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

[Aaron Gilpin]

Just wanted to give you my two cents worth,  I downloaded the trail version and found it super slow ie. waiting upto 5 seconds to apply any changes with adjustment brush etc. Im using a basic imac with with 1GB ram and 2.4 ghz intel core 2 duo. My first thought was to upgrade the ram so i added another 1GB and now I have no problems at all its as fast as I need it to be.

[Guest]

Where you running in 64 bit or 32 bit (it loads in 64 bit by default).

I have 3G ram on the same setup - and it crashed the mac when running in 64 bit - just about ran in 32 bit.

I have had to do a clean reinstall of 10.5.8 and am ordering extra ram - when  I get LR up again, I shall let you know how I get on.

p.s. When I tried running LR2 in 64 bit it also crashed the mac.

[Guest]

I am one of the ones who has been having serious trouble with the LR3 upgrade. Tried discarding 1:1 previews, trashing the preference file, repairing disk permissions, defragging the HD, recalibrating the monitor, based on the suggestions of various recognized and self-appointed experts. None of this worked. Finally gave up and increased the RAM from 4 to 8 GB and that seems to have worked so far (knock on wood). Don't know if I would have bought the upgrade at this point if I'd known that I would have to spend another $400 on more RAM. Yes, the additional RAM is welcome but it is not something I absolutely need right now. However, when I got a glimps of the possibilities of LR3, I got sucked in. Maybe that was Adobe's plan? As suggested, I could have tried the trial first, but the upgrade wasn't that expensive and it got some very good reports from some people I respect who put it to hard real-world commercial use.

I also think that Adobe needs competition to keep them on their toes. Looks like Photoshop CS5 has been having its share of problems too. If it is really just a matter of having adequate system resources, fine. Just tell us what we really need. I simply cannot conceive of Lightroom 3 working at all with the 2GB of RAM which Adobe recommends for a minimum. Hell, 2GB of RAM is not even enough for LR2 in my experience.

24" Imac, 2.66gh Core2 Duo processor, 8GB RAM. OS 10.5.7.

While I am at it, I will report something else which has started to occur since upgrading to LR3: other programs are freezing on me and after I force quite them I cannot reopen them (I get Mac error message -600). When I try to restart the computer it won't  shut down and I have to manually press the power button to get it to shut down. Anyone have any similar experiences or suggestions where I might get some authoritative advice on this (assuming Adobe people aren't going to try to field this themselves). I am inclined now to remove Lightroom 3 from my computer entirely.

[Mikkasa]

2010DME wrote:

If it is really just a matter of having adequate system resources, fine. Just tell us what we really need. I simply cannot conceive of Lightroom 3 working at all with the 2GB of RAM which Adobe recommends for a minimum. Hell, 2GB of RAM is not even enough for LR2 in my experience.

That should be 2Gb of RAM for LR alone, I think. One of the issues I have with memory is er, it's because of erm... no, sorry, it's gone...

Oh yes: the way I generally read it, if a min spec is quoted as (among other things) '2Gb RAM' you're supposed to have 2Gb installed, not 2Gb freely available at any given time. LR3 clearly needs between 1 and 2Gb at any given time, leaving little headroom for anything else. The min spec should therefore be 3Gb, possibly 4...

other programs are freezing on me and after I force quite them I cannot reopen them (I get Mac error message -600). When I try to restart the computer it won't  shut down and I have to manually press the power button to get it to shut down. Anyone have any similar experiences or suggestions where I might get some authoritative advice on this (assuming Adobe people aren't going to try to field this themselves). I am inclined now to remove Lightroom 3 from my computer entirely.

Right now have LR3 open and it's using 1 Gb idle; a browser, Mail and three other smaller apps, along with the system itself takes my current usage up to 2.45Gb. If I task LR it will typically leave me with less than 300Mb free, which might be an eyebrow-raiser but its generally not a problem. However (I noted this upthread but as you mentioned something similar I'll repeat it) if I do something to a lot of images simultaneously (multi-selected or whatever) this can start to get out of hand, and when I was updating metadata for the whole catalogue led to the exact situation you describe. With nothing else open, at this point LR will hang while hogging ~3.2 of my 4Gb total memory and the system gets extremely sluggish, even after I force-quit LR. A restart fixed everything. However I get the impression if I had 8Gb of RAM and asked enough of it, it would hog most of that too and still end up hanging...

