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

[Mikkasa]

mei! wrote:

Another data point:

I left my computer running for the last 8 hours rendering standard size previews for a load of images. Before starting this it was running normally and fairly quickly. I cancelled the rendering before all the photos were done (about 10k left and I have stuff I need to do) and Lightroom was then very unresponsive, with many grey boxes where thumbnails should be and taking many seconds or minutes to move between images, often sticking at the loading message with a very pixellated picture.

I closed and restarted lightroom but it didn't help. I closed it again and it was not showing as an application or a process in the Windows Task manager, but if I look at resource monitor it's shown as still being there and taking up about 2.7gb of RAM - in normal use it never gets much about 1.5gb.

I restarted the machine and reloaded lightroom, ram usage and performance seems to have gone back to normal. But... then it bogged down again and I'm now optimizing the catalogue trying to speed it up again.

It seems Lightroom has a memory leak somewhere and/or isn;t releasing resources when it closes.

----

Windows 7 64bit, 4gb RAM.

I managed to kind of reproduce this problem on the mac (quad-core i5 iMac 4gb RAM). Normally I never see LR use more than 1.75Gb of memory, even in Develop. Yesterday I was globally editing the IPTC/copyright info for my main (35k image) catalog and everything was progressing normally until ~90% of the way through, then it slowed considerably.

After abt 1 hour of processing the progress bar more or less stopped progressing (although the drive was still chugging away) which prompted me to open Activity Monitor. CPU use was surprisingly very low at <5%, RAM OTOH was maxed out at the available 2.8GB. I quit all open apps and watched as LR soaked up the newly available RAM to a max of 3.32Gb. I went to bed and 6 hours later the progress bar had barely moved, LR was kind of hanging for the first time since upgrading, and everything system-wise was very unresponsive. As soon as I force-quit and released the RAM the system returned to normal.

After a restart I was gratified to find the updated IPTC info had been retained, but it was an interesting event... hope it's of some use.

[emmapal]

LR 3 is almost unusable for me on my laptop (admittedly slow and small) and my desktop PC. I am running Windows 7 32-bit on the laptop and and the desktop. LR 3 is being shipped to me while I use the 64-bit trial version. Is there a 32-bit trial download? Is that my issue? I can't run other applications at the same time, even Photoshop has to be closed (and reopened every time I want to take an image in for further editing)

The adjustment brushes take several seconds to update a stroke, the sliders take several seconds to update each little change, it's maddening. What other information do you need from me to help identify how I can get it usable again? I am a real estate (wide angle) photographer and the lens distortion ability is vital for me, the reason I bought LR 3, but it's so bad I'm almost willing to do without that feature and go back to LR 2.

I have a catalog for a year with personal and client photos, 100,000 or so in one catalog. I regularly go in and delete photos that didn't make the client viewing cut. Should I create smaller catalogs for each sub category of photos? My machines are well maintained, as free of viruses and spyware as we can, optimized, etc. The laptop is a new little Acer netbook, and the desktop had Windows reinstalled recently and mostly new hardware (video card, motherboard, hard drives) about a year ago.

Thanks for any advice.

[Guest]

LR3 can be run in 32 bit mode - I have had to do so as it crashes my Mac when I try to run in 64bit.

Interresting, LR3 defaults to 64bit when installing, while LR2 defaulted to 32 bit - which is why it worked for me.

[Jim Stamates]

Me too. MacBook Pro 2.33 OS 10.5.8 3gigs ram running LR3 in 32 bit

I have a catalog I print from that only has about 800 images. When I click the 'print' button, it takes 20 sec. to see the dialogue. Click print, another 14+ seconds to close dialogue then LR3 starts to process job.

Another 30 sec. to finsih processing. LR2 was almost instant from clicking print to dialogue to processing.

On my main catalog, 57k DB of raw or dng's with some psds.I have had lots of the same problems others have stated. Took hours to process new previews. It is still blazingly slow browsing and developing.

