the most part, for you, then consider yourself lucky.

PS - I'm sure there are some people who don't understand that processing big RAWs just takes a good while, but I think they are in the minority.

Rob

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Brian Noppe

New Participant

OK!

I was dismayed... I love Lightroom; it is the most valuable part of my image workflow. Lightroom 3 was giving me the dreaded mac beachballs of death, external hard drives mysteriously being "not properly ejected", crazy load times, slow sliders, etc. etc.

Much better now!

I "exported as catalog" the images that I was working on (about 700 flagged images). Closed Lightroom. Trashed all plists (LR2. LR3Beta2, LR3).

Created a new Catalog. Imported from the catalog of images I had been working on to the new working catalog.

Voila! LR3 is not instantaneous, but definitely workable....and I've not had to restart so far.

Thanks, Victoria Bampton (especially) and others that got me to my present much happier place. :-D (and yeah, I'm knocking on wood)

Have you other folks experiencing problems done these steps?

Cheers!

Brian

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Drew789

New Participant

I've found LR3 to be brutally slow at pretty much everything. I'm running WinXP with some pretty decent hardware. I upgraded from LR1.4. I thought LR1.4 was pretty snappy but find LR3 to be a major step backward in speed. Manipulating sliders (like Recovery, for example) is painfully awkward and slow, with major lag. Tools like red eye reduction and brushes are even worse. This is slowing down my workflow tremendously. I love LR, but what is going on here?!? I'm sure hoping this is a bug that can be fixed and not a permanent issue.

C

camerahans

Participating Frequently

Same here. I am a big fan of LR, but this version is enormous slow in almost anything. Just experienced a crash because of trying to change too often to another pic while it was rendering (?). ANd thaat of pic straight out of the camera with basic processing. No local adjustments, no graduated filters. Pics look great, but the time involved isn't really billable anymore.

I am on Win XP32, prof, 3 Gb, extended physical address, Xeon 3Ghz.

I would like to know if it is just windows users or are Mac users also experiencing these slowdowns?

J

J_Simono

New Participant

You gotta be kidding me. I have been waiting for this for so long I built a new highly-specd machine in anticipation. For my efforts I get a performance decrease from LR 3.

A

arnelg

Participating Frequently

I have also been experiencing slow processing with Lightroom 3.0 compared to Lightroom 2.7.

Here is a comparative table of observation in memory process usage:

Description LR 2.7 LR 3.0 Remarks

Start-up

No processing

Browsing only 300-320 MB 300 -320 MB Basically the same

Develop Export

to Jpeg Quality

100 450-570 MB 1.74 to 1.94 GB LR 3.0 uses double the memory compared to LR 2.7

Time to process

same 7 RAW files

of an EOS 40D 30.42 seconds 1 minute & 3.13 seconds LR 3.0 almost takes double the time to process same files in the same machine

(using a digital stopwatch)

At Rest-Idle no

processing

being done 448-532 MB 1.786 - 1.85 GB LR 3.0 uses more than double the memory even in idle or rest.

Both versions are in the same Mac, so I think the configuration should not matter but I wrote it anyway. In fact, my LR 2.7 has 4,182 images on the catalog that I tested and the LR 3.0 only has 691 images on its catalog. I noticed LR 3's sluggishness when I was processing the images so I measured the processing time using a digital stopwatch in order to mathematically express the slow processing that I have observed. Both versions and catalogs were optimized and have the same preferences.

iMac 2.4 GHz Duo Core 4GB (667 MHz)

I hope an Adobe Engineer would read this. Your prompt response and solution is needed and greatly appreciated.

areohbee

Brainiac

Does sound like you've been bitten by the Lr3-sloooooooooow bug.

I'd like to point you to the online Adobe bug database which gives a complete list of all bugs identified so far so you can check status..., but there isn't one.

Rob

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DavePinMinn

Inspiring

At least some of us are here. We read lots, say some. But, we don't

get into discussions on what's coming next (by policy), and we don't

try to defend the choices we made.

-melissa

Sent from my iPhone

Hi Mellissa.......

I can fault Adobe for not having someone detailed to participate in discussions in various forums, but they're CERTAINLY not unique.

IMO, the world has changed drastically in the last few years. MANY of us now rely on forums and other Internet-based support sources FAR MORE than the traditional "manufacturer tech support". It may be because so many manufacturers have outsourced their support, which can lead to immense frustration when trying to get a solution from someone not directly connected to the development process, often with limited knowledge and resources, and frequently unable to do much more than quote the manual or fall back on rote diagnostic processes that have already been performed. It's also because there is SOMETIMES a huge group of knowledgeable users that can offer advice, recommendations, and solutions - YES, you may have to wade through some foolishness, repetitive noise, and get past the folks that are apparently poor at reading comprehension, but I've had FAR BETTER success getting solutions in various forums than I EVER get from manufacturer technical support.

