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

[AZDawg]

acekin, try reporting your problem here...

http://forums.adobe.com/community/general/forum_comments

Being a holiday weekend may delay a response.

Also of interest...

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/503132?tstart=30

[Jonathan Westcott]

sherlocc wrote:

Lee Jay:

    Nice try  - but no.  I am now getting less than 2 seconds with pictures not in the cache. and since I installed my SSD this afternoon for the cache, those pictures in the cache seem to be in the half second range.

    Prior to getting my temperatures under control so the CPU was not throttled down, I was getting 5 to 8 seconds rendering pictures consistently.  Probably 5 in the cache and 8 if not - but I didn't really control test the difference.

    In any event, roughly speaking, I would say that the transition picture to picture in the develop module:

     1. was around 8 seconds with a throttled CPU and no cache.

     2. was around 5 seconds with a throttled CPU and in the HDD cache.

     3. is 2 seconds               with full speed  CPU and no cache.

     4. is 1 second                 with full speed  CPu and in the the HDD cache.

     5. is less than 1/2 sec     with full speed  CPU and in the SSD cache.

   Obviously these times are eyeball approximations, but the relationships between them is the point.

   I believe the LR 3.0 problem to be a CPU bound issue that can be mollified somewhat via the "tricks" described in this forum, but that older systems with underpowered CPUs will be etretched significantly regardless of how much RAM, HDD speed, MAC vs Windows, 64 bit versus 32 bit, etc.  Certainly they have their effect, but as an analogy, you can do all the ignition, carburation, body, tire work you want to speed up your car - but you cannot overcome in any significant way an underpowered power plant.

    Exactly what should be considered underpowered with a high powered, high end product like LR is the question?  My guess is that in spite of the fact that performance is in the eye of the beholder and a function of workload - a controled survey of CPU speed correlated against LR performance would probably tell the story.  Remember, again, clearly there no doubt would be exceptions that require further investigation.

    Anecdotal evidence, while interesting, don't really prove a lot, again because of "the eye of the beholder", workload, etc.

    I ask - again - does Adobe have anything to say about this?  How much stress testing did Adobe do with less than optimal configurations?

There seems to be some oversight in the above post (and many others) in not giving specific file formats and sizes. In many cases we are comparing apples with oranges. For example my 5D mkII RAW files will be significantly slower to load than a 5D mk1 JPEG. Unless we compare like for like these times are largely irrelevent.

If we really want to compare systems and identify issues can I suggest using a common image and set of steps. I will put together something and post link(perhaps also a page to post results..). Any suggestions/scripting/help would be welcome!

Jon

[Guest]

Jon:

    In answer to your question, I exclusively process 12 megapixel compressed RAW files from my Sony Alpha 700.  I assume the compressed format adds an extra processing requirement to Lightroom's normal RAW rendering as well.  These are not lightweight files, although not full frame.

   Good idea on trying to quantify this problem.   There has to be a way to quantify performance.  I would suggest:

      1. ensuring a stable LR 3.0 for starters.  That is, no background rendering going on.

      2. maybe time the transition from picture to picture in the develop module - "virgin" (not cached), and cached.

                              Will the old one thousand one, etc be good enough?

      3. cpu speed

      4. RAM size

      5. are pictures on external or internal drive?

      6. database size?

      7. OS

      8. File size and format

   For example, how many of the improved performance anecdotes are really the result of cached versus non cached files?  Or background rendering finally finishing?  Again,  we do need controled apples against apples comparisons in order to make sense out of this.

   The point is that this needs to be consistant and easily quantifyable.  I believe that it will soon be clear that below a certain minimum cpu speed and ram size, that the rest is marginal.  In addition it will be problematic if if the system is significantly above minimum requirements, but uses slower external devices.

   In other words, I believe that a balanced system that is above some minimum processing requirement will provide reasonable performance.  In other words, balancing I/O, video drivers, wacom drives, video resolution, cache size, etc while certainly effecting performance probably is not the real culprit here.  Balancing these items will reduce CPU load, and thus improve things.  But fundamentally, the CPU may well turn out to be the real bottleneck.

   My experience was with a core i7-975 with 12 GB RAM, 64 bit Win 7, etc.  A very powerful system that was underperforming with LR 3. However I discovered an overheating problem that caused the CPU to throttle CPU speed in half, and thus causing delays in LR 3.  Once I fixed the overheating and got back to a full speed CPU, LR 3 is blazing fast, albeit on my very powerful system.  The point is that a 1.6 ghz CPU was not fast enough regardless of all the other high powered configuration components and software tweaks.  