The part that amazes me is that Adobe is selling us a new and faster LR! Love the new features and processing but hate the faster?

[Guest]

emmapal wrote:

LR 3 is almost unusable for me on my laptop (admittedly slow and small) and my desktop PC. I am running Windows 7 32-bit on the laptop and and the desktop. LR 3 is being shipped to me while I use the 64-bit trial version. Is there a 32-bit trial download? Is that my issue? I can't run other applications at the same time, even Photoshop has to be closed (and reopened every time I want to take an image in for further editing)

The adjustment brushes take several seconds to update a stroke, the sliders take several seconds to update each little change, it's maddening. What other information do you need from me to help identify how I can get it usable again? I am a real estate (wide angle) photographer and the lens distortion ability is vital for me, the reason I bought LR 3, but it's so bad I'm almost willing to do without that feature and go back to LR 2.

I have a catalog for a year with personal and client photos, 100,000 or so in one catalog. I regularly go in and delete photos that didn't make the client viewing cut. Should I create smaller catalogs for each sub category of photos? My machines are well maintained, as free of viruses and spyware as we can, optimized, etc. The laptop is a new little Acer netbook, and the desktop had Windows reinstalled recently and mostly new hardware (video card, motherboard, hard drives) about a year ago.

Thanks for any advice.

I think you can't expect wonders, when running LR3 on a netbook. I have a Samsung NC10 netbook (1024 x 600 screen, 1GB RAM) and yes, LR3 runs slow. However, it runs quick enough for importing and reviewing images while I am on travel. In library mode switching from image to image takes about 1 to 4 seconds, which is very acceptable, working in develop the main problems is zooming, which is slow.

I use Lightroom 3 on the desktop with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, 4 GB RAM on a 1600 x 1200 screen with a current not top notch nVidia graphics card (only the standard drivers, nothing special from nVidia) with out problems. Running Photoshop CS4 and other applications (Firefox, Thunderbird etc.) at the same time - no problem. You can test the behaviour of smaller catalog by trying to export a collection or selection of imaes to a new catalog and see if that makes any difference. My catalog contains 18,000 images.

We have to acknowledge that the new Lightroom features (especially the new image conversion engine, but also the on screen rendering) needed some reengineering of the application and usage of hardware near stuff, to make the new stuff run quick enough under the majority of configurations. That does not exclude that configurations like yours, have problems that Adobe still needs to address. I would not count on that a perceived "maintencance" of a particular machine has any influence here. Even if you have a good maintenance level, one buggy driver version or even a sloppy programmed BIOS of the manufacturer of your PC can cause applications to break.

The best thing you can do is to provide Adobe with the exact specifications of your configuration and try if reducing catalog sizes have any influence. Dealing with magic parameters, where we have no clue on their influence, could be a waste fo time, before Adobe developers have reproduced the problems in definite configurations.

Kind regards

Thomas

[LittleJu-qMSLMD]

When rendering standard previews for my whole catalog (after deletion of the LR2.7 previews folder), I had the problem that the rendering task was freezing after a while (very variable, sometime after 15 pictures, sometimes after 2000 pictures).

Now it seems to work, but I tried so many tricks, I can't tell for sure which one made it...

But maybe one of these:

- to upgrade my Windows XP user rights from "limited user" to "administrator"

- to uninstall LR2.7

- to have the LR3 software, the previews folder and the camera raw cache in 3 differents partitions (of the same hard drive in my case)

Also what for sure helped with unresponsiveness was:

- to close left and right panels and strip, and switch to "loupe" view, before running the rendering task,

- plus the famous tricks described here:

http://www.lightroomqueen.com/blog/2009/05/02/hurry-up-lightroom-the-best-speed-  tips/

[mei_-EPZwbs]

"CPU use was surprisingly very low at <5%, RAM OTOH was maxed out at the available 2.8GB. I quit all open apps and watched as LR soaked up the newly available RAM to a max of 3.32Gb."

