Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 4.x

SPECS: Core i7 950 not overclocked, Asus Sabertooth mobo, 12 GB RAM, Radeon 5700 video with 1GB, Win7 Ultimate 64bit on SSD with programs (including LR), images on separate 2TB HDD, Dual displays.  In other words, quite capable hardware that runs anything I have ever thrown at it with aplomb.

I'm going to chronicle my experiences thus far:

1. Installed LR4 beta when it came out and made a test catalog of about 2000 images.

2. Noticed sluggishness immediately, especially in develop when moving sliders.  Chalked it up to being beta and went back to LR3, waiting for LR4 final.

3. Yesterday, excitedly installed LR4 final, which updated my LR4 beta test catalog

4. Experienced the same sluggish performance.  Thought it was maybe because the catalog was made with the beta.

5. Created a new LR4 catalog, and imported about 60 "fresh" raws (Nikon NEFs) to test it out.

6. Experienced the same sluggish performance. 

Sliders are slow to react to mouse dragging, and the image preview is slow to update to the adjusted values once the slider has finally moved. The slider handle doesn't follow the mouse pointer unless dragging really slowly, and it is difficult to make fine adjustments - e.g. the exposure slider sort of jumps along in 0.2-0.4EV increments.  The second display lags behind the first by as much as 4 seconds.  There is a less severe but still noticeable sluggishness to the overall navigation, such as switching between modules or scrolling and clicking in the filmstrip.  LR4 is virtually unusable in this state.  CPU activity monitor spikes on all 8 threads everytime a slider is moved.

Frustrated, I started experimenting further and found some suggestions on this thread to try:

1. Performace increases to the point of usability with the second display disabled, but this isn't a solution.  I need my dual displays!  And even with a single display, it isn't as smooth and responsive as LR 3.6

2. PV2010 vs. PV2012 doesn't seem to matter in terms of performance.  Both are unusably slow.  But again, PV2012 is where it's at, so it needs to work!

3. Building fresh previews doesn't seem to help, since performance was poor with the beta test catalog and with the newly created one with newly rendered previews.

4. I imported a batch of 180 images into the LR4 catalog using "Copy as DNG" to see if that helped matters.  I have never used DNG before.  The conversion and preview rendering took about 4-5 min total for all 180 images (12mp NEFs).  Seems reasonable.

5. Again performance seems a bit jerky but usable with only one display in use, but slows to a crawl with both enabled. The second display lags significantly behind the main display.  So DNG doesn't seem any better than just the regular NEFs for me.  And again, using DNG isn't a solution anyways, just a workaround.

Soooo, I'm in a rut.  Nothing I do really seems to fix the problem.  Looks like Adobe has some investigation to do, so lets hope these posts help shed some light on the source of the problem.

I used LR4 Beta since it was released and found it sluggish like hell when processing G10 & 450D raw files.

And after installing LR4 release version, I found the same problem. Using sliders was always in slow motion and

it took 1-3 secs to response.

After reading this forum, I tried the so-called solution by deleting cache and preview files serveral times and nothing was chagned.

And finally I tried changing a profile of a photo from 2012 to 2010 and then back and forth. The strange thing is that when switching from 2012 to 2010,

all adjustments to the photo was lost. The result was the same as a reset. Is this normal?

Besides this, I also tried import raw files using Copy As DNG to see if DNG will work better.

After these operations, my LR4 works as fast as LR3. I do not know what was happened. I tried to touch serveral ten photos and LR4 is still fast.

And slider operation is almost instant. And all other operations is at lest 2-3 times faster than it was before.

My computer is always the same unit: Mac Pro 3GHz, 8-core, 16G Ram, System Disk: SSD, Data Disk:Raid0 x 3, OS X 10.7.3.

It seems I am dreaming but it is true. I even tried to check the screen if I am using LR3.

I do not know if LR4 will slow down again....

I have a relatively new Dell XPS 8300 and I find LR4 to be as quick as LR3. The only sluggishness I've noted is the initial switch to the Develop module in a new folder. Subsequent uses of Develop in that folder are less than a second.

I'd like to post more details on my computer, but I don't have access to them at the moment.

Although I am disappointed that the only plug-in I can use at the moment with Lightroom 4 are my onOne Perfect Suite 6 plug-ins, I am very happy with how fast the program is. I've noticed a huge improvement from Lightroom 3.6 at least on my machine. Win7, i72600k, 64 bit, 16gb ram, amd radeon 6800 series graphic card etc. Lightroom 4 is running better than any version since the very first roll out of Lightroom, too bad they didn't get everything completely right, but it seems they've figured out the resource issues to me.

Now if I could just work out getting all of my Nik software and Topaz plugins to work without having to install a trial version of cs5 which I have absolutely NO interest in using, I'd be completely happy.

I used LR 3 and now upgraded to LR4. I have a small laptop (I5, 6 Giga Ram, 1024 Video card,  from HP). I really do not notice any significant difference.

The cursors are still super fast. What takes time (but is was true before) is to zoom in at 100%. I use Raw file from Canon 7D. It takes me about 4 to 5 seconds to zoom 100% in the Development mode. But again, no difference with LR3. As I'm not a pro, such 4 to 5 seconds delay is not a big issue for me.

Thanks, frankc1978, for your detailed post. LR4 is unacceptably slow for me also - MacBook Pro 8gb ram 24" cinema display - but it's nice to see it's also slow for those of you in SSD land - I don't have to think about that expense for now!

I tried doing what you and hamish niven suggested - deleted the Preview file and also purged the RAW cache, but to no avail.

LR4 is not only terribly slow, but the real deal breaker was when I went to edit out a photo in PS, and LR4 said I would need Camera Raw 7 - what? There is no Camera Raw 7 that I know of. And when I opened the photo in PS anyway, LR4 had sent it the unmodified RAW file, not the one that I had worked on in LR4!

Back to LR3.6 I go. Four hours of work yesterday down the drain, along with the $79 upgrade price.

Finally - let's look at the file sizes: LR3.6 is 102.4 MB. PS CS5.1 (the mother of all apps) comes in at a whopping 410.8 MB. Did I say "whopping" - fuhgeddaboudit. Here's the new whopping - LR4 is 922.3 MB. Over twice as big as PS. I think Adobe has created a Swiss Army Knife behemoth. Time to go on a diet.

- Kip Shaw

I sure hope Adobe is monitoring these comments and working on it.  I depend on LR for my photography business and will eventually need LR4 due to body upgrades for new camera raw. 

Same here, LR4 very slow in some cases.  The library module was slow at first but has improved.  Now, the spot healing tool takes a LONG time to respond.  I didn't notice this with the beta and LR3 was impressively fast and responsive.

Try the manual lens correction feature.  I could have sworn I heard my laptop actually backfire.  It was almost comical watching the image spasm and distort for a good minute after I took my finger from the track pad.

Delete your prieviews.lrdata file and let lightroom re make prieviews as it goes.

This was a suggestion when LR2 PV2003 was updated to LR3 PV2010, and the noises have indicated that this should help.

No harm in also deleting your cache file as well.

Other noises indicate that there are speed issues with OSX and fewer with Windows, but the above comments from the  few who have posted seem to err more on windows issues.

I'm still on the beta as downloading LR4.0 is expensive when having to pay for data in hotels.....