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

[teho59]

tgutgu wrote:

Every major release is a different case. They have to deal with new operating systems and patches, which did not exist when development started, deal with new hardware categories, which were not there, when testing, they may have used other third party frameworks under the hood, cope with faulty drivers from hardware manufacturers, which they did not expect, and so on.

I can agree with what you say here, but for LR the surprise for many users and myself is the fact that LR3 beta worked well, the release does not. The only factor new is the new release. So this should not be a factor for LR3!

In my opinion Adobe has made a major mistace by changing to much from the beta to the release without a proper validation.

Why did it work well during beta, and not in the release?

I thought the new noise reduction and camera process (2010) seemed so promising (fast and fluid) in beta so I bought LR3 the day it was released without a doubt. I guess I was not alone.

- Terje

[ChBr02]

@teho59

"In my opinion Adobe has made a major mistace by changing to much from the beta to the release without a proper validation."

I have good reason to believe that you are correct in your opinion.

[Lee_Jay-ZyZk56]

LR 3 is much faster than LR3 Beta 2 was for me.  And 3.2 is faster yet.  So, experiences differ.

[ChBr02]

@ Lee Jay

"LR 3 is much faster than LR3 Beta 2 was for me.  And 3.2 is faster yet.  So, experiences differ."

What position is it that you hold in the Adobe Sales Dept?

Seriously, what is your system / system info?  Did you start off with a new catalog?  Have you done anything special with drivers, preferences, previews, catalogs, caches, etc.?  Is the majority of your images RAW, jpegs, and generally what sizes are the images that you start with?  What are the typical types of adjustments that you make?

Any other hints that might help us slow dogs???

[Lee_Jay-ZyZk56]

ChBr02 wrote:

@ Lee Jay

"LR 3 is much faster than LR3 Beta 2 was for me.  And 3.2 is faster yet.  So, experiences differ."

What position is it that you hold in the Adobe Sales Dept?

Seriously, what is your system / system info?  Did you start off with a new catalog?  Have you done anything special with drivers, preferences, previews, catalogs, caches, etc.?  Is the majority of your images RAW, jpegs, and generally what sizes are the images that you start with?  What are the typical types of adjustments that you make?

Any other hints that might help us slow dogs???

I use LR on four different systems from a 7 year old laptop to a brand new modern machine.  The trend is the same on all of them, though obviously the modern machine smokes the old one.

Nothing special.  I use LR in a wide variety of ways from raw to JPEG, from simple basic panel corrections to complex local adjustments.  I wish I knew what was different between those who find LR3 final slower than the beta and those who find it faster.  It might help the team track down the trouble with the code.

[JayS_In_CT]

Lee Jay wrote:

LR 3 is much faster than LR3 Beta 2 was for me.  And 3.2 is faster yet.  So, experiences differ.

Lee Jay,

I remember you indicating one of your machines was problematic.  Did 3.2RC clear up the issues there?  If so, which issues seemed to be fixed.  We know from what Dan said there are still more to come.

Jay S.

[imajez]

ChBr02 wrote:

@teho59

"In my opinion Adobe has made a major mistace by changing to much from the beta to the release without a proper validation."

I have good reason to believe that you are correct in your opinion.

You seem to be overlooking the fact that new beta builds are tested up until release, sometimes only a few days apart. The Public Beta is different in that only two builds were released and also some features may not have been ready for inclusion in those releases as the Public betas were out some time before actual release.

[thewhitedog]

@Thomas: I think it's significant that Mac and Windows users are having similar problems with Lightroom 3. This suggests true parity in the product across both platforms. And it leads me to suspect the issues are not merely cosmetic, but are rooted deep in the entrails of the program. This is the first thread I've been on where both platforms are involved and there has been no petty sniping about which OS is better. I find that eminently refreshing.

[ChBr02]

"This is the first thread I've been on where both platforms are involved and there has been no petty sniping about which OS is better. I find that eminently refreshing."

Yes, thank goodness for that.  There have been times that I would have gladly bought a new computer of either stripe just to solve this problem.  But, it looks like that is not the solution.

[areohbee]

Ditto that.

My primary machine is Windows, but I also own a Mac. When I was having performance problems with Lr3.0 in Windows, I tried Lr3.0 on the Mac too, to see if it was any better, but it wasn't (nothing rigorous nor scientific - just seemed slow on my Mac too...)

Rob

[TK2142]

tgutgu wrote:

I can't see anything significantly slow so far.