That sounds very familiar. I just had the situation where I'd supposedly exited Lightroom but it was still there in the background, not burning many CPU cycles (1-5%) but using a lot of memory and reading loads from disk.

My new theory is that it's doing stuff in the background to optimize its use in some way, but getting the when and what wrong.

There are some options to do things when Lightroom quits, maybe it's also doing other stuff. There's an option to periodically discard 1-1 previews which I had turned on, set to "after 30 days". I'm guessing when I exit Lightroom it's checking through my catalogue looking for old previews to delete and that's taking a while and bogging down my system.

I've turned auto preview discard off now, see if that makes a difference.

[Jim Stamates]

Interesting. I've had many times, actually most times, that I shut down LR3 and it wouldn't close so I had to force quit.

[Guest]

It is fair to state that there are issues with LR3 that is causing so many speed problems with so many users. One or two is a fluke but with so many users affected, with most having the necessary hardware, something is a miss in the program causing these issues.

[hamish niven]

Think you will find of the however many copies sold or LR3 70% are managing fine and don't have major issues. Forums generally attract the most vocal and those with issues.

hamish NIVEN photography on the move

[Mikkasa]

Yeah I'd count myself among that 70% Hamish, but I also see reproducible issues with heavy processing that weren't there with LR2.

A lot of my positive experiences with LR3 could well be down to 'good practice' in my workflow, wide awareness of how to optimise performance, etc. Without that, I can see how easy it would be to become one of the 30%.

[DavePinMinn]

>A lot of my positive experiences with LR3 could well be down to 'good  practice' in my workflow, wide awareness of how to optimise performance,  etc. >Without that, I can see how easy it would be to become one of the  30%.

Sounds like we've got some things to learn from you.  Can you specifically detail your "good practice" and "awareness of how to optimise performance" so that some of the 30% can take advantage of your knowledge and skills to improve their experience?

I agree that forums attract the people that are having problems, but I suspect there may be a higher percentage of people reqally USING the product in the forum, which is why they're having problems.  I also figure EVERY entry in a forum is at least 1000 people with the problem that didn't make an entry, or stopped using the product, or are just badmouthing it elsewhere.  In the case of Adobe, probably more like 10,000 people so that 30% starts looking like a WHOLE LOT of angry, frustrated users.

[Jim Stamates]

First, 30% of users is huge. Most companies could fail if 30% of their customers had issues with their products. Mine would. That said, 30% is pulled out of the air. We don't know how big this problem is.

I've been using LR3 since the first beta, usually on a daily basis. (using LR since the original beta)

With LR3 I've been frustrated with the speed issue from day one because we were told how much faster LR3 is supposed to be. I waited for the actual release to see if the claims of a faster LR are valid. For me, they're not.

I had lots of issues. Most I found solutions for, like merging LR3 beta into LR3 after it converted the LR2.7 catalog.

Then I used it some more and dealt with the slowness until I was so frustrated I searched to see if I was doing something wrong and found this posting on the Adobe forums.

I bumped up the raw cache and I deleted my preference folder, then restarted LR3 and there is a marked improvement. Still somewhat slow.

My point is, there may be some people that have time to post and whine, but most of us have real problems, and I think most don't even look to find answers. There are probably a whole lot of users that just look for solutions without posting and are just as frustrated. And how about new users that don't have LR2 to compare it to? They may think waiting 10 seconds for an action is normal.

Hey, after I posted this a thought came to mind. I downloaded my copy from Adobe rather than wait for the CD. What's the mix? How many that are having problems downloaded vs installed from a CD?

[goodlux7]

I strongly disagree with @hamish that 70% of LR users are quietly satisfied

and the other 30% are a vocal minority who are having issues or are clueless

or using crappy hardware. Hardly an isolated problem:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=asb&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=lightroom+slow&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

I've suffered though years of using LR (since version 1) without

complaining. I can't say how many countless hours I have wasted using LR. I

kept hoping it would get better, but I've started getting more vocal now

that I'm more dependent on it for my workflow, and the release quality seems

to be consistently bad. I'm beginning to think that their approach to making

asset management tools are flawed...they've created a "does it all"

application that doesn't handle it's primary purpose well...managing assets.

