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

[emmapal]

same problems here, though I must update and say my laptop is 64-bit and my desktop is 32-bit, and both have the same problems with taking forever to render any of the develop tab options. Those are the worst in terms of slow speed, but the whole thing is very slow in the other modules as well.

It's so bad i cannot work, literally cannot work. It should not take several seconds to apply a single slider drag.

What options are available to speed it up?

[camerahans]

Emma,

it is slow, but I could speed up thinks a little by putting program, cache and previews each on its own (internal) drive. What certainly did help was droppping the old (converted) previews and rerender the whole with LR3.0 For me that took a lot of time but it was certainly worth the effort.

[bob frost]

acekin wrote:

I am running the following hardware/software:

Intel i7-980 Extreme Edition 6-core CPU

12 GB Corsair Dominator RAM

2x 1 TB HD

1 GB VRAM ATI chipset video card

Windows 7 64-Bit OS

Lightroom 64-Bit

In the catalog I am using there are 28 photographs, that's it.

My complaint about the slowness is not about rendering, but actually working on the image. The software currently is absolutely unusable. Here is why:

1. In the Gallery view, I can zoom in and out no problem but in the Develop module it takes unusually long

2. Spot healing brush is impossible to use as it responds with 4-5 second delays and jumps around

3. Ditto for the Gradient Fill tool

4. When zoomed in in the Develop module, moving the image on the screen with the Hand tool has several seconds delay

I increased the Camera RAW Cache size from what it was set at, 1GB to 10GB which I believe should be plenty for 28 images. That made a small change in performance, but I will keep watching. Incidentally, LR3 ran better on my older 32-bit box, Windows XP, 4GB RAM. I never touched the cache size and everything was much, much better than what I am experiencing on teh 64-bit platform. Is it possible that this slowness is a 64-bit issue? Constantly watching the configuration parameters to eek out a decent performance is not very encouraging for me.

I find your post interesting because I am also using Win7x64 with a mere i7 920 cpu, 12GB ram, but with a SSD for the system, and another SSD for my catalog and previews. The image nefs are on a 2TB internal HDD. I have 50,000 images in my catalog and NONE of your problems!! Without the SSDs the library is slower, but I still do not have your Develop problems. Sounds as though you may have a graphics card problem which is slowing the screen response down? Have you tried a different graphics card?

bob Frost.

[Guest]

Bob, after I increased the cache size to 10GB the system has become  usable. Then, the point I made was "why do the user need to go to the  depths of configuration and guess what these settings should be?" I  think I will hobble along until the maintenance release.

[bob frost]

acekin wrote:

Bob, after I increased the cache size to 10GB the system has become  usable. Then, the point I made was "why do the user need to go to the  depths of configuration and guess what these settings should be?" I  think I will hobble along until the maintenance release.

Have you tried clearing the cache? The same cache stores partly-rendered images for all versions of LR.

I found that a lot of problems with LR3 were solved by upgrading my 50K LR2 catalog, deleting everything in the previews folder INCLUDING the previews.db and the root-pixels.db, deleting the old cache, and then generating new STANDARD previews (and cache - automatic). After generating the new previews, tell it to do them again; it may not have completed them on the first  (or even second run if you have tens of thousands). Then set the library to ALL PHOTOGRAPHS and leave it to sort itself out for a few hrs (or if you use Resource Monitor until the reading/writing to the previews.db and root-pixels.db are completed.) Generating 1:1 previews will just slow everything down, both rendering them and accessing them afterwards in Library.

I also found that I had a lot of duff entries accumulated in my LR2 catalog, which LR3 did not seem to like (they didn't upset LR2). Most of these could be got rid of by exporting the entire upgraded catalog to a new one - before creating the new previews etc.

There were a lot of problems with graphics cards in LR2; those of us with nVidia cards had to fiddle with the nVidia control panel settings to improve things, but later drivers seemed to have sorted this out.

My graphics cards that have no problems with LR3 are bog-standard nVidia 8600 GT and 7600 GT (in different desktops) with the latest drivers. Not the latest, fastest things on the planet, but they were/are in Adobe's list of tested cards for CS4/5.

Bob Frost

[MikeX_ZA]

I believe graphics cards play a big role in the speed of LR but I've yet to see anyone produce the magic potion solution. I have an Adobe approved and tested card Nvidia 9800 GT and to this day all versions of LR are sluggish and I've tried about every tweak imaginable. I had LR 2.7 at a point where it was quite usable (no fireworks though) and LR3 in my personal experience is an absolute disaster and much slower than 2.7. There are many who say they have seen an increase in speed and many who have said they have seen the opposite as I have.