Try heavily editing an image. Use lots of (bigger) spot removal applications and many sets of many brush strokes, covering considerable area (maybe its just the number of stroke sets, I haven't investigated that). Use the details panel activating sharpening and noise reduction. If you are daring, throw lens correction into the mix. While speed has been improved since LR3.0, there is still a progressive delay in responsiveness of the adjustment brush (probably applies to other tools as well, I haven't had time to explore LR3.2RC extensively yet) the more edits you have applied on an image. While I fully understand that initial rendering times will be higher for such images, I don't think interactiveness should suffer.

tgutgu wrote:

Therefore 3.2 RC leaves a very good impression and the slowness, which users experience is probably much dependant on some configuration patterns, which we all try to identify via the exchange and discussions in this thread.

Just a subtle point but I don't think that remaining issues are caused by inappropriate configurations. Rather some remaining issues become more manifest on some systems than on others. That was at least the case for LR3.0 where a number of issues where addressed by LR3.2RC without users changing their configuration.

[Guest]

Ok, I tried. About 25 spot tools in an image - no significant delay.

Applying brushes of different sizes with different parameters: the effect gets a little behind the drafting after about the 15th brush point or so. I would estimate the delay at about one third to one half of a second. Does this render the brush feature useless? No. Does it disturb? Just a little, if I am really picky. How many images will receive such a heavy localized editing? Less than 1 %. Should Adobe stop the release because of this performance "issue" - not for me.

After finishing brushing: Large spot removal spots: yes, they take time (about two seconds until the second circle appears). Smaller spots around half to one second. Is this a dealbreaker? Not really, because I use the spot tool mostly - well - for spot cleaning, only occasionally for larger stuff.

So, there is a I would say for me small amount of performance degradation, roughly proportional to the local edits you apply, more obvious with spot tool than with brushes. The delay in interactiveness may be on purpose (I mean that the tool is active only after the second circle is rendered) as it could be inconvenient to do spotting continuously without seeing where the second circle is actually going.

This unclear manifestation of issues probably makes nailing down the reasons clearly so difficult and cumbersome.

Again, with the issues I have here, I won't say that LR3 was not ready for production. 99% of my editing works are just not affected.

Kind regards

Thomas

[thewhitedog]

@ChBr02: Sorry to plague you with all that "esoteric" information. I was responding to a problem I thought Jay S. had raised. As it turns out, he didn't care for my answer either. But, complex as it may seem, it was a workflow, and hence a performance, issue. There is more than one way to slow things down and speed them up. Replacing inefficient work patterns with more efficient ones is one way to do it.

[Guest]

thewhitedog wrote:

@ChBr02: Sorry to plague you with all that "esoteric" information. I was responding to a problem I thought Jay S. had raised. As it turns out, he didn't care for my answer either. But, complex as it may seem, it was a workflow, and hence a performance, issue. There is more than one way to slow things down and speed them up. Replacing inefficient work patterns with more efficient ones is one way to do it.

And probably the most effective one.

Thomas

[JayS_In_CT]

tgutgu wrote:

thewhitedog wrote:

@ChBr02: Sorry to plague you with all that "esoteric" information. I was responding to a problem I thought Jay S. had raised. As it turns out, he didn't care for my answer either. But, complex as it may seem, it was a workflow, and hence a performance, issue. There is more than one way to slow things down and speed them up. Replacing inefficient work patterns with more efficient ones is one way to do it.

And probably the most effective one.

Thomas

Thomas,

But not everyone's work patterns fit another person's work needs.    What does work though, is the process of sharing them.  Doing that lets us pick up new techniques and ideas that we can apply to the work needs we do have.  For that, I appreciated the fact that Whitedog took so much effort to outline his.

Jay S.

[snahphoto]

I am amazed about the numerous views & responses and wonder what Adobe will do about this issue.

Yes, I am experiencing the same problems.

Meanwhile we know that this issue is NOT due to a specific OS or Machine setup (even though Windows machines seem to be the majority).

We also know this problem since early versions of LR and that Adobe has not resolved it.

There are only a few clues that might ease this issue, not basically, but a bit.
It seems as if the graphic-card (GPU) being used is an important factor.

I believe that many of us pay attention to and do follow Adobes HW recommendations.
Unfortunately it seems as Adobe is not so much paying attention to this important issue raised in its forum.

