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Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 4.x

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
March 6, 2012
188 replies
629159 views

Anyone else notice that lightroom 4 is slow? Ligtroom 3 always ran fast on my system but Lightroom 4 seemlingly lags quite a bit.

My system is:

2.10 ghz Intel Core i3 Sandy Bridge

8 GB Ram

640 GB Hard Drive

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

Message title was edited by: Brett N

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Victoria Bampton LR Queen

It's now impossible to see the wood for the trees in this whopping 43-page long thread. Many of the original 4.0-4.2 performance issues have since been resolved, and it's impossible to figure out who is still having problems, and what they can try.

I've started a nice clean thread to continue this discussion for 4.3 and later. http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1117506 Thanks to Bob_Peters for the suggestion. I'm locking this one, otherwise it'll continue to get increasingly unweidly, but please feel free to continue existing discussions on the new thread.

Victoria Bampton LR Queen

Correct answer

Community Expert

It's now impossible to see the wood for the trees in this whopping 43-page long thread. Many of the original 4.0-4.2 performance issues have since been resolved, and it's impossible to figure out who is still having problems, and what they can try.

I've started a nice clean thread to continue this discussion for 4.3 and later. http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1117506 Thanks to Bob_Peters for the suggestion. I'm locking this one, otherwise it'll continue to get increasingly unweidly, but please feel free to continue existing discussions on the new thread.

Victoria - The Lightroom Queen

R

ronda@gregoriophotography

Participant

I just upgraded to Lightroom 4 last week and I am very unhappy with how slow it is running. What a pain! Should be great software but it is not :-( I waited this long for Lightroom 4 thinking the problem would have been solved, I was wrong! Lightroom 4 is annoying!

S

Shizam1

Participant

I have a new build that LR is struggling on...

My system:

Intel i7-3930K - a 6 core 3.2 GHZ CPU

32 GB RAM

2 GB NVidia video card

240GB Intel SSD

2 X 3TB WD RED drives mirrored

This machine gets a 7.6 on the Windows Experience Index.

Some things I've noticed - When generating previews, LR seems to barely use the CPU. When bringing up lightroom, it takes 10-20 seconds to display images on the screen. When clicking on a new image, it shows "Loading" for 8-12 seconds. And it seems to not keep the previews. If I stop/start lightroom, the behavior repeats.

I have the Cache and catalogs on the mirrored drives, but the Cache directory is empty anyway and nothing is being put into it.

If I'm sluggishly going through photos, the CPU will stay very low, then all of a sudden all CPU's will spike and start doing stuff, and going through photos goes faster.

I'm going to try removing all the .LRData files tonight...

B

bob frost

Inspiring

From: "Shizam1

Some things I've noticed - When generating previews, LR seems to barely
use the CPU. When bringing up lightroom, it takes 10-20 seconds to
display images on the screen. When clicking on a new image, it shows
"Loading" for 8-12 seconds. And it seems to not keep the previews. If I
stop/start lightroom, the behavior repeats.> I'm going to try removing all
the .LRData files tonight...
I have the Cache and catalogs on the mirrored drives, but the Cache
directory is empty anyway and nothing is being put into it.

Yes, delete the previews folder including the previews, previews.db and

rootpixels.db, clear the acr cache, and then rebuild fresh previews. I have

more or less the same setup, and mine runs fine with 4.3, so there is

something wrong in your system. I note you say nothing is being put into

your acr cache. Delete the existing folder and create a new cache folder

from within LR (Edit/Prefs/FileHandling) or let it use its default cache

folder in your system drive.

Bob Frost

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

Next to Bob's advice make sure you check the permissions on all those

folders whether the user you run Lightroom as has write access to them.

Also be careful with antivirus software.

K

KKuja

Participating Frequently

I have been very sceptic about LR 4. I tried 4.0 and it was sluggish. I partially blamed my old machine (1) and thought, oh well, no more new LRs for me. Today I tried LR 4.2 (because I was too lazy to get RC 4.3) just to see how slow it is. To my surprise it was usable. Very close to 3.6, which I have mainly been using.

I tried LR 4.2 with only fairly small amount of pictures, so I have to continue testing it. Also, I did very basic editing, without any localized adjustments. But I think I will try to use it with the next patch of images I process. Anyway, this was psotivie surprise to me.

