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

[Pascal_O]

Martin,

I have a D300 and I'm processing only 14bits RAW files. My current library contains around 18_000 pictures.

Pascal.

[TK2142]

teho59 wrote:

Hopefully it is just a combination of hardware/software that causes this strange sluggishness in LR3. I hope Adobe is working hard on this, else they would loose a lot of customers very fast!

- Terje

We've seen some people going back to LR2.7 and others claiming refunds, but I don't think financially it is a noticable sting for Adobe. Customers could vote a lot more with their feet than they do.

I wish the user interface of Bibble 5 were as nice as that of LR. It can do so many more things (all image adjustments are applicable to localised areas and there is much better cloning and patching support), does non-destructive editing and performs really well (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2uH_NPnbgM). In the demo they use a very powerful machine but I tried it on my machine and adjustment brushes are always very fluent, no matter how many of them you apply. I truly hope Adobe can get closer to this because in terms of usability, they have the edge with LR. For instance, I like to see the effect of an adjustment brush while I'm painting. Bibble 5 always shows you the overlay mask while you are drawing. There are a lot of small things like that which -- for me personally -- make LR more usable. If Adobe cannot address the performance problems in 3.1, I'll make an effort to reprogramme myself so that I'll start liking the Bibble 5 user interface.

[Keith Reeder]

TK2142 wrote:

I truly hope Adobe can get closer to this because in terms of usability, they have the edge with LR.

All well and good. But in terms of image quality, Lr 3 is in another league compared to Bibble 5, if you use certain cameras like the Canon 7D.

Seriously, Bibble is not even in the game, and they're more interested in tweaking the bells and whistles (like spending an inordinate amount of time and resource recently on reworking the plug-in SDK) while actively, continually ignoring the godawful demosaicing it currently uses: it's not even remotely as good as the free Raw Therapee in terms of IQ, and a hundred miles behind Capture One 5 as well.

[Brian Noppe]

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. 😄  (and yeah, I'm knocking on wood)

Have you other folks experiencing problems done these steps?

Cheers!

Brian

[davidnaylor83]

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]

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

[Wanchese West]

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]

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.

[Wanchese West]

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.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Oh well, it was worth a shot!  There are so many levels of experience here, you can't take anything for granted.

[Wanchese West]

...and considering I am new to the forum, a good suggestion..

[davidnaylor83]

Did you mean 19,000 or 190,000?

[arnelg]

With all due respect because there is Lr 2, an older version which processes at half the time and uses half of the ram and we actually have real work to do. I believe, most would agree that a new version must perform better.

I agree with you Photo_op8.

[davidnaylor83]

arnelg wrote:

With all due respect because there is Lr 2, an older version which processes at half the time and uses half of the ram and we actually have real work to do. I believe, most would agree that a new version must perform better.

Half the time: Really? But with LR3 you're getting twice the IQ!

Half the ram? Stop looking at your RAM usage and just do your work. The Windows ram measurement is nowhere near reliable anyway, and doesn't show you the real usage.

[lkemper]

I have a MacPro4.1 Eight Core with 14GB of ram OS 10.5.8.  I just downlaoded 3000 images I took at a swim meet today and I am in the Develop module going through the images and rating them and maybe addong some fill light when necessary.  It is taking between 3-5 sec for each image to get in foucus and render, which I figure adds up to 3 hours of my time waiting for images to render.  And on top of that it has locked and frozen 5 times now and I have had to Force Quit and continue.  I never had these problems with Lightroom 2.  What is up with this?

[Guest]

This sucks.  Windows 32bit, 3GB Ram, Quad Core processor.  CS5 allocates all free RAM to CS5 when it opens.

Lightroom only gets 700mb even though my machinne has 3000mb.   There is an obvious flaw by which Vista is not allowing lightroom to access more RAM.  Working on one RAW image easily puts me over the bar and I can not even export a full size jpeg as a result.  What a pain!

[camerahans]

There certainly are problems with LR 3 with respect to being very slow. But why are you doing your rating in the Develop module. Use the library module for that! That should at least give some more speed for this work.

[lkemper]

Tried that and it wasn't any faster and this way I can twezk settings as I go through the images.

[camerahans]

surely it doesn't show the real usage. It is worse than that!

Why Am I answering rthis kind of posts?

[Guest]

Here's what I've tried with no success.

System is a quad core 4mb RAM Windows 32 bit vista.

I tried messing with BCDEDIT to increase UserVa 3072.  I noticed a little improvement with LR but, not much.  The instability that it caused to the system just wasn't worth the trouble for the little increase I got in LR.  So, I reset the value.

As it stands ... i get the following working on ONE RAW file.

Built-in memory: 3070.5 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 716.8 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 807.0 MB (112.5%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 898.3 MB
Memory cache size: 35.7 MB

So try as I might, Vista or Lightroom is only making 716 MB of RAM available to Lightroom.  For the life of me I don't understand why we can't increase that value from within LR as we can within CS5.

Working on one RAW file is just chewing up the system resources.  In turn it brings LR to a halt.  Adjustment brushes and other adjustements lag....there is no immediate response.   It becomes un-useable working on RAW files despite the fact I exceed the system requirements but the program won't allow me to utlize what I need.

I've tried the above, I've also switched my Vista desktop to basic, closed down all processes that I can do without and shut off my antivrus.  It all makes no difference. 

There is obviously a problem within lightroom slowing it down or not allowing it to take full advantage of a system's resources.

I have music editing software and when it runs, I can literally assign all processors to it.  It blazes.

I never bothered to check system information with LR 2.7 because I never had to....it was much faster.

So, the issue is with the software and there is an obvious issue with it's ability to ultilize system resources.  You can't convince me otherwise given I've tried everything else without success.

I am tired of getting "not enough memory" message errors when trying to export full size jpgs out of LR and I am tired of getting the "Lightroom Not Responding" stalling messages that I get when making multiple adjustments to my work.  My workflow has pretty much grided to a halt.  I am not pleased.

I called Adobe tech support and they had absolutely no clue on what the problem was.  They acknowledged I met min system requirements.  Other than that, they were no help at all.

With that said, we can complain until the cows come home.....but the fact remains that Adobe dropped the ball with 3.0.  BIG TIME.

I mean for real.....why not integrate a system resources option like one that is available in CS5?  How in the world can someone effectively adjust RAW images when system resources exceed the available RAM that LR allows to be made available to it?

I am not going to buy another system.  I would rather buy another lens. Something needs to be fixed.

That is my rant for the day.

Fulvio

[Butch_M]

FulvioE wrote:

So, the issue is with the software and there is an obvious issue with it's ability to ultilize system resources.  You can't convince me otherwise given I've tried everything else without success.

I would have to concur with this assessment ... while I do agree using a computer with plenty of horsepower can help in improving responsiveness and speed when dealing with a large quantity of RAW images ... that still does not explain why I have no issues with LR performance on a modest setup (as I listed in prior posts on this thread) ... many of my Mac brethren with faster/newer processors and graphics cards and more RAM are complaining of performance issues ... it's got to be more than just hardware related issues ....

[goodlux7]

Maybe it is the antenna.

[DJ-G]

Sunspots?

[areohbee]

I find the phases of the moon seem to have an influence as well - or maybe its just my imagination... But, definitely Lightroom has moods, which don't coincide with my own, nay maybe even just the opposite - hay! - I think I've discovered another factor...

[areohbee]

+1 post (er, I meant +1 vote). - I agree - totally useless...

Rob