   Again, don't get me wrong - an unbalanced system certainly is problematic, but even balancing apparantly cannot overcome a marginal CPU.

   In a past life, I ran the Corporate Computer Center at Hughes Aircraft.  At times I would call down to see how things were going, and would get the response - "it is running fine".  I would respond with, "but is it working"?.

   For many people, LR 3 may be running but it is not working.   Adobe's minimum hardware requirements, may allow LR 3.0 to "run", but apparantly - not "work" in some cases.  LR 3 has introduced something that has effected resource requirements. Hopefully Adobe can fix it.

   It is very possible that I am wrong that the CPU is fundamentally at the heart of this, but your efforts to quantify this will go a long way to help determine just what is the problem and what exactly are the resource requirements for LR 3.

Sherlocc

[Guest]

Well, after doing an erase and install of a new OS (Apple Leopard to Snow Leopard), changing the Wacom tablet driver from the most recent to the version before the last one, and disconnecting an external hard drive which may be on the way out, LR3 seems to be working really well for the most part. It still seems to get a little unresponsive when working on files that have a lot of edits, when it takes some time to move back and forth between the most recent edits and earlier states, or when working with one of the tools.

Not sure exactly which changes or combination of changes helped, but none of the problems was happening with LR2 and Leopard, with the possibly questionable external HD attached.

Equipment is an Imac 24", 2.66 gh Core 2 Duo, 4 GB Ram, OS 10.6.3. Camera is a Canon 5d II. I am a professional photographer and I need speed and reliability more than a lot of fancy features (reliability above all). While LR3's noise reduction is terrific, LR2 did a very good job. I do architectural photography and need distortion correction features. It is nice having them in Lightroom, but I can get by with doing this work in other programs. My computer is hardly the most recent, powerful, or top of the line, but it is still respectably spec'd. I don't want to have to do a lot of complicated tweaking and work-arounds just to use what the manufacturer bills as standard professional software. Yes, I know computers and computer software are complicated things that are just bound to cause problems from time to time.  However, if Adobe rushed the release version without sufficient testing, that would be most discouraging. I am assuming Adobe will fix the problems eventually, and no doubt the things I did as a result of my problems with LR3 have helped my system, but I really want to emphasize that it is more important to me to have software and equipment that doesn't get in my way than it is to have lots of features. This is one of the reasons why I try to avoid Microsoft, although they seem to have cleaned up their act for the moment with their current OS.

I am curious. I have not been doing digital photography or been heavily involved with computers for that long. Have any of Adobe's other software releases caused as many problems as we have been seeing with LR3? By the way, it appears that the release of Photoshop CS5 has been causing some troubles also.

[Jonathan Westcott]

sherlocc wrote:

Jon:

    In answer to your question, I exclusively process 12 megapixel compressed RAW files from my Sony Alpha 700.  I assume the compressed format adds an extra processing requirement to Lightroom's normal RAW rendering as well.  These are not lightweight files, although not full frame.

   Good idea on trying to quantify this problem.   There has to be a way to quantify performance.  I would suggest:

      1. ensuring a stable LR 3.0 for starters.  That is, no background rendering going on.

      2. maybe time the transition from picture to picture in the develop module - "virgin" (not cached), and cached.

                              Will the old one thousand one, etc be good enough?

      3. cpu speed

      4. RAM size

      5. are pictures on external or internal drive?

      6. database size?

      7. OS

      8. File size and format

   For example, how many of the improved performance anecdotes are really the result of cached versus non cached files?  Or background rendering finally finishing?  Again,  we do need controled apples against apples comparisons in order to make sense out of this.

   The point is that this needs to be consistant and easily quantifyable.  I believe that it will soon be clear that below a certain minimum cpu speed and ram size, that the rest is marginal.  In addition it will be problematic if if the system is significantly above minimum requirements, but uses slower external devices.

   In other words, I believe that a balanced system that is above some minimum processing requirement will provide reasonable performance.  In other words, balancing I/O, video drivers, wacom drives, video resolution, cache size, etc while certainly effecting performance probably is not the real culprit here.  Balancing these items will reduce CPU load, and thus improve things.  But fundamentally, the CPU may well turn out to be the real bottleneck.