Honestly I don't really care about noise reduction. I'd be happy to just be

able to see and find my photos.

While I don't feel I am an expert user who knows every keyboard shortcut by

heart, I have used LR very regularly, for years, and there are still tons of

things that are confusing to me or unexplained about lightroom.

You basically have to be a amateur research scientist to use LR...constantly

experimenting with all the different settings and switches to try to find

the optimal setting, because for 95% of the people out there, LR is going to

be slow out of the box once they have more than a handful of photos in a

catalog. Once they get the LR software installed, a user can expect to have

their computer running constantly while LR updates previews, renders, loads

refines....whatever it is doing!. The switches and options are really

misleading because they give the impression that there is a way to speed

things up. When there is not.

There is no consistent information provided by Adobe about optimization, the

best bet is to spend all the time you are waiting for LR reading through

posts here to figure out what is going on. There seem to be a few friendly

regulars on the forums that are co-opted by Adobe for whatever reason; they

usually have helpful advice, but you get the feeling that this is Adobe's

way of dealing with the angry hordes that have bought the software then

wasted a beautiful Saturday afternoon trying to simply tag their photos.

I'm sure there are tons of others that feel the same way but don't bother to

post about it because they don't have the time or they are too busy

rebooting their machine because their LR catalog is corrupted.

Lets face it. Quality control on LR releases are poor, and they have been

since version 1. There are tons of pissed off LR users out there and I don't

think its a minority. If you are having problems you should post and know

that you are in company of MOST of the users out there.

[mei_-EPZwbs]

goodlux7 said:

"There is no consistent information provided by Adobe about  optimization, the best bet is to spend all the time you are  waiting for LR reading through

posts here to figure out what is  going on."

Hahaha! That's exactly why I'm here most of the time, waiting for LR to do something.

[Guest]

qoodlux7, while you are be one of the people suffering from some problems identified after the release of the final version of LR3, some your blatant statements should not be generalized and have nothing to do with the slowness some users experience.

I, for one, have been using Lightroom constantly from version 1. So far, I only encountered one significant problem in version 2, as the import dialog was very slow when importing Panasonic raw files when previews were on. That's it. Speed was never a serious issue, even the more complex tools, such as brushes, while not lightning fast when first released, were always acceptable. In LR 3 everything works great (no showstoppers discovered).

I have used the various Lightroom versions on very different machines (Windows) ranging from Dell notebooks with Windows XP to my current desktop with Windows 7 64 bit. Sure, on older hardware (the Dell notebook) LR 3 is not lightning fast, but it is still very usable. Even on my Samsung NC10 netbook, it can be used for image importing and browsing well enough, is certainly better than any of the Epson image tanks, and gets only slow when going into image editing. This, however, is no surprise, netbooks are really low spec machines.

Therefore, I don't think that Adobe's approach for asset management is flawed, I think it is well thought. Lightroom is a software which combines asset management and photo editing to an amazingly efficient extent at this combination. Of course, there are tools specialized for image management, which have features on top of Lightroom and if you are only interest in asset management you better switch to those tools. But as a single workflow solution Lightroom still stands out as the real competition (Bibble 5, Aperture) is still not as mature as Lightroom.

I don't think that you need to be amateur research scientist to use Lightroom. It is certainly complex, because we need these complex features. If you need something more simple Adobe Bridge or Photoshop Elements might be the way to go. To me usabiltiy in Lightroom is still overall the best among the competition, where things are usually more in the way. Walking through an image catalog, filtering images, cropping, zooming - this stuff is more efficient and follows a more conclusive concept in Lightroom than at its competitors.

