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

[Keith Reeder]

goodlux7 wrote:

It doesn't make up for the time you've wasted beta-testing for Adobe

That's just nonsense.

We all had 30 days to evaluate the release version Lr 3 - and that's precisely what I did - before parting with any cash.

The fact that folk have blindly waded in without taking any personal responsibility for ensuring that it will work for them, makes it hard to sympathise, really.

[hamish niven]

Keith_Reeder wrote:

goodlux7 wrote:

It doesn't make up for the time you've wasted beta-testing for Adobe

That's just nonsense.

We all had 30 days to evaluate the release version Lr 3 - and that's precisely what I did - before parting with any cash.

The fact that folk have blindly waded in without taking any personal responsibility for ensuring that it will work for them, makes it hard to sympathise, really.

unfortunately and harshly, but you are totally correct

[csaager]

Not all of us used the trial: I used beta2 for months and it was (almost)

flawless and running fast (at least faster than Lr2 I trialed earlier). As

the release appeared Adobe France offered a 15% discount to the beta testers

for a short period. Considering the extremly positive experience I had, I

bought it without going into another trial (besides I had been too busy to

spend a day or two with it)

[Keith Reeder]

Well yes, Csaager, you made what you thought was the right decision for you, and it hasn't worked out - I sympathise.

But the fact remains that software trial periods exist precisely to allow potential users to assess the product against their needs and a deliberate decision to forgo an ample opportunity to thoroughly test the software is still, at the end of the day, your decision, for better or worse.

I'm no Adobe fanboy - Lr 3 is the first Adobe product I've been anywhere near happy enough with to actually use, although I've had Lr since v1, and CS3 on my machine for a long time - and I'm living proof that not simply diving in is often a sound strategy. Lr 3 was surprisingly usable on my rickety old Win XP/Dual Core/2 GB RAM box (as long as I didn't push very hard); and on my (very) new Win 7/Quad Core/6 GB RAM machine it fairly gallops along.

I really use it only as a converter though - no use of DAM functionality, no use of the correction tools - but the point is still well made that I evaluated it thoroughly for my purposes, and it passed all tests with flying colours.

[Gary_Rowe]

Interesting as it may be pointing out that it is someone's own choice to purchase LR3, this thread is about the poor performance in version 3.0 of Adobe Lightroom that many users are experiencing. Many of which are users of LR for several years. What people need here is to understand where its problems lie, so that as many people as possible get up and running properly in spite of the problems delivered by Adobe in 3.0, by working around them.

We shouldn't be having the problems with LR3 we are. People are pissed off - accept it, it's human nature - give them validation for their feelings so that they can get past it. Unless we can help each other here, we are dependant on Adobe to release fixes, and that is done according to their own rules which we have no control over. Adobe does what Adobe does, in Adobe's own time.

So, allow the griping and complaining, accept it as valid, and let's all try to help each other get out of the pain we are in. That's what this forum is for.

[Guest]

Is this a "moral support" group, that is one that provides moral support in time of grief or trouble?  Or is it a "technical support" group established to to exchange real world experience with specific technical issues?

I, for one, am looking for the latter. One of the reasons these threads get so long is the venting that goes on.   The "piling on" either on Adobe or each other serves no useful purpose except to allow people to vent.  I am more interested in real world technical experience and information myself.

If this thread includes the "I feel your pain" stuff, maybe we need a new thread that gest us back on the technical issue at hand.

Frankly, I hope that no one responds to this post, as I really believe that we need to get back on the "real" issue.

[Pascal_O]

Sorry I'm respondonding

The "real issue" you said? Well the real issue as stated many times is a (set of) LR3 bug(s). No one has found a pattern up to now. I would just stop this thread and wait for 3.1.

[Guest]

Now that we are back on track:

     First of all, the title of this thread ensures that almost all involved probably think they have a slowdown with LR 3.0.

     The 'real" issue is what combination of circumstances causes Adobe LR 3.0 to react in the manner descibed over and over in this thread? So far, in this thread, we have not done any kind of job of organizing our experiences so that a quantifiable pattern can emerge.   Something has turned South in LR 3.0 under certain circumstances.  Many users seem to be happy.  Ignorance, "eye of the beholder", workload?   If we could quantify the environment, maybe we could focus on a workaround, as well as providing real world valuable information to Adobe and their efforts to solve the problem with 3.1.