Maybe you weren't doing anything quite so 'heavy' at the time, but the results sound the same. My LR workflow is absolutely fine, zippy even, if I keep to 'normal' small, local changes. Apart from 'make sure you've read that blog post' I'm afraid that's all I can suggest, but hopefully it will make LR usable for you in the short term.

Mine's a 2.66 quad-core iMac 27" BTW.

[JayS_In_CT]

All,

I mentioned this earlier (maybe in this thread or another) and it was a suggestion to me from another member.

If you're working with a group of images, all the same ISO, e.g. staged theater performance, where the amout of NR/Sharpening is likely to be the same, try turning detail off while you do your other editing and see if that helps performance.  It is a simple matter of selecting all the images when done, turn on Auto Sync and turn Detail back on before export.  With especially large RAW file like from the 7D, I've found this very helpful..  Just offering a workflow tip while Adobe looks at these issues.

Jay S.

[Ian Lyons]

If you're working with a group of images, all the same ISO, e.g. staged theater performance, where the amout of NR/Sharpening is likely to be the same, try turning detail off while you do your other editing and see if that helps performance.  It is a simple matter of selecting all the images when done, turn on Auto Sync and turn Detail back on before export.  With especially large RAW file like from the 7D, I've found this very helpful..  Just offering a workflow tip while Adobe looks at these issues.

It has always been the case that the default setting for colour noise reduction imposes a performance penalty on processing previews, updating same after adjusting a develop slider or applying a brush in local adjustments. With the new noise algorithms the amount of processor grunt required has increased significantly. There is also an issue (bug) associated with higher screen resolutions that seems to have slipped into the performance mix. So, yes, turning colour noise in particular to off will help, but turning off the detail panel in it's entirety seems like overkill. However, be warned that it's likely that either  will cause other problems because many of the adjustments in Detail panel will have an impact on saturation and to lesser extent hue. Therefore, if everything is off and you tweak an image to your liking then switch Detail on there's good chance that some of the earlier edits will no longer be optimal.

[JayS_In_CT]

Ian,

No disagreement.  I'm primarily talking about major repetitive work and that without Detail on, you can expedite.  Yes, it is signficantly more of an impact with the new NR processing.  For places where you need to make sure subtle adjustments are the way you want them, Detail should be on.  Thanks.

Jay S.

[areohbee]

+.02 - Just so the newcomers understand: Lightroom is slow to radically different degrees and in different ways for different people - no doubt due to a multitude of bugs that may or may not bite... Those for whom some aspect is a little bit slow may find some solace in small-hammer work-arounds that noticably improve performance, however if your brush strokes are lagging by a few to several seconds (as mine usually-but-not-always do), there is small comfort in solutions that shave off a quarter of a second...

Rob

[Guest]

areohbee wrote:

... however if your brush strokes are lagging by a few to several seconds (as mine usually-but-not-always do), there is small comfort in solutions that shave off a quarter of a second...

Rob

When I first reported the healing brush being extremely slow, I meant the movement of the brush without even clicking to heal anything. If the brush does not follow the mouse movement before some delay, it becomes impossible to use it since placing it on a blemish with some level of accuracy requires 20-30 second effort with many small jumps. Then the wait starts for it to work. This is happening on a loaded computer, probably as fast as one can get today. Needed: bug crushing, then a review of the functional architecture of the software. Issues like the cache size and clearing the cache, or turning off some functions are too arcane for many users, or not very reasonable to expect from them. How would you like if your TV picture quality got better as you lowered the volume? Mute it and perfect picture! Not very usable, is it?

I am a reasonably seasoned (read as old) computer user, I have seen them all, from TRS-DOS to CPM, to .... In this day and age, software users should not be required to constantly tweak it to get the best performance from it. Transparency of complexity is an operative concept here. Complexity should be several levels removed from the user. That is the mark of great software and hardware of any kind. I am sure anyone can find many examples of these. For example, an analog wristwatch represents a very transparent technology: look, know time. Simple, efficient, highly effective.

[areohbee]

acekin wrote:

When I first reported the healing brush being extremely slow, I meant the movement of the brush without even clicking to heal anything. If the brush does not follow the mouse movement before some delay, it becomes impossible to use it since placing it on a blemish with some level of accuracy requires 20-30 second effort with many small jumps

This is totally different than what I experience - for me, the brush moves instantaneously, its the effect that lags (and I'm talking about the local adjustment brush, not the Dust Spot Removal tool, although the DSR tool behaves similarly for me).