   My experience was with a core i7-975 with 12 GB RAM, 64 bit Win 7, etc.  A very powerful system that was underperforming with LR 3. However I discovered an overheating problem that caused the CPU to throttle CPU speed in half, and thus causing delays in LR 3.  Once I fixed the overheating and got back to a full speed CPU, LR 3 is blazing fast, albeit on my very powerful system.  The point is that a 1.6 ghz CPU was not fast enough regardless of all the other high powered configuration components and software tweaks.  

   Again, don't get me wrong - an unbalanced system certainly is problematic, but even balancing apparantly cannot overcome a marginal CPU.

   In a past life, I ran the Corporate Computer Center at Hughes Aircraft.  At times I would call down to see how things were going, and would get the response - "it is running fine".  I would respond with, "but is it working"?.

   For many people, LR 3 may be running but it is not working.   Adobe's minimum hardware requirements, may allow LR 3.0 to "run", but apparantly - not "work" in some cases.  LR 3 has introduced something that has effected resource requirements. Hopefully Adobe can fix it.

   It is very possible that I am wrong that the CPU is fundamentally at the heart of this, but your efforts to quantify this will go a long way to help determine just what is the problem and what exactly are the resource requirements for LR 3.

Sherlocc

Yes, I tend to agree. My move to i7-930 with 12GB 1600 triple buffered ram certainly made a difference (lots of fast ram seems to help) but I do think this sort of spec should be overkill and not required just to get a 'useable' system!

I'll post when I have something usefull for tests.

Jon

[MikeX_ZA]

As I've posted in earlier posts my machine is more than capable of running anything I throw at it, Lightroom however is the only one that is sluggish. LR2.7 used to at least use quite a lot of available Ram but LR3 I've noticed seldom uses more than 500-700Mb of ram and I have 6GB unused and eagerly awaiting Lightroom to grab it and use it but it's not doing it. Once again today we've had some posters claiming lightning fast performance but when challenged on providing their system specs and details they just disappear ... hmmmmm

Some things I have tried / experienced so far:

- Rebuilding the entire previews folder (22 hours) did speed things up somewhat but it's still sluggish in many respects. Scrolling down the library, every second or third page down hooks and a page of grey squares is a common occurence. Once major thing HAS changed since recreating all the previews, no longer does Lightroom seem to be continually trying to re-render thumbnails. This was a major annoyance in LR2 and I hope it is now permanently fixed in LR3, guess I'll know for sure once it stays this way for a month or more.

- Plugging out the Wacom and removing driver did not seem to make much difference to speed, will check tomorrow that it is completely removed

- My catalogue is 95000 images and in library mode Lightroom 3 is not using more than 500mb of Ram (6Gb physical memory available) I can scroll up and down through the library as much as I like and it's memory use does not budge

- If I switch to develop mode then suddenly Lightroom 3 will double it's memory footprint and probably grow as I start making changes but the program could probably be running so much faster in library mode if it were using memory that was available to it.

- I tried the new Nvidia 257.x series driver but it caused video lag in several applications so I reverted back to the 197.x driver ..... neither old nor new driver makes any difference to LR performance

Specs:

Intel DX58SO

Intel Core I7 965XE

8GB DDR3 Kingston

Nvidia 9800GT (Adobe Tested and Approved Card)

SSD for OS and applications

Seagate Savvio 10K.3 SAS for LR Catalogue

Seagate Sata 2 Drives for Original NEF's

Nikon D3, D3x, D3s and D90 images (RAW) and Canon 5D Mark 2 images (RAW)

Windows 7 x64 Ultimate

[Guest]

>>Yes, I tend to agree. My move to i7-930 with 12GB 1600 triple buffered ram certainly made a difference (lots of fast ram seems to help) but I do think >>this sort of spec should be overkill and not required just to get a 'useable' system!

>>I'll post when I have something usefull for tests.

  Jon:

     I don't think that 12 GB is required for usability - but 4 GB? or maybe 6 GB?

     I have been actively involved with computer systems for over 50 years.  Most of my active career was on the vendor side with Operating System development.  There is some "rule of physics" that says that new releases must overpower current level hardware.  The overhead required to prepare for future hardware capability sometimes overwhelms current capabilities.  At some point the hardware catches up and things are balanced.  This "rule" is probably a corollary of Parkinson's Law - that is, software must expand to fill existing capacity.  In many cases designers overshoot.  I don't know what Adobe has done to LR 3.0, but one could think they might have "overshot" what might be considered "usable" today, but would be considered antique tomorrow.

    I am not advocating that this is the case with LR 3.0, but it well could be.