(1) Macbook4,1. Core 2 duo 2,4 GHz, 4GB RAM. OS X 1.6.8. Images were from Nikon D700.

JP Hess

Inspiring

Here is what I don't understand about this whole performance issue. I have used Lightroom on four different computers, two of them were 32 bit and two of them are 64 bit. I will admit that performance was a little sluggish on the 32 bit computers, but it wasn't really intolerable. All of the computers have been pretty much what you would call "plain vanilla" computers; no high-end graphics cards, no SSD drives, all just basically off the shelf computers. My new Windows 7 64 bit computer is just using integrated video, 8 GB Ram, but other than that there is really nothing out of the ordinary (if you can call that out of the ordinary). This new computer has no problems whatsoever with Lightroom. New images are downloaded and previews are built so quickly that I hardly even see the progress bar. I keep expecting to encounter the problems a lot of others seem to be having, but I just haven't seen it.

A

andreas603

Participating Frequently

Jim, *most* performance issues are not related to speed of import or preview build time during that import. They occur during subsequent editing..in Lib or Dev tabs with Exp, Lum, spot healing, image redraw when scrolling, etc. They also occur during image re-draws after scrolling or zooming. I think its an over simplification that you can draw any conclusions from simply comparing 32 vs 64bit systems.... This can easily get lost on anyone joining this monsterous thread...Its been noted many times.

Pete.Green

Community Manager

Hi all,

We have put together a technote containing several less traditional suggestions for optimizing Lightroom's performance that we hope will help.

http://adobe.ly/LRPerformHints

Let us know which of these suggestions are helpful to you. Thanks everyone!

B

bmphotography1

Participating Frequently

Done all of these Peter,

Still no dice. I desperation, I just threw a grand at a 3930K and OC'd it to 4.5. Performance is slightly better but hey I'll take what I can get.

Until you can explain to me why LR uses less threads/cores threads for the noise slider when shadow or highlight are <> 0 and why it is that all threads/cores light up using the noise slider when shadow/highlight = 0 then I dont think I am going to be very happy (i.e. why does LR use less resources when there are more calculations to do).

For a IB-E 3930K to be sitting at about 50%CPU capacity when the program is clearly struggling to update the screen is beyond me.

areohbee

Legend

The problem with assuming the the user's machine is at fault is that the job of the software dev is to iron out the problems on common hardware. It's ludicrous to say..."well..it works fine on a commodore 64...your problem is that your hardware is at fault...it's not a commodore64..

No...I realize that no software works perfectly on all hardware...but there is a reasonable expectation that software will be functional on common setups...not so buggy that like-machines are behaving 100% differently.

If you bought a car and the brakes were mushy you'd not expect the dealer to tell you that you're partially at fault, that you should start stopping earlier and not be in such a rush...would you? (though it would "fix" the problem...you'd be able to stop in time, it's not the ROOT of the problem is it? It's the brakes...not you or the way you use the brakes...you EXPECT brakes to behave in a certain way

IF my other software programs can get this simple thing right (I can't REMEMEBER the last time I had a conversation like this over software) then certainly LR should be better than it is.

I use Photoshop CS5 on the same machine and it's got TONS of more capability than LR and it runs like butter....

rpavich1234 wrote:
...

rpavich1234,

I essentially agree with you, and I am most certainly on your side here: Lr should be robustened and optimized so it doesn't have all these problems...

But there still seems to be a cricital point you are missing, as evidenced by this statement:

rpavich1234 wrote:
it's the job of the software dev to iron out the problems on common hardware.

While I agree with this (I have been a software dev since the beginning of (computer) time).

Adobe did iron out all the problems on common hardware before releasing Lr4 (as a beta that is). I assume this based on experience - I have no inside info about it. No self-respecting engineer would certify it, and no reputable company would force it from the hands of the engineers without such certification (even if informal). If you think Adobe knew it was cr@p and didn't care, and shipped cr@p because they had the users by the ball sack or whatever - you are being way too cynical. - it may seem like that, but things are rarely exactly what they seem to be.

I mean, I'm sure they were aware of some bugs when they shipped, but if Lr was performing poorly in their lab (or in their small circle of alpha testers) the way it is (or was) for some people in the field, they wouldn't have shipped it (Adobe is a respectable company with a reputation to uphold, despite the fact that profit is the primary business motivation).