In comparison, Lightroom and Lightroom betas were amazingly stable experiences so far. Lightroom 3 betas were so flawless that many people used it already for production work. Do you think that would be possible if 95% are suffering the speed problems, people describe in this thread?

Computers are very complex entities. By experience I know that if you purchase hardware, which is not carefully chosen or combined by the manufacturer, you can have bottlenecks, from which applications can suffer despite being well written. Drivers are often badly written, often programming interfaces do not work according to their documentation. As a software developer the only thing you can do is writing workarounds for this.

The current problems most likely stem from real world situations, which you probably cannot cope with during development and testing, because of the countless permutations you would have to deal with. So a vendor needs to make an economic cut, as when testing is sufficient enough to go to the release, and from what I can see, Adobe made it usually. Reading through the forums you can notice countless posts of impatient members complaining why Adobe takes so long with the release.

Every vendor of imaging software has problems with some scenarios in the first release versions, that is normal and will never change. The DxO 5 release was a desaster, exaggerated by the fact that customer support reacted arrogantly and denying problems. CaptureOne 4 was crashing constantly with the first relase version and Bibble 5 got delayed for a year and still has some problems. Lightroom releases so far had very good quality in comparison.

As you can see from the participation in this thread by Adobe staff, is that they take the problem seriously, but have not found a definite cause for all the performance problems various people encounter. Already found workarounds or solutions must be tested well, as they can affect other configrations adversely. I am sure that they will come up with solutions for some performance issues pretty soon. If you ask for an immediate solution or a magic configuration setting, you might be waiting in vain for your particular situation. UItimately, the developers do not know your machine, do not know the hardware you use, which drivers you have installed, the background tasks you have running, and even the sequence you have installed software previously. If you have problems with Lightroom from version 1, it could well be that you have something in your configuration, which simply does not match with it. You have the choice getting other hardware or change your configuration, if Lightroom is so important for you. It is common experience that working with one machine configuration long enough you will notice slowdowns. I had that stuff with my Windows Vista machine, which was painfully slow after a year of adding software, hardware, drivers etc. to it. Surely, this also affected Lightroom's performance a bit.

I am posting here not because I want to defend Adobe, but because I think that statements like yours, that suggest a level of incompetence at the Lightroom team, are misleading. Would the cause of the problems be simple and only in the hands of Adobe, it would probably not have been occured.

Pissed off people probably are a minority, it cannot be proven either way round anyway. Catalog corruption for me has been an issue when working with the so called DxO plugin (from DxO) because there were some issues with interoperability. However, it was reassuring that most catalog corruptions could have been restored, and with the few occasions that was not possible, I could go back to my catalog backup which Lightroom does every time I leave the program.

To sum up, Lightroom 3 is definitely ready for production work, it is fast, usable, and produces good image quality. Customers who read this thread and think to buy or upgrade should have this in mind first, despite negative comments. However, there are configurations and scenarions out there, which have negative impacts on the operation of Lightroom, which still need to be identified. Therefore, it is wise to test drive Lightroom 3, before making a purchase decision. It has always been like this, nothing has changed with LR3.

Kind regards

Thomas

[malcolmmw]

"To sum up, Lightroom 3 is definitely ready for production work"

That's certainly not true for me, and I don't think I am doing anything overly complex either.  My workflow went from 1 hour to 3 yesterday which is NOT usable for me.

This release is a disgrace.  I was perfectly happy running 2.7 but was really excited about the new distortion and perspective correction tool.  I had to do it before by going from RAW to TIF in PtLens, but that whole process was way faster than this nonsense.

I have to do a minimal amount of adjustment brush work but now I have to sit and wait and wait and wait.

Don't get me started about the other nonsense like ignoring settings from 2.7.  It dropped my backup copies from my import all over my desktop instead of in a folder (carpet bombed me).  The flag filter turns off every time I change to a different folder, etc.  Simple stuff but enough to annoy me on top of everything else.