I know that speed improvements to LR was at the top of Adobe's list for version 3 and I am pretty sure they actually achieved this but in the real world many are not seeing the same thing. So I'm not disputing whether Adobe got it right or wrong because I do believe they would have made considerable improvements in speed but here at ground zero I have to move back to 2.7 until someone can provide the magic answer to a fast LR 3.

I am hesitant to spend money on any card that Adobe has tested and approved because my current card was listed on the Adobe site as exactly that but does not perform well with Lightroom nor does it perform well on Photoshop CS4 when I have GPU support turned on. I certainly am willing to spend money a new card if it will speed things up but I am looking for a common denominator amongst those who have these lightning fast Lightroom's on their machines and I just cannot seem to find it amongst these lengthy forum posts. So if anyone has the recommendation of the "magic" video card for Adobe's products ..... pipe up !!!

My system is by NO means underspec'd (below) to run any Adobe product and in fact not a single piece of software on my PC does not perform like a beast other than Lightroom.

LR3 is drastically slower than 2.7 for me, I've tried tweaking the Nvidia application specific settings to no avail. Yesterday I deleted all the previews to recreate them which was a fix that worked in 2.7 to speed things up. So far LR3 is a good 50% (or more) slower at rendering the previews than 2.7. I'll give you an example. In LR2.7 I had a catalogue of 120,000+ images and it took approximately 32 hours to render standard sized previews for them all. Since then my catalogue is down to 88,000 and in 24 hours LR3 has just hit the 50% mark so I'm easily in for a full 48 hour ride to recreate the previews and that's with a catalogue that's approx 40,000 images less than when I did this same excercise in LR 2.7 ???? How is that faster?? and more importantly can the video card be the culprit affecting the rendering of these previews??

If someone has a SOLID recommendation for a replacement video card, please be so kind and share the info. All I am seeing in these forums is whinging, whining and bickering with VERY LITTLE actual solutions to people's problems. I certainly don't have time to b1tch about the product that is slow and to try and blame Adobe because clearly it does not work. I am simply looking for a solution that works and I don't think that's asking too much.

My specs:
---------------------------
Intel DX58SO
Intel Core I7-965XE
8GB DDR-3 Kingston Ram
Intel SSD for OS and Applications
Seagate Savvio 10K.3 SAS for LR Catalogue
Seagate 1TB Sata-2 Drives for Originals
Nvidia 9800GT
LR3 x64
LR2.7 x64
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate

[Lee_Jay-ZyZk56]

MikeX_ZA wrote:

I believe graphics cards play a big role in the speed of LR ...

Well, I have one system that's quite fast on LR 3 that uses the Intel integrated graphics in a ULV laptop, so doubt raw graphics performance plays much of a role.  Maybe there are bugs that make things go horribly on some otherwise-fast graphics subsystems, I don't know.

On the other hand, fast I/O subsystems seem to have a very dramatic effect on LR3 performance, indicating possible contention in the I/O by the various LR threads.

[MikeX_ZA]

So maybe I will then rip this Nvidia card out this weekend and enable the onboard video with Intel's drivers and see if anything improves. Will see if I'm in the mood this weekend and will report back if I see any changes.

I still believe there are people here in the forums who continually respond to forum posts about slowness that say their LR's have always been fast and it seems they are all very secretive about their video cards and system specs which I really would still like to see.

What hardware does Adobe actually test the product on before release? What video card's does Adobe use?? none of this info makes it into these forums. If Adobe said to me we used this mobo, this processor, this video card, these hdd's ... etc etc etc ..... believe me I would spend the cash tomorrow to see what Adobe see's. Ultimately the slowness of the product costs me more money in wasted time than if I spent the cash getting the hardware they approved of.

So as I say, I still eagerly await seeing the magic potion revealed.

[areohbee]

I remember a few years ago (maybe more) I was trying to build a computer that would play blu-ray.

I must of went through a dozen different video cards - every one had some new flavor of performance snafu - higher end cards were the worst.

There are other examples...

The point is that the graphics subsystem is the most complex subsystem and is somewhat out of the hands of the operating system, and of Adobe.

It has less to do with raw speed and more to do with everything being on the same page (figuratively speaking)...