    Somewhere on the hardware capabilities curve, is an inflection point beyond which LR 3.0 is happy - given a balanced system.

    Your job, "Mr. Phelps", should you choose to accept it, is to lead us in uncovering where that inflection point on the curve is given existing hardware availability.

    This tape will self-destruct in 30 seconds.

Sherlocc

[Mikkasa]

sherlocc wrote:

>>Yes, I tend to agree. My move to i7-930 with 12GB 1600 triple buffered ram certainly made a difference (lots of fast ram seems to help) but I do think >>this sort of spec should be overkill and not required just to get a 'useable' system!

>>I'll post when I have something usefull for tests.

  Jon:

     I don't think that 12 GB is required for usability - but 4 GB? or maybe 6 GB?

I just upgraded from 4 to 8Gb RAM and noticed a difference in LR performance in many areas; even things like keywording – when you can get a short 'working...' message after adding a tag – is roughly twice as fast now. This is on a new, well-specced (quad-core i5) iMac. However, more CPU-intensive tasks (Develop tools, for example) are still a *tiny* bit jerky, ie exactly the same as before. In true scientific tradition of concluding that which I set out to prove, I'll say again that LR is basically a resource hog. There may well turn out to be a bug whereby memory is not released after intensive rendering (i just noticed LR RAM use shoot up to 2Gb while scrolling through 1:1s in Library *and stay there* despite idling for the last 20 mins) but it'll always want unrestricted access to ALL your resources or it will begin to falter.

I should add two things: LR3 has been generally very responsive (in some areas better than LR2) for me. More RAM has made a marginal improvement to my workflow, rather than totally transformed it. The other thing is *lots of things* on the Mac now run twice as fast. For example, all apps open near-instantly, so it's not just feeding the memory hog. Modern systems, especially ones with nice shiny GUIs, like lots of memory, and so do many of the apps we run on them. LR just happens to be the latest big kid on the block.

The overhead required to prepare for future hardware capability sometimes overwhelms current capabilities.  At some point the hardware catches up and things are balanced.  This "rule" is probably a corollary of Parkinson's Law - that is, software must expand to fill existing capacity.  In many cases designers overshoot.  I don't know what Adobe has done to LR 3.0, but one could think they might have "overshot" what might be considered "usable" today, but would be considered antique tomorrow.

That's my guess too. More speculation... I'm not expecting a big difference with v3.1, just the usual sophomore bug fixes. These might improve overall performance for many users but it won't change the way LR is engineered to grab quite striking amounts of RAM, GPU and CPU capacity in order to deliver that performance. It's such a system-wide hog that, even after those fixes, if you have any bus bottlenecks at all you will still not see promised performance levels. Maybe this release was aimed at grabbing the high-end 'power-user' market and only fell over with these few bugs; but it wasn't designed to perform well on older systems. More to the point, it *was* designed to out-perform any present-or-future competitor on a sufficiently well-specced machine, namely the ones we'll all be buying before LR4 comes out...

The published min specs for LR (and PS5, for that matter) say it all, really. If you exceed those several times over (the 'balancing' caveat noted) LR really does fly: how soon before entry-level reaches those specs? I think you're right, they just jumped the gun a bit for many present-day users.

[MikeX_ZA]

I'm not expecting a big difference with v3.1

Me neither and perhaps we all get dragged all the way to v4 waiting for the materialisation of the eternal promise of "accelerated performance"

[DanTull]

Just catching up on this thread (lots to read). I'm usually the "catalog" guy (search for my name and Lightroom catalog, you'll see what I mean), so I've been involved in other bug hunts for more esoteric issues.

> Again,  we do need controlled apples against apples comparisons in order to make sense out of this.

Anyway, I just wanted to add a super sized +1 to the above remark.

Experimental control is hands down the most troublesome thing about pinning down Lightroom performance characteristics and the permutation explosion of all the possible configurations is a close (and related) second. There's lots of "tribal lore" about how to make LR work faster and some kernels of truth in it, but most of it lacks any hard empirical foundation.

DT

[Guest]

Dan Tull:

    I have been preaching this for days.  Anecdotal experience creates the smoke, but until you isolate the flame - not all that helpful to the debugging process.

Obviously, I couldn't agree more.

[JayS_In_CT]

DanTull wrote:

Just catching up on this thread (lots to read). I'm usually the "catalog" guy (search for my name and Lightroom catalog, you'll see what I mean), so I've been involved in other bug hunts for more esoteric issues.