Don't get me wrong: plenty of beta testers reported problems and they shipped it anyway, but I'm really glad they did: I've been happily using it for almost a year now. The deal being this: knowing that some people have problems is often insufficient info for finding a solution: very hard to fix if can't reproduce in lab.

Maybe you do understand that - dunno. I mean, your point is well-taken: they should have tested it better. Dunno if my point is being taken - so far there has been no indication that I've been understood.

My machine runs very well, in general - most apps, including Lightroom. I do have some other apps that don't work as well on my machine as they do on other people's machines - go figure.

Food for thought: if you are one of the people having problems, then such problems seem more prevalent than if you are one of the people not having such problems.

For the record:

rpavich1234 wrote:
The problem with assuming the user's machine is at fault...

I have never ever thought that, nor said that.

But this is a user forum, and none of us has any control over the software, which I consider to be a given (in mathematics terms: a constant, not a variable) - your mission should you choose to accept it, is to try and get that lousy piece of ______ working as well on your machine as it possibly can. - this post will self-destruct in 5 seconds.

Rob

D

DaleusAtUPEI

Participant

I've read page after page of suggestions on how to improve performance, and I've noted a number of things to try. I am working on a client's machine and so can't provide immediate feedback.

I have not seen any mention of my client's problem, but then again, I haven't read every page of responses here - the backbiting is just way too vicious - and my eyes are getting tired. So here is a quick summary of my client's issue and I hope someone can suggest some reasonable solutions:

---

When typing in a dialog or other text field within the program, LR often suffers from some sort of "outage" as it "goes to sleep" for 15 to 20 seconds. Sometimes, Windows 7 even displays the partly opaque "white screen", which generally indicates the system is trying to cope with demands on the system.

During the outage, the system continues to capture keystrokes as evidenced when it comes back to life - all keystrokes captured during the outage are subsequently shown in the text field.

Original observations led me to conclude that something like Windows Indexing might be playing a part - the behaviour very much looks as though the system is struggling to index something or struggling to search an index of something, perhaps a repository of auto-name-completion information. It's difficult to explain.

In order to eliminate some of the typical Windows irritations, a number of configuration changes have been made, but none have made a difference.

----

I don't know if this is even remotely related to the issues that other folks have talked about in this thread. Frankly, there are dozens of responses that seem to have nothing to do with LightRoom issues and more to do with finger pointing. There *was* a post that suggested there is a more "official" Adobe thread as opposed to this "User to User" thread, but my eyes are practically bleeding from trying to sift through some of the nonsense here.

If someone could direct me to that thread, or if someone could provide a direct and helpful answer, I would be grateful.

Dale

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dwterry

Known Participant

I assume this text entry you are talking about is when entering a keyword?

I too suffer a similar delay (and probably about the same 10-15 seconds). It happens to me during the Import Dialog where I type in the keywords for the entire import. It is so bad that I hardly use this feature any more so I just haven't said anything about it. I believe it started with 4.2RC. I don't think it existed in 4.1 or any prior release.

One thing I should point out, I have well over 400,000 images in my catalog. There are, of course, new ones since LR 4.x came out, but not so many as to explain such a drastic slow down.

The rest of LR 4.2 (final release) and LR 4.3RC is functioning quite well for me. So by avoiding the keywords I'm generally failry happy with LR's performance at this point.

D

DaleusAtUPEI

Participant

Hi thanks, yes this is text entry via the keyboard and what I viewed I beleive was a keyword field.

Having related to my client, some of the issues reported in this forum, she noted that she is also having many of the same problems, so it appears it is not strictly related to text dialogs etc.

I appreciate hearing from someone who is experiencing the same issues as she is. She has already all but made up her mind that she will be rolling back to LR3. The impact on her work flow and her ability to respond quickly to *her* clients has been too much for her to deal with. She is quite disappointed having spent money specifically for a new computer and the new software.

However, she will be heartened to know she is not the only person suffering the same issues.

Thank you once again for your response!

areohbee

Legend

Lr4.3RC any better?

PS - Has anybody in New Jersey or Portland taken trshaner or Brett N up on their offers?

C

ChristianDembowski

Participating Frequently

Rob Cole wrote:
Lr4.3RC any better?

I doubt it but you never know. It worries me that "performance issues" aren't even mentioned in the list of bug fixes.

B

beautiful_writer15A8

Participating Frequently