Oh yes, tech support was clueless and told me to delete a file which caused a short panic because it lost 3 hours of work until the file was replaced.

If I had any idea beforehand I never wouldn't upgraded even if it was free.  I will never trust this company again to get it right.

[Guest]

One simple suggestion regarding the tech support. DO NOT BLINDLY FOLLOW THEIR WORD. A few years back I had a series of installatoin issues of CS4 and was horrified by the suggestions and solutions they offered. It turned out that none, NONE, of their solutions would have worked. I have written on this extensively on my blog, even today I get many visitors from search engines. If you like to read, and avoid unreasonable solutions, point your browser to:

http://www.keptlight.com/index.php/tag/adobe/

[goodlux7]

Whatever you do, don't listen if they tell you to put your computer in the

bathtub.

[Guest]

malcolmmw wrote:

... The flag filter turns off every time I change to a different folder, etc.  Simple stuff but enough to annoy me on top of everything else.

Simply "close" the lock at the right of the filter bar and your filter criteria stay applied when you change to a different folder.

Kind regards

Thomas

[malcolmmw]

tgutsu, apparently my version of LR3 is running in an alternate universe because your version is not unusable and that lock to the right of the filters works correctly.  😉

I played with that lock and it unlocks itself when I go to a different folder every time, thus turning off the filters.

Back to the slowness, I forgot to mention Macbook Pro with 4GB of RAM, OS 10.6.  I've done all the things that off-shore support said to do except when they told me to throw it in the bathtub.  You have to draw the line somewhere.

If I only had to work on one or two photos I could accept it.  If it didn't break so terribly from v2.7 I could accept it.

But I can't accept waiting for the beach ball to stop spinning every time I touch something when dealing with about 30 photos at a time.

This is just unacceptable.

[Keith Reeder]

malcolmmw wrote:

If I had any idea beforehand I never wouldn't upgraded even if it was free.  I will never trust this company again to get it right.

So you didn't download and test the living bejeebuz out of it before upgrading into a live production environment?

Seriously - not a very bright decision, was it? It amazes me that anyone would do that, but - now that I know - I've got a really nice bridge for sale...

[malcolmmw]

malcolmmw wrote:

If I had any idea beforehand I never wouldn't upgraded even if it was free.  I will never trust this company again to get it right.

Keith_Reeder wrote:

So you didn't download and test the living bejeebuz out of it before upgrading into a live production environment?

Seriously - not a very bright decision, was it? It amazes me that anyone would do that, but - now that I know - I've got a really nice bridge for sale...

Seriously, how do you know I didn't test the living bejeebuz out of it and found that it ran fine in the test environment.  It amazes me how clueless some people are.

[hamish niven]

malcolmmw wrote:

malcolmmw wrote:

If I had any idea beforehand I never wouldn't upgraded even if it was free.  I will never trust this company again to get it right.

Keith_Reeder wrote:

So you didn't download and test the living bejeebuz out of it before upgrading into a live production environment?

Seriously - not a very bright decision, was it? It amazes me that anyone would do that, but - now that I know - I've got a really nice bridge for sale...

Seriously, how do you know I didn't test the living bejeebuz out of it and found that it ran fine in the test environment.  It amazes me how clueless some people are.

Amazes me how some people dont test properly, if its taken you this long to complain and rant and then imply your testing was good enough, it obviously was not sufficient.

[malcolmmw]

Amazes me how some people dont test properly, if its taken you this long to complain and rant and then imply your testing was good enough, it obviously was not sufficient.

Obviously.  But I that's why I don't participate in beta programs anymore because it involves a lot of time. 

When you buy software you usually expect it to work at least as well as the current version, but I violated my own rule to never use v.0 anything because I never experienced any of the problems with LR 1.0 or 2.0.  I also let myself to be more complacent since I shifted from Windows to Mac a few years ago.  I just haven't been burned in a long time.

It sounds like the devs are here and will get this fixed.