It makes sense that the values for
- Real memory used by Lightroom,
- Virtual memory used by Lightroom,
- Memory cache size
vary in size continously, when importing files or manipulating them.

But it does not make sense that Real Memory available to Lightroom is only a fraction of the Built-in memory (System).

Furthermore the specs for LR require 2GB, but LR is not able to address half of it.

Interestingly enough this does not seem to be a problem for Photoshop CS5 and the other memebers of the Photoshop family.

Adobe should really focus on getting this fixed and allow LR3 to make full use of the Built-in memory similar to the way its done in Photoshop.
Again, by counting the numbers of views and replies to this thread Adobe should step forward and provide some information what Adobe is going to do about it.

I personally feel that Adobe is not really taking the question of this thread and its contributers (defined as mostly advanced users) not very serious.

Else it would not hurt Adobe to speak up and provide a clear statement - in contrary, we'd appreciate such a step.

Just two more System Info examples:

PS CS5:
Built-in memory: 3582 MB
Free memory: 2152 MB
Memory available to Photoshop: 1688 MB
Memory used by Photoshop: 65 %
Image tile size: 128K
Image cache levels: 5

LR3:
Built-in memory: 3581.7 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 716.8 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 679.4 MB (94.7%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 720.3 MB
Memory cache size: 106.3 MB

That was my penny.

[Lee_Jay-ZyZk56]

snahphoto wrote:

I personally feel that Adobe is not really taking the question of this thread and its contributers (defined as mostly advanced users) not very serious.

Else it would not hurt Adobe to speak up and provide a clear statement - in contrary, we'd appreciate such a step.

There are many posts from the LR team in this thread.

[Guest]

snahphoto wrote:

I am amazed about the numerous views & responses and wonder what Adobe will do about this issue.

Yes, I am experiencing the same problems.

Meanwhile we know that this issue is NOT due to a specific OS or Machine setup (even though Windows machines seem to be the majority).

We also know this problem since early versions of LR and that Adobe has not resolved it.

Well, Adobe has fixed a lot of performance issues during the course of version 2.

Adobe should really focus on getting this fixed and allow LR3 to make full use of the Built-in memory similar to the way its done in Photoshop.
Again, by counting the numbers of views and replies to this thread Adobe should step forward and provide some information what Adobe is going to do about it.

I personally feel that Adobe is not really taking the question of this thread and its contributers (defined as mostly advanced users) not very serious.

Else it would not hurt Adobe to speak up and provide a clear statement - in contrary, we'd appreciate such a step.

What answer do you expect? We are testing? How do you know that they are not taking the reported problems serious? Adobe staff has discussed issues here in this thread and reported quite openly, what is going on. These "official statements", which will never give any guarantees how quick something will be fixed, do not help anything to find a solution, thus I don't care. It would be much more beneficial, if employees close to the developing team and which have an indepth knowledge of the product, keep discussing the issues here in the forum.

I was in a very similar situation. We released a product, which did not work at some clients. We could not reproduce the problems, looked at firewall and network issues - no clue. The clients were getting unpatiend, angry. We kept having no clue for months. Testing, testing - nothing. Only by chance we found out that when a PDA is attached to the computer the system showed a similar "behaviour". Then, after cheching with some clients, we found that most of them had a PDA attached. Did the issue occur with every PDA - nope. It took another week to find out, that it was not our code, which caused the problem, but that of a third party library. At the end, we coded workarounds to fix the issue for most clients, but not for all. It took another three weeks to release the bug fixes. Were we to careless with testing - no, to count for these cases beforehand would not have been economic. Should we have released the product even if the issues were known before - yes, of course, because only a few clients were affected (less than 5%), and others would have been pissed off, had we delayed the release further. In general, I believe the same pattern goes on here.

So let's keep these demands for official statements and assumptions that Adobe does not care out of here, and let the discussion go back to the topic's subject.

Kind regards

Thomas

Thomas

[Guest]

I just want to report the LR 3.2RC is working much faster on my system than 3.0.  Importing of files is much faster and no observed slowness with brushes.

One bug I did notice, and if someone already reported this, my apologies, in the web module, applying a drop shadow to a watermark renders the shadow above the watermark.  It looks like 2 separate watermarks being applied.  This shows up in both the index and image view. When uploaded, the watermark looks fine on the web site.

.

[2drumstix]

I'm seeing the same thing here with watermarks, the shadow is offset and looks two different marks.