PS - I finally bought a consumer blu-ray player - Now all new high-end computers can play blu-ray...

Rob

[MikeX_ZA]

If Adobe actually came out and said "hey guys, this is the hardware spec's we use inhouse to test the product through all it's beta stages until final release" we could at least start heading in the right direction. Serious pro's would not hesitate spending the cash on new hardware that fitted Adobe's specs. You simply cannot go by the minimum/recommended specs on the box because they are inadequate for those with large catalogues and image files that come from a D3x or other high res body.

I've worked with much software in my life with computers (since Dos 1.0 days) and in all those years I often came across specialist applications that had very specific hardware specifications which you had to follow, some of those vendors would not even sell you the software without them providing the hardware they knew would work 100% or would tell you outright that if you did not follow their hardware spec then they would not be interested in supporting you when ran into problems. Of course Adobe is not ever going to do that but they could come out right off the bat and say if you really want to see this product perform then THIS is what you need.

There must be someone from Adobe on these forums who can share such information, sure hope so.

[areohbee]

Mike,

I hear ya.

It'll be interesting to see if Adobe just gets it working with most off-the-shelf video cards (which I assume is their present strategy) or resorts to a hardware compatibility list (I'm guessing this would be a "Plan B").

Reminder: Things were a lot simpler in the days of DOS 1.0. Nowadays, things change with different drivers and OS updates and apps installed and motherboard hardware and chipsets... Probably not as simple as a list of compatible hardware in the case of Lightroom - Adobe has in fact said they are still trying to figure out how the symptoms are influenced by hardware and systems...

Its entirely possible that if you built a computer like Adobe uses in their labs (exact same hardware) you'd still have problems they don't because of other apps installed and in what order, weird things that happen with continued use, ...

Rob

[MikeX_ZA]

Things were a lot simpler in the days of DOS 1.0

The good old days Rob 

[goodlux7]

If Adobe came out with a $4000 system that only ran lightroom and nothing

else, but ran lightroom very well, I bet a lot of pros would buy that.

The only reason I have a desktop is to edit and manage photos.

I find it fascinating that Canon can make a hand-held battery powered camera

that can create and compress 10 photos per second, but there's no consumer

machine that can sufficiently deal with the output.

Why don't they make a DIGIC III co-processor that you can in install in a

PC?

[Guest]

I can see, possibly, the impact of the graphics card on the develop module. The card I am using is an MSI, ATI-Chipset card with 1GB of VRAM. However, I do not understand how my increasing the cache size from 1GB to 10GB could have somehow helped with the performance in that case. Also, I am not sure how much of the rendering, or generating standard size previews is done on the GPU and how much on the CPU. My guess (and only a guess) is that it is more CPU intensive operation as the image rendering does not, or need not have visual manifestation.

[goodlux7]

Just guessing, but maybe this difference in speed (slower when generating

previews) is due to the new "2010" image processing algorithms. They

supposedly produce better quality images, but maybe they take longer to

produce all that image quality goodness. I can't even tell the difference

between images, so I take Adobe's word that they are "better".

I've noticed that preview generation seems a lot slower on my machine, but I

don't have any hard data.

What I often wonder is why doesn't Adobe make a "preview agent" that runs in

the background at (very) low priority to make thumbnails and previews when

the user isn't around? I think Picasa has something like this, and it seems

to make a lot of sense. Right now LR not only seems slow, but it seems to

slow everything else (like web browsing) down.

[areohbee]

bob frost wrote:

Sounds as though you may have a graphics card problem which is slowing the screen response down? Have you tried a different graphics card?

I have a hunch the graphics interface may be at the root of a lot of the bizarre performance behavior we see. - just a hunch...

Rob

[Mikkasa]

areohbee wrote:

bob frost wrote:

Sounds as though you may have a graphics card problem which is slowing the screen response down? Have you tried a different graphics card?

I have a hunch the graphics interface may be at the root of a lot of the bizarre performance behavior we see. - just a hunch...

Rob

I share that hunch. I've just been trying out LR on an iMac similar in age to mine (new 27" quad-core 2.66/4Gb) with the same memory and (I think) internal drive. It was a smaller (5000 image) catalog on a core duo machine (note: we already know relative processor grunt means very little to LR3 performance) with everything set up right AFAICS, and it was noticeably slower using tools and rendering.