> Again,  we do need controlled apples against apples comparisons in order to make sense out of this.

Anyway, I just wanted to add a super sized +1 to the above remark.

Experimental control is hands down the most troublesome thing about pinning down Lightroom performance characteristics and the permutation explosion of all the possible configurations is a close (and related) second. There's lots of "tribal lore" about how to make LR work faster and some kernels of truth in it, but most of it lacks any hard empirical foundation.

DT

I also agree, and have encouraged folks who are experiencing issues to call into Adobe.  I did this A.M. on a couple of issues and the team was excellent about collecting the "facts".  That said, and without the benefit of a 3.1 yet, ANYTHING that Adobe comes up with that can be potential "stop gaps" and (I hate this word) "bandaids" while the team sorts through mountains of data would be appreciated by all, I'm sure.  Many here (even though this is a user to user forum) do welcome the visit and words from the team behind the scenes...  So, keep the information coming, please let us know how the team is progressing, feel free to ask for something.  I guarantee they'll be no shortage of volunteers to try something that might help.

Thanks again..

Jay S.

[Guest]

Perhaps I have misunderstood, but doesn't Adobe charge for phone support?  If so, why should I pay to give them product feedback so they can fix their problems?

[JayS_In_CT]

2010DME wrote:

Perhaps I have misunderstood, but doesn't Adobe charge for phone support?  If so, why should I pay to give them product feedback so they can fix their problems?

You can call and report problems you've found.  I've never had an issue there.

Jay S.

[Guest]

How is this different than submitting a bug report through their  website?

[JayS_In_CT]

2010DME wrote:

How is this different than submitting a bug report through their  website?

If you have the time to spend, there are cases where they'll try to work through things with you on the phone to help debug or provide them with more information.

Jay S.

[DdeGannes]

I am replying to the last post in this thread but my post has no revelance to that post. I am just making a comment.

I follow most threads in the forum but must say this one is the most frustrating.

There have been 481 replies in the thread and not one has any indication that there is any partial solution or help in solving why some have problems with the LR performance.

The physical length of the thread make it teadious to follow or access.

It should be closed since it is serving no useful purpose but is a constant source of frustration.

Some one from Adobe should try and identify some of the system/configeration that have problems,

Maybe a pol from those having problems to identify their system configeration, it should also allow those without problems to also post their system configeration.

That said, I am not one who has had problems with LR 3.0  

[areohbee]

DdeGannes,

I just assumed Adobe was well on their way to solving the worst of the problems and had quit listening to this thread and was getting ready to release 3.1.

If they really don't know what the worst problems are (the real deal-breakers), or can't reproduce them, then it seems like really defining what the problems are and under what conditions they occur really must be step 1. And, I agree that a "brainstorm spewing in the forum" may not be the best way. I like your idea - maybe a structured survey, that includes detailed descriptions of the various problems, so people can say whether they're having them or not and provide their system info and feedback in a consistent format...

Adobe really needs to get a handle on this...

Rob

[goodlux7]

Adobe should set up something like this.

http://uservoice.com/

It takes 5 minutes.

It would be interesting to see which user issues get the most votes. For

instance, Adobe has done a lot of work to make sure LR will run on a laptop.

At first blush, that makes a lot of sense, because there are people out in

the field that want to do their work on location and get stuff out to

clients immediately.

But when you consider that LR doesn't even work correctly on a hefty desktop

with lots of resources, it kind of makes the effort to get it working on a

laptop highly questionable.

Do you really want to waste your time out in the field tweaking LR?

People really need image database / image management tool when they have a

lot of images. I wouldn't think most people store lots of images on their

laptop. Do they really need an image database on their laptop?

Personally I would never use LR on my macbook, because it's just too slow.

If I needed to edit a photo "in the field" I would just use photoshop, then

later import again on my desktop. I'm sure there are people who feel just

the opposite.

So bringing this full circle, the "voting up" feature is really helpful for

everyone to see what actual users actually want.

Maybe most people don't want "laptop friendly" lightroom...or maybe they

do.

Maybe most people don't want click and drag sliders to change the

exposure...or maybe they do.

It would be great if everyone could see that, and it was

quantified. Otherwise, it begs the question: who is Adobe building LR for

anyway? The product team? Or the photographers?

[Jim Stamates]

Before LR 1 was ever released, photographers had a chance to help develop it with all the needs of many. I like most of what LR does and how it operates, (except for LR 3 problems) I helped build it with my input from the beginning. I may not use every feature, but the ones I do use are great.