[thewhitedog]

I just downloaded, installed a tried out Lightroom 3.2 (final). I can't find much in the way of release notes but my preliminary experience is promising. When rendering previews now Lightroom uses all 4 CPU cores (as shown in MenuMeters) on my quad-core 3GHz MacPro. This indicates, if I'm not mistaken, that Lightroom is using multi-threading more efficiently. RAM and virtual memory usage are moderate, under 1 GB each on some medium sized JPEGS; on RAW images RAM and virtual memory use are higher, around 1.4 GB - which is less than Safari is using while I'm writing this. All this is, of course, very preliminary, but it does seem to render images faster. In a more critical test, where I was having problems with earlier versions of Lightroom 3, rendering thumbnails in the import dialog in a folder with thousands of images, 3.2 does much better, not freezing or crashing, as it had done before, and rendering the thumbnails much more quickly. In this process RAM and VM use rose to over 2 GB, but this is still reasonable, given that I have 8 GB available. Later I'll take a look at how well Lightroom does with Photoshop CS5 running in the background. I'm hopeful that this means most of the grievances that have been aired out on this forum thread are resolved. I look forward to what others of you have to say on the subject.

[JayS_In_CT]

thewhitedog wrote:

I just downloaded, installed a tried out Lightroom 3.2 (final). I can't find much in the way of release notes but my preliminary experience is promising. When rendering previews now Lightroom uses all 4 CPU cores (as shown in MenuMeters) on my quad-core 3GHz MacPro. This indicates, if I'm not mistaken, that Lightroom is using multi-threading more efficiently. RAM and virtual memory usage are moderate, under 1 GB each on some medium sized JPEGS; on RAW images RAM and virtual memory use are higher, around 1.4 GB - which is less than Safari is using while I'm writing this. All this is, of course, very preliminary, but it does seem to render images faster. In a more critical test, where I was having problems with earlier versions of Lightroom 3, rendering thumbnails in the import dialog in a folder with thousands of images, 3.2 does much better, not freezing or crashing, as it had done before, and rendering the thumbnails much more quickly. In this process RAM and VM use rose to over 2 GB, but this is still reasonable, given that I have 8 GB available. Later I'll take a look at how well Lightroom does with Photoshop CS5 running in the background. I'm hopeful that this means most of the grievances that have been aired out on this forum thread are resolved. I look forward to what others of you have to say on the subject.

Whitedog...

Great to hear that you're not only seeing benefits in terms of "look and feel" but you're seeing it in the underlying structure as well.  +1 for the post for sure.

Jay S.

[Lee_Jay-ZyZk56]

thewhitedog wrote:

I can't find much in the way of release notes...

http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2010/08/lightroom-3-2-and-camera-raw-6-2-now-available.html

[JayS_In_CT]

thewhitedog wrote:

I just downloaded, installed a tried out Lightroom 3.2 (final). I can't find much in the way of release notes but my preliminary experience is promising. When rendering previews now Lightroom uses all 4 CPU cores (as shown in MenuMeters) on my quad-core 3GHz MacPro. This indicates, if I'm not mistaken, that Lightroom is using multi-threading more efficiently. RAM and virtual memory usage are moderate, under 1 GB each on some medium sized JPEGS; on RAW images RAM and virtual memory use are higher, around 1.4 GB - which is less than Safari is using while I'm writing this. All this is, of course, very preliminary, but it does seem to render images faster. In a more critical test, where I was having problems with earlier versions of Lightroom 3, rendering thumbnails in the import dialog in a folder with thousands of images, 3.2 does much better, not freezing or crashing, as it had done before, and rendering the thumbnails much more quickly. In this process RAM and VM use rose to over 2 GB, but this is still reasonable, given that I have 8 GB available. Later I'll take a look at how well Lightroom does with Photoshop CS5 running in the background. I'm hopeful that this means most of the grievances that have been aired out on this forum thread are resolved. I look forward to what others of you have to say on the subject.

While not as "in depth" as what Whitedog is saying I can say that I am seeing a much more dynamic use of memory (real/virtual) when preforming a "batch" type function, e.g. rendering 1:1 previews on a number of images.  Before, I was seeing LR 3.2RC (64 bit - OSX) have its memory figures stay somewhat fixed.  Now I am seeing the memory figures changing much more often as LR needs more or less...

Jay S.

[Gavin Farrington]

Win7x64, LR 3.2 64-bit release version:

I too am seeing much better overall performance.  Thank you Adobe.