The only significant difference between the two machines is the graphics card: mine's an ATI Radeon HD 4850 with 512mb onboard RAM while my friend's mac has an ATI Raedon 4670 w/ 256Mb onboard. This shared hunch goes back to LR2 for me, as I always assumed slow LR performance on my MacBook was down to the weedy GPU setup, hence splashing on the better-specced iMac this time round. I'm really glad I did!

My other hunch is that GPU grunt is a lot more complicated than simple card+driver specs; the time it would take to test the myriad flavours of cards, drivers and systems out there, with all the variables that represents, is the reason the fix is taking so long to come about.

[hamish niven]

Guessing that is a BAD one.  The only 3 times I did that with LR2 it broke the catalogue and I had to use a backup. I would definitely NOT do that again.  Really bad

hamish NIVEN photography on the move

Message was edited by: hamish niven typo form iphone thinking it can spell better than I can

[Guest]

I upgraded with the download. If Lightroom 2.7 and and Photoshop CS4 are working relatively well for me with pretty well spec'd and pretty modern hardware, I would expect the LR3 upgrade to work at least as smoothly without having to do any special optimizing or buying any new hardware, barring a warning to that effect from the manufacturer. And, with all the reported problems, the manufacturer is not offering any good possible solutions. And Photoshop CS5 seems to be having major problems too for many people.

For the record, tried discarding 1:1 previews, optimizing the catalog, increasing and decreasing the ACR cache, defragging the hard drive, deleting the preference file. No go. Brief hints of fast performance, but mostly slow as molasses. Awful, horrible, useless.  I am trying to earn a living with this software.  Just installed a trial of Aperture 3 and it is smooth and fast.

[Guest]

While I have to say that Lr 3 is noticably slower than Lr 2.x (spot healing, cropping are the most egregious examples), I have a feeling that my issues are nowhere near those reported by most folks who have posted to this thread. Lr 3 is still quite usable for me. The IQ improvements and lens correctiion (particularly for my UWA lens) are well worth the slight degradation in speed.

For the record, I'm using a Mac Pro 1,1 running OSX 10.6.3 with 12 GB of RAM.

[camerahans]

one thing that keeps bothering me is that I see rendering in the grid, filmstrip, navigator etc. While I would like to see the difference between colour and B&W in the filmstrip I couldn't care less about real colours etc. For me it is only a navigating tool. I think it might be usefull to only render what really is needed to work with a file. Just my 2 cts.

[Nick Walker]

Lightroom V3 has great potential but is slower than V2.7 using certain tools. Multiple use of the spot removal tool slows the system down to the spinning beech ball - V2.7 didn't with 8 meg RAM - since installing LIghtroom V3, 14GB RAM installed.

V3 seems snappy enough on my system, until certain tools are in operation.

Mac Pro 2 x 2.8 GHz - quad-core Intel

Mac OS X 10.6.4

14 GB RAM

Plenty of hard drives and space.

Lightroom V3 - one catalogue only - 1.08 GB (optimised).

[JayS_In_CT]

For me, the biggest difference in overall speed comes with turning off the "detail".  Everything seems almost 2.7 like (at least while editing).  Of course, part of the whole thing with LR3 is the great Noise Reduction feature (sorry if this is a duplicate post from within this thread..  starting to get too long to keep up!)  🙂

Jay S.

[Jim Stamates]

And there's the problem, it wasn't supposed to be LR2.7 like, it was supposed to be much faster. Built from the ground up for speed.

[JayS_In_CT]

Jim,

Can't argue that, just trying to give a pointer to help with the current situation.  There are other places where there is a rerendering going on that I'm not sure is necessary as well.  Example, I've updated my 7D images in LR3 with an NR preset I built for ISO 3200.  I pretty much autosync or sync the whole batch shot at that ISO for a given shoot.  When I go back to now work on Recovery, for example. I'm seeing a "lesser" version displayed when I'm making the adjustment and then the image "redrawn" again back to the level of NR I had established.  I don't see this behavior in 2.7.  Seems like excess cycles to first lower the resolution and then redraw it?  This only happens in "fit" mode, not fill or 1:1.... Maddening.

I think it will get there..but agree, we're a far cry from where I hope the end result will be.  I do like the analogy someone made about a camera manufacturer releasing a camera that took 3 or 4 firmware upgrade to get to what was promised to be there on day 1 launch.  "Sorry we're not quite at 8 FPS yet, in the next firmware release".   🙂

I'm really not trying to make light.. It is hard to work in diminshed speeds when pushing hundreds of images through.

Jay S.