Anyway, I also have a relative adjustment plugin (DevAdjust) that for some people is fast when accessed in the Library module, but slow when accessed in the Develop module, and other people say just the opposite is true for them! (and some say its fast in both modules, some say slow in both modules).

So, I rest my case about performance symptoms being radically different for different people.

PS - I'm sure Adobe also wants it to work well regardless if your facing North or South...

Rob

[Cary W]

I just got here and see that this discussion has been going on for a while, so I'll just weigh in in the hope that the sheer number of complaining voices will bring some results.

My setup: iMac 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM. Haven't tried it yet on my MacBook Pro with identical configuration.

For me the problem is overall sluggishness and the occasional dreaded beachball. But the worst comes with the local adjustment brush where there is an annoying lag time between performing an action and seeing its result. This makes it almost impossible to do detailed masking. Everything seems to have gotten worse the longer I've used LR 3.

Anyway, I haven't yet tried trashing plists, prefs or reinstalling, so I guess that's next.

[Larry Loos]

Has anyone considered CODEC? I have installed a codec pack from FastPictureViewer (http://www.fastpictureviewer.com/codecs/) on my WIN7 64-bit PC and aren't having many of the issues discussed here and I am wondering if that is the reason why. What do you think? Someone should try it out and see if it changes things.

I also have Shark007's Free codec pack (http://shark007.net/) installed, although I believe it's mainly for video.

Anyways... just a thought.

[calm_Light157F]

Hi,

I can get the full speed back by lowering my screen resolution from 1920x1200 to 1280x800 but I guess that is already known stuff.

I have Nvidia GTX 275, Q6600@3.2GHz, 4GB memory.

- Terje

[goodlux7]

Have you tried putting your screen physically below the CPU?

Having exhausted all other hope for speeding up LR, I just tried this

with my iMac...and it seems to speed up the previews slightly.

Of course because of the oh so clever construction iMac, to put the

processor above the screen you simply tilt the computer over, placing

it sceen down. An added shake seems further improve the experience.

Only Adobe knows for sure, but I think the speed improvements I'm

seeing are caused by the electrons and pixels falling back out of the

CPU (or GPU...not sure) back into the lightroom catalouge.

The only problem is that I can no longer see photos, or do any work.

Has anyone tried this? Ideas?

[areohbee]

I think you've made your point!

On the other hand, people are still trying to shed any light on this that they can, and come up with work-arounds... - not in lieu of an Adobe solution, but until one.

I was going to suggest for people who have the more specific Lr3 performance issues, that they can use both Lr2 and Lr3 - use Lr2 for all the stuff that's too slow in Lr3, then finish in Lr3 - to add lens corrections and PV2010... - I know its tacky, but sometimes you have to compromise. It took Nikon a few months to fix a memory leak in NX2 - During that time, I would edit for a few minutes, save, close, re-open, edit some more...

Rob

[hamish niven]

goodlux7 wrote:

Have you tried putting your screen physically below the CPU?

Having exhausted all other hope for speeding up LR, I just tried this

with my iMac...and it seems to speed up the previews slightly.

Of course because of the oh so clever construction iMac, to put the

processor above the screen you simply tilt the computer over, placing

it sceen down. An added shake seems further improve the experience.

Only Adobe knows for sure, but I think the speed improvements I'm

seeing are caused by the electrons and pixels falling back out of the

CPU (or GPU...not sure) back into the lightroom catalouge.

The only problem is that I can no longer see photos, or do any work.

Has anyone tried this? Ideas?

once I read this 3 times and finally saw your falling electrons, I think you may have a point.

you can bridge your iMac across a pair of bar stools and lie on your back, you will then need to rest your mouse and keypad on something, and ideally have a beer and a straw.

Working wont be easy but after the 4th beer, who cares, and I think the neurons will be falling out of your ears, maybe that will help.

And at least you can see the screen.

[DanTull]

Very funny, though I'm not sure why you're ridiculing the original poster since their observation is an astute one.