I use my MacBook Pro exclusively. No big desktop. And I know a lot of others who do, too. In the field I download my shoot to my MBP and work with the images in LR. When I return to the office I move the images to one of my 4 external 800 Firewire drives, Works for me. LR 2.7 no problems. LR3, well I don't have to tell you again...

It's not how much stuff it has, or who uses it how, it's simply not what we where told it would be...yet. I'm a wishin' and a hopin' for a fix...soon.

[areohbee]

Jim Stamates wrote:

...it's simply not what we were told it would be...

Just want to re-iterate that different people have different problems. Some are of the "its not ""Accelerated"" like it said in the marketing blurb" kind..., but others are of the "orders of magnitude too slow to be useful" variety - the problems that are causing people to just not use it at all, period - until 3.1 comes out. - those need to be fixed in 3.1, soon, period.

Rob

[JayS_In_CT]

areohbee wrote:

Jim Stamates wrote:

...it's simply not what we were told it would be...

Just want to re-iterate that different people have different problems. Some are of the "its not ""Accelerated"" like it said in the marketing blurb" kind..., but others are of the "orders of magnitude too slow to be useful" variety - the problems that are causing people to just not use it at all, period - until 3.1 comes out. - those need to be fixed in 3.1, soon, period.

Rob

Rob,

The same +1 in that I think those "not suffering" would benefit as well from fixing the bigger issues.  Hit the major issues first, then fine tune it.

Jay S.

[imajez]

goodlux7 wrote:

But when you consider that LR doesn't even work correctly on a hefty desktop

with lots of resources, it kind of makes the effort to get it working on a

laptop highly questionable.

Do you really want to waste your time out in the field tweaking LR?

When you are working on location, you only have a laptop. So it's hardly a waste of time, not to mention, I have a laptop more powerful than many desktops were a few years back. So thinking laptops are slow compared to desktops is not a straightforward conclusion.

I also have a desktop that has 4x the no. of cores of my laptop at same chip speed, yet desktop is way more sluggish when using LR.

Though I just did a fresh OS + software rollback + re-install on my desktop as OSX10.6.4 bugfix seemed to be particularly buggy.

[JayS_In_CT]

imajez wrote:

goodlux7 wrote:

But when you consider that LR doesn't even work correctly on a hefty desktop

with lots of resources, it kind of makes the effort to get it working on a

laptop highly questionable.

Do you really want to waste your time out in the field tweaking LR?

When you are working on location, you only have a laptop. So it's hardly a waste of time, not to mention, I have a laptop more powerful than many desktops were a few years back. So thinking laptops are slow compared to desktops is not a straightforward conclusion.

I also have a desktop that has 4x the no. of cores of my laptop at same chip speed, yet desktop is way more sluggish when using LR.

Though I just did a fresh OS + software rollback + re-install on my desktop as OSX10.6.4 bugfix seemed to be particularly buggy.

Second the 10.6.4 causing some sluggishness.  I did likewise a while ago and posted a note here.  What was interesting was Apple was more than accomodating in helping with the rollback.  Sounded like others (not related to Adobe) were having issues with 10.6.4.  There was also a CPU heating and utilization issue on Mac Pro's, but supposedly for for Audio issues only.

http://www.worldtech24.com/software/apple-offers-fix-audio-related-mac-pro-performance-issue

Can't hurt I'd guess to put that fix on though.  🙂

Jay S.

[Mikkasa]

JayS In CT wrote:

Second the 10.6.4 causing some sluggishness.

Who knows if this is relevant & useful or pointless thread cruft, but I've deliberately avoided 10.6.4 due to reported bugs. My 10.6.3 system is a rock and LR3 runs well enough for me. Is there an acronym for If It Ain't F@¢ked Don't Fix It?

And for want of a place to compare Mac setup/performance ratios, mine is an OOTB 27" quad-core i5 iMac with no mods or add-ons whatsoever apart from a RAM upgrade to 8gb. Everything I need (ie last 4 years work) is in default locations on my main internal 1tb drive, which is ~65% full and providing 50gb ACR cache, standard previews, several catalogs and the main one running at ~35000 images.

I do get the unreleased RAM issue which is less of an issue since I upgraded it and otherwise all I ever wait for is my external 1tb drive to spin up when I'm accessing any finder-based actions. Maybe LR3 was developed with the same setup..

HTH