It takes VERY few experiences like this one to ensure you don't bother with Adobe support again:

My laptop went up in flames - LITERALLY, smoke and flames. Dead. Clearly, I WAS NOT going to be able to "deactivate Photoshop."

Replaced the laptop in 24 hours. Installed CS4, and of course, was told that "you can't activate because you've already got two licenses."

Called "support". EXPLAINED CLEARLY THAT THE LAPTOP BURNED UP AND I COULDN'T DEACTIVATE. And needed him to deactivate the software so I could reactivate....... And was told (I'm not kidding) "Well, you should have deactivated Photoshop before installing it on the new computer."

Oh........

Unfortunately, at this point I'm homicidally frustrated, convinced I'm dealing with a complete idiot, and resort to speaking very slowly and clearly, requesting that he deactivate the software... Again. Eventually, after sufficient hoop jumping, it gets done, but I'm once again left with the feeling that what Adobe needs MOST is a MAJOR COMPETITOR TO FEED THEM THEIR LUNCH.

As far as I'm concerned ANY manufacturer that charges for technical support to address problems with their product is making a clear statement that they DO NOT want to hear about the problems the majority of their users are having, and do NOT want to be bothered addressing them. It may be tolerable for a $20 product, but for a tool that sells thousands of licenses and costs hundreds or thousands of dollars, it's attrocious.

B

Brian Noppe

New Participant

Hi!

My images are taking 10 seconds to load going from one image to the next in Develop mode. I'm using LR3 with the existing reviews from Beta2, which was much faster. Macbook Pro 2.16 GHz 2GB 667MHz, running OSX 5.8.

Should I delete the preview cache and Re-render, or is my computer just too slow for LR3?

Cheers!

M

Mikkasa

Participating Frequently

I haven't loaded LR3 onto my macbook (same spec as yours) yet but if LR2 was anything to go by, and you're talking about 1:1 rendering in Develop, 10 seconds probably is a bit slow but not horrendously so.

I'm still not sure what aspect of the i5 iMac makes it so much quicker (quad-core/4Gb notwithstanding) but it is... consensus here seems to be that more RAM helps, but it's not the end of the story. Are you running it in 64-bit mode? I believe RAM needs to be a little beefier than 2gigs to make the most of 64bit, but it might help.

I do remember getting better macbook performance with LR on its own, ie quitting other stuff (esp browsers) that can be RAM-hungry.

T

thewhitedog

Inspiring

You can't run Lightroom 3 in 64 bit mode in OS X 10.5.8. It requires Snow Leopard - OS X 10.6.x. That said, I am using OS X 10.6.4 on a three year old 3GHz quad core Mac Pro with 8 GB of RAM. And, despite plenty of RAM and 64 bit operation, Lightroom 3 renders images and just generally runs more slowly than Lightroom 2. I guess I'll have to live with it, though, unless Adobe can find a way to optimize performance somehow, because the new Mac Pros are way out of my league price-wise.

On another note, at the risk of being labelled a Mac fanboy, one of the advantages of Snow Leopard (on a late model Intel Mac, of course) is that even when the OS is running in 32 bit mode (the default, because most apps are not yet 64 bit capable), you can run applications in 64 bit. I guess I'll have to try running 10.6 in 64 bit mode to see if that gives Lightroom a boost. And you don't have to buy a separate version of OS X to get the 64 version. It's something you can turn on and off at will - with a restart, of course.

At any rate, I'm glad to know I'm not the only one experiencing Lightroom 3 slowdowns, and that the problem does not appear to be platform specific.

David Ayars

Participating Frequently

Keep in mind that if you're using a 32-bit Windows OS including Windows 7, the OS can only use about 3 GB or maybe 3.5 GB of RAM, no matter how much you load onto the PC. So if LR3 is slow on your system with 2 GB of RAM,and that wouldn't be a huge surprise especially if you have a large catalog and a 2+ year old PC, it may not be much better even if you upgrade your RAM to 8 GB, unless you also do a reformat and reinstall to a 64-bit Windows OS. Doing that may cause other issues with other software. For example, I also use Adobe Audition, and comments on the Adobe support forum for those who have tried Audition with 64-bit Win7 seem divided between those who run it fine and those who can't run it well at all. Your hardware drivers also may or may not support 64-bit Windows.A 64-bit OS is great with hardware and software that can run it, likely including LR3 and PS CS5, but YMMV with your other apps and your gear.

W

Wanchese West

Participating Frequently

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.

M

Mikkasa

Participating Frequently

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

Brainiac

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

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