Reducing screen resolution (or, more simply, the amount of the screen that is covered by the develop view) can actually have a substantial effect on interactive rendering framerates (theoretically* around 4x if your resolution change drives the size of the loupe view across one of the pyramid size boundaries) when performing develop adjustments. Similarly, the number of thumbnails on screen in the library directly maps onto the number of requests required of the preview system to get all the thumbs filled again. The size of the thumbs similarly has an effect on how much data has to be loaded. Again, screen resolution can have a huge effect here. Add a second monitor, and you'll push it even harder.

From what I can gather from my own experiments many of the issues described are not about a specific component but about the ways the components relate to each other. Disk, CPU, RAM, video, and screen(s) sizes all have to balance with each other. Some of the substantial adjustments in Lightroom's internals opened some floodgates. When the balance is right, it can make things much smoother and faster. When it is off, it can overrun and make matters worse. Bullet proofing that and providing better back pressure against one component burying another is not easy.

Dan Tull

Lightrom QE

* I don't have the raw numbers from benchmarks handy at the moment, but the changeover at certain resolution thresholds is easily noticeable.

[Guest]

Good to know that you guys are looking at the balance. Can you share some more detailed suggestions? I use two monitors and when I install LR3 I had expected to open the program on both. Now - not so much!

(Win7 64 Home Premium, 6Gig on the motherboard, i7-920. No overclocking yet. Gigabyte X58A-3udr, some SATA3 ports with Barracuda 2TB "XT" drives plugged in to those new faster SATA ports.)

I use a mid-range nVidia GTS250 from EVGA with "only" 1Gig VRAM. It drives two monitors at 1920x1200 and 1600x1200. Avoid maximizing on both of these? Stick to smaller thumbnails?

AFAIK my 2.6 works as fast as expected. I will have a mid-range number of pictures in the catalog when I eventually switch over to LR3 and by the end of the year. Maybe 20,000.

Jonathan

[DanTull]

> Good to know... Can you share some more detailed suggestions?

Unfortunately, not yet. I'm still getting my head around this rather thorny problem (or rather this collection of problems -- it's hard to say how many issues are entwined in this thread, teasing those out is part of what I'm looking for on my first pass).

I hope to have more answers (and probably questions, first) as I go. It takes time to wade through all the noise and pick out the signals that are most likely to yield the right follow-up questions and experiments (which also take time) to pin the issues.

DT

[Guest]

  I totally agree with Adobe's Dan Tull.  I have made the same point several times in this thread - that is, that unbalanced systems seem to cause LR 3.0 fits.

  As I have posted, my experience with an overheating high end balanced system that throttled the CPU to half speed was that ultimately, once the system is balanced that underpowered CPUs become the botttleneck. Many of our tweaks are designed to bring us into balance and keep data available for the CPU to process. Increase RAM, increase Cache usage, faster disk access, improve video performance,etc.  Once I fixed the overheating problem, LR 3.0 is very fast on my system - which is to be expected on a core i7-975 based system.

   I believe that Adobe needs to give more guidance on component tradeoffs and how Lightroom performance is effected.

I repeat just my latest observation from a few days ago:

>>I think that what we have learned here is that the added features in  LR 3.0 may have pushed Lightroom beyond the knee of the curve in terms  of being forgiving of unbalanced or underpowered systems.   Much like  there is not one type of cancer with one "magic bullet" cure, there may  not be one type of configuration issue and one type of "magic bullet"  fix.

>>For  example:

>>     1.  Have you given LR 3.0 a chance to stabilize - that is all the  background previews, etc conversions are over?

>>    2.  There is a  performance penalty to be paid with external drives on USB and  firewire.  Nowhere near the speed of bus connected hardware. >>Possibly  the reason that Lightroom catalogs cannot be placed on network drives.

>>     3.   RAM constrained systems pay a performance price.

>>    4.    Are speedy video cards becoming more important?

>>    5.   Finely  tuned positioning of cache, preview, database, application, OS, and swap  files may be more important than in the past.

>>    6.   Is LR 3.0  to the point with large files and multiple exports, etc that 64 bit is  more important to power users?

>>    7.   Constraints in the above  will increase issues with bottlenecks such as underpowered CPUs.

[JayS_In_CT]

DanTull wrote:

Very funny, though I'm not sure why you're ridiculing the original poster since their observation is an astute one.