     Without our help in quantifying the problem, I fear that 3.1 will not solve the problem.

     Someone, volunteered a while back to organize this, but so far it has not happened.

     Maybe a simple Poll of 3.0 experience relative to 2.7 (on the same harware and software) can at least get us an idea of how widespread the problem is.   On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is much much faster, 5 is the same, 1 is much much slower.

      Add in, CPU chip type and RAM size.

      Anyone volunteer to organize such a thread?

[R Owens]

You can be the HERO. I volunteer you to organize this.

[Guest]

I checked with myself, and reconfirmed that I am not available.

I informed myself that, were I available, I would have volunteered in the first place.

You see, I am not experiencing the problem any more and I am convinced based on my experience that this is a CPU based problem. That all other tweaks serve to reduce CPU usage and marginally improve things as a result, but that LR 3.0 has passed the knee of the curve in regards to CPU requirements and that it doesn't take much of an imbalance to really turn its performance South.

I have stated this, on and off, multiple times and in multiple ways in the past couple of weeks.

The only way to confirm or deny this or discover the real pattern is to organize our experiences.

At this point my system is blazing fast for all appllications, including LR 3.0 because the system is state of the art, built with best of breed individual components.  I had a cooling issue that caused the CPU chip to throttle down to half speed and that is when I experienced slowdowns.  With a new heatsink, LR 3.0 really flies now.  That is why I believe this to be a CPU problem. 

I have over 40 years of experience both developing and the analysis of the performance of operating systems.  I designed and developed I/O susbsystems for IBM and later was the CEO of a company focused on Performance Management and Capacity Planning.  Without access to the internals of LR 3.0, and measurements of its bottlenecks, I can only present an educated guess on the LR 3.0 problem.

So you see, I am really happy to share my experience and offer advice on where to go from here, but I leave it to someone with more urgent needs to take the lead in organizing this thread.

core i7-975 (overclocked to 3.73 GHZ), 12 GB RAM, 4 TB Raid 0 database. Win7 Pro 64 Bit.

[Gary_Rowe]

I did say "What people need here is to  understand where its problems lie, so that as many people as possible  get up and running properly in spite of the problems delivered by Adobe  in 3.0, by working around them" ...  but what really pisses me off is that presumably Adobe knows of at least some of the reasons for the problems we are having,  possibly (god I'd love to think so 😉  all, but in the absence of any info from them we are left trying to work things out ourselves.

I can just imagine it, lots of people spending lots of time identifying their problems and systems, and then Adobe releases 3.1 which fixes many of the problems but not all, and as most people are then happy the few remaining are left feeling abandoned ... and many of those that put all of the work in now left feeling that maybe it was in vain,  when some of the issues identified by them aren't resolved or at least acknowledged in any way ...

Most people here are looking for help, hoping to find a way out of the problems, and Adobe keeps schtum. There are resources here that would put a load of effort in if they thought it'd help ... I just wish that Adobe would loosen up and give us some direction - where do they need help in all of these systems that are showing issues that (presumably) didn't turn up in testing? Is there useful debug / system state info that we can give them? Are there things they want checked out in problem systems? Why do they give us forums and seem to ignore us most of the time? Sometimes it is the blind leading the blind here ...

If I knew what to investigate, I'd do it (and love it!).  But, in the informational vacuum that we're in, I'm loathe to do technical work that noone of relevance will look at

Or am I wrong, Adobe?

[JayS_In_CT]

Gary=Rowe wrote:

I did say "What people need here is to  understand where its problems lie, so that as many people as possible  get up and running properly in spite of the problems delivered by Adobe  in 3.0, by working around them" ...  but what really pisses me off is that presumably Adobe knows of at least some of the reasons for the problems we are having,  possibly (god I'd love to think so 😉  all, but in the absence of any info from them we are left trying to work things out ourselves.