Reducing screen resolution (or, more simply, the amount of the screen that is covered by the develop view) can actually have a substantial effect on interactive rendering framerates (theoretically* around 4x if your resolution change drives the size of the loupe view across one of the pyramid size boundaries) when performing develop adjustments. Similarly, the number of thumbnails on screen in the library directly maps onto the number of requests required of the preview system to get all the thumbs filled again. The size of the thumbs similarly has an effect on how much data has to be loaded. Again, screen resolution can have a huge effect here. Add a second monitor, and you'll push it even harder.

From what I can gather from my own experiments many of the issues described are not about a specific component but about the ways the components relate to each other. Disk, CPU, RAM, video, and screen(s) sizes all have to balance with each other. Some of the substantial adjustments in Lightroom's internals opened some floodgates. When the balance is right, it can make things much smoother and faster. When it is off, it can overrun and make matters worse. Bullet proofing that and providing better back pressure against one component burying another is not easy.

Dan Tull

Lightrom QE

* I don't have the raw numbers from benchmarks handy at the moment, but the changeover at certain resolution thresholds is easily noticeable.

Dan,

I agree to a point on what you're saying.  These elements can have an effect on the overall performance without doubt.  That said, in LR 2.7 the impact of the number of thumbnails, or whether or not someone chose to use a full screen without lots of other panels, etc. did not have the impact it seems to be having in LR3.  Clearly there are issues.  We have images that go "jaggy" during editing that are stuck that way until something else changes the image (scale up, scale down or turn detail on/off, etc.).  To your balance point, I believe there are a number of code issues, not user operations, in LR 3.0 that are causing the imbalance.  Clearly there is a difference between what we saw in the beta vs. the production version.  So while the suggestions on smoothing things out are appreciated, greatly, we still need the Adobe team to address the things that they can to bring some of that balance back to the base code.  I think you're trying to say that in your last paragraph when talking about floodgates.  Hopefully there weren't too many cases of the historical developer dilemma of "please I promise, this is the last line of code I'm adding"  

Jay S.

[Jim Stamates]

I agree with Jay S,

LR 2.7 worked much better and faster than 3. I've done all the tricks and it improved speed. I was starting to enjoy LR again and then working on images last night it slowed to almost a halt in develop. Why? Don't know.

[malcolmmw]

OK, here is a pretty plain 17" MacBook Pro:

2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

500 GB 7200 RPM drive

OSX 10.6.4

I did call in right away and tried all the tricks they suggested.

I can live with the import/export slowness for now but the two things that are the hardest to deal with are the Adjustment Brush and Spot Removal.  They just slow down horribly compared to 2.7.  I think I remember once or twice in an earlier version they would slow down but a fresh start would fix it.

I'm really looking forward to 3.1 because the perspective correction tool is really nice.  No TIFF turnaround.

[DanTull]

> I think you're trying to say that in your last paragraph when talking about floodgates.

Yes. LR 2.x had some of the same sensitivities, but it had some bottlenecks that tended to throttle everything back. On one hand, that meant it went slower than it could on some systems, but in trade it tended not to flood itself under so severely because artificial internal contention restricted other kinds of resource contention between subsystems. Actually we had to work through analagous issues of throttling back certain behaviors to avoid paralyzing feedback effects even in LR 1 and 2, but the revamp in LR 3 opened up some new ones by being more distributed across threads.

There are some cases where things were accepted as being slower in order to make them more responsive (and provide progress indicators). Some people will say that "feels" faster due to the responsiveness, but some notice the walltime slowdown and don't like it. The develop rendering is shunted off to a background thread so the sliders aren't as "chunky" but it adds a little bit of extra latency to the adjustment rendering. Which is better is subjective at that point.

More tradeoffs:

Cache things to avoid needing to go back to disk or re-doing work you've already done, but not too much or you'll swap (swap is the performance kiss of death). Pre-compute some things so they'll come up faster when the user asks for them, but not at the expense of what they're asking for right now. Check that things on disk haven't changed externally so there's not a long lag before the changes show up in LR, but not so much that we never quiesce or rebuild things unnecessarily.

Anyway, now I'm just rambling, but you get the idea.

DT

[areohbee]

Dan,

I assume you realize that there are two kinds of problems in Lightroom 3.0:

1. Those making performance sub-optimal / noticeably slower than the betas or than 2.X - disappointing but still useable.

2. Those that are so bad it makes the product practically unusable. e.g. dust-spot tool that's so slow to respond to the mouse that you can't even get it positioned over the dust spot...

I hope Adobe is concentrating their efforts on solving type 2 problems first.

Rob