I can just imagine it, lots of people spending lots of time identifying their problems and systems, and then Adobe releases 3.1 which fixes many of the problems but not all, and as most people are then happy the few remaining are left feeling abandoned ... and many of those that put all of the work in now left feeling that maybe it was in vain,  when some of the issues identified by them aren't resolved or at least acknowledged in any way ...

Most people here are looking for help, hoping to find a way out of the problems, and Adobe keeps schtum. There are resources here that would put a load of effort in if they thought it'd help ... I just wish that Adobe would loosen up and give us some direction - where do they need help in all of these systems that are showing issues that (presumably) didn't turn up in testing? Is there useful debug / system state info that we can give them? Are there things they want checked out in problem systems? Why do they give us forums and seem to ignore us most of the time? Sometimes it is the blind leading the blind here ...

If I knew what to investigate, I'd do it (and love it!).  But, in the informational vacuum that we're in, I'm loathe to do technical work that noone of relevance will look at

Or am I wrong, Adobe?

Gary / Sherlocc,

Perhaps I'm wrong (don't think so), but isn't that is the whole purpose of calling into Adobe and formalizing the issues you have with them.  Again, this is a user to user forum, not an Adobe to user forum.  The best we should expect here is help from each other, as best we can - some being technical, some being moral support - whatever we can.  Occasionally Adobe folks are here..  Melissa for example, whose name pops up on the credits for some Adobe products.

Things like machine configurations, etc. ARE important to Adobe..  As for Debug tools, in the hands of some, can be dangerous, and probably best left in general to a direct debugging session with Adobe Tech support.

I've suggested to Sherlocc that given his background and knowledge he should be talking to them directly.  Clearly he has a level of expertise most do not, and can probably communicate with more empirical terms.   My Lightroom runs good..not great, but better than some of what we've heard from others with far more "potent" machines.  I was just reading a Mac article (on 10.6.3 and 10.6.4) where there was some issue with the CPU overheating vs. earlier releases - which will effect performance.  In that case, looks like more an Apple issue that Adobe "reaps the benefits of" (I'll try to find the article).

Sorry for taking long to make a point, but I think the best place for any collection of specs of machines vs. problems encountered, etc. belongs in Adobe's hands first and foremost, and if there is a concern your (genericly meant) problem is not going to be covered in a 3.1 release ... well it certainly won't unless you report it to Adobe..  Again that is a generic statement.  By spending more time here talking about particular issues vs. talking directly to Adobe, all that happens is that time is lost and information potentially not getting into Adobe's hands.. not 100% not getting there, but there is certainly no guarantees that coming from here it will.

I am not taking anything away from anyone's efforts..  I just think the focus of those efforts should be targeted better perhaps.

Jay S.

[goodlux7]

The adobe people aren't here because they all left for vacation immediately

after spewing out LR 3.

"Mission accomplished!"

"See ya! Wouldn't want to be ya!"

"Pass me my margarita!"

So I deleted my previews, as suggested by someone on the thread, and rebuilt

all my previews (about 100k images). It took over a week running nightly

and some days, to rebuild the catalog. This is on a band new quad core iMac.

The results?

It still doesn't work! I'm getting the 2 minute "loading...." now for every

image.

I really need to get some work out to clients. I'm weeks behind due to this

"upgrade". I'm definitely returning my copy of LR 3 and reinstalling LR 2

and rebuilding my LR2 catalogs. 2.7 wasn't really this bad, was it? What a

mess.

As for the answer to "Why is Lightroom so slow?"

"Because you keep buying broken software and not returning it."

[JayS_In_CT]

goodlux7 wrote:

The adobe people aren't here because they all left for vacation immediately

after spewing out LR 3.

"Mission accomplished!"

"See ya! Wouldn't want to be ya!" 

"Pass me my margarita!"

So I deleted my previews, as suggested by someone on the thread, and rebuilt

all my previews (about 100k images). It took over a week running nightly

and some days, to rebuild the catalog. This is on a band new quad core iMac.

The results?

It still doesn't work! I'm getting the 2 minute "loading...." now for every

image.

I really need to get some work out to clients. I'm weeks behind due to this

"upgrade". I'm definitely returning my copy of LR 3 and reinstalling LR 2

and rebuilding my LR2 catalogs. 2.7 wasn't really this bad, was it? What a

mess.

As for the answer to "Why is Lightroom so slow?"

"Because you keep buying broken software and not returning it."

And there in lies the somewhat insanity about this.  I'm on a MBP with 2.33 Core 2 Duo, mostly eSATA drives via Expresscard.  I tried some of the things here and develop load times for a 7D run about 6 to 7 seconds now.  LR 2.7 wasn't bad at all, but doesn't have much of the newer technology I want, including the NR and Sharpening (which adds to the overhead).  There has to be something else causing you to have to wait those times.  Just curious..  Have you exported a smaller section of that catalog (under LR3) and tried to that?  Any difference with 5K images and a fresh start on previews.  Don't know how much memory you have, what external drives you may be using, etc.

Last question, did you report it to Adobe, or were they (support) on vacation as well?  (just kidding).. 

Jay S.

[Jim Stamates]

Jay S

I have pretty much the same set up as you, different hard drives.

I put in a 500gb hard drive and did a clean install of 10.5.8 to see if it would help with the slooooowness.

Maybe a little.

After a while Activity Monitor pegged at max. Found out it was Carbonite. I did a download but never signed up. Had to delete anything that had Carbonite in the name everywhere, Library, plists, etc.

Now he activity monitor is back to low unless I do some heavy lifting. Nothing conclusive here, just another part to check into.

Overall performance has increased a little since I first posted a couple of weeks ago. Can't contribute it to any specific thing. Did everything suggested on this forum, and more.

Wish I could be of more help.

And just for the note, you shouldn't have to do a trial version first if you've been using a software successfully from first launch. Updates and new versions, should just work, and work better. Been using PS since ps3, now up to CS5 and it just keeps getting better. LR3, something is amiss.

[Mikkasa]

goodlux7 wrote:

So I deleted my previews, as suggested by someone on the thread, and rebuilt

all my previews (about 100k images). It took over a week running nightly

and some days, to rebuild the catalog. This is on a band new quad core iMac.

The results?

It still doesn't work! I'm getting the 2 minute "loading...." now for every

image.

I really need to get some work out to clients. I'm weeks behind due to this

"upgrade". I'm definitely returning my copy of LR 3 and reinstalling LR 2

and rebuilding my LR2 catalogs. 2.7 wasn't really this bad, was it? What a

mess.

I'm with Jay & Jim on this: an OOTB quad-core iMac should give you very usable performance (at a minimum) with that size catalog. If you could be more specific about your setup there, including things like preview size and location, asset fie type and location, ACR cache size and concurrently-running software, we *should* be able to get you back to productive. Gotta be worth a try.

[ldw17323]

Sorry I didn't read every post on this thread but someone months ago said that on windows platforms a large number of files in the recycle bin slowed performance.  I emptied my recycle bin back then & keep it clean & my Lightroom performance did improve... a lot.  Larry

[goodlux7]

I store my image files (dng) on a firewire raid drive, which has two 2TB

drives mounted as a single 4TB drive. I also store the previews on that

drive. I haven't noticed any performance issues moving data on or off this

drive, or from other applications (say, photoshop) accessing this drive.

I use an online backup (crashplan), but I have been careful to turn off the

client and background server while generating previews.

Other than that, there is no other software running concurrently (like an

antivirus or applications) that I know of. If I do use other software...say

firefox...it is noticeably lagged while generating lightroom previews.

I've increased the cache size to 200GB in the lightroom settings. I assume

it stores them on the local drive.

The files themselves are images made with a Canon 20d, 30d, or 7d...most are

probably with the 30d. They are stored in folders by year, then shoot under

one common "photos" root drive.

I generated medium sized previews, using the maximum resolution size

available (i don't know what it is off the top of my head).

I'm not sure if there is other information that would be helpful.

[Mikkasa]

goodlux7 wrote:

I store my image files (dng) on a firewire raid drive, which has two 2TB

drives mounted as a single 4TB drive. I also store the previews on that

drive. I haven't noticed any performance issues moving data on or off this

drive, or from other applications (say, photoshop) accessing this drive.

Is that raid FW400 or FW 800? There's a big difference in transfer rates. A fast internal drive could be *much* quicker accessing your data. Before anything else, I'd try experimenting with data, previews and *everything* on your internal drive. Unplug the raid setup if possible.

I don't think it's so important how big your test catalog is, I'd suggest trying it with as many images as you can be bothered with and see if it makes a difference.

[goodlux7]

Well storing the images on the internal drive is not an option. There

are too many, so this wouldn't make sense for me. But ill try moving

the previews over to the local drive and see how it goes. I moved them

off in the first place because of performace issues (file vault), at

the advice of a blog post I read. It seemed to make sense at the time.

This is a firewire 800 interface, purchased within the past year. So

modern, up to date equipment.

[JayS_In_CT]

goodlux7 wrote:

Well storing the images on the internal drive is not an option. There

are too many, so this wouldn't make sense for me. But ill try moving

the previews over to the local drive and see how it goes. I moved them

off in the first place because of performace issues (file vault), at

the advice of a blog post I read. It seemed to make sense at the time.

This is a firewire 800 interface, purchased within the past year. So

modern, up to date equipment.

goodlux7,

I think the suggestion to try moving some of the images to the internal drive and unplug the raid unit was just to see what seemed to be what.  Not a permenent fix.  Just would be an interesting data point to see if there was a marked improvement.

Jay S.

[Mikkasa]

That's basically it. There aren't many clues here as to why two identical computers should perform so differently with the same software, but one we do have concerns data bottlenecks. As goodlux7 has a machine v similar to mine it's worth cutting out the obvious differences first.

While firewire is a fast interface for external devices, it's nowhere near as fast as internal drive access. I've heard of a couple of people who've upgraded to solid state eSATA drives (basically external version of the SATA drives used as internals) and reported vastly improved bitrates compared to FW drives. Might be an option if the internal access fixes things and the RAID has an eSATA socket..

[Guest]

"While firewire is a fast interface for external devices, it's nowhere near as fast as internal drive access. I've heard of a couple of people who've upgraded to solid state eSATA drives (basically external version of the SATA drives used as internals) and reported vastly improved bitrates compared to FW drives. Might be an option if the internal access fixes things and the RAID has an eSATA socket.."

If basic hardware capabilities are a limiting factor, should't the software maker explain that in its documentation? I mean, there are a lot of people creating big files with full-frame dslrs these days. If cpu capacity and data transfer speed are limiting factors that can easily render a program useless with bigger files, shouldn't that be made clear?  I mean, they should be able to test for that before the release. If those are real issues with LR3, then I want to return my copy because I am not going to be doing any major hardware upgrading anytime soon (and I can't add an eSata drive to an iMac). However, if it is just a bunch of bugs that will get fixed in the next update or two, I might hang on and use some other software until a reliable version is available. 

I have been using a firewire 800 drive for my LR library and backup and have no intention of moving my library to the computer's HD.

[JayS_In_CT]

2010DME wrote:

"While firewire is a fast interface for external devices, it's nowhere near as fast as internal drive access. I've heard of a couple of people who've upgraded to solid state eSATA drives (basically external version of the SATA drives used as internals) and reported vastly improved bitrates compared to FW drives. Might be an option if the internal access fixes things and the RAID has an eSATA socket.."

If basic hardware capabilities are a limiting factor, should't the software maker explain that in its documentation? I mean, there are a lot of people creating big files with full-frame dslrs these days. If cpu capacity and data transfer speed are limiting factors that can easily render a program useless with bigger files, shouldn't that be made clear?  I mean, they should be able to test for that before the release. If those are real issues with LR3, then I want to return my copy because I am not going to be doing any major hardware upgrading anytime soon (and I can't add an eSata drive to an iMac). However, if it is just a bunch of bugs that will get fixed in the next update or two, I might hang on and use some other software until a reliable version is available. 

I have been using a firewire 800 drive for my LR library and backup and have no intention of moving my library to the computer's HD.

It was meant as a diagnostic step on a smaller catalog to see if there may be a hardware issue on the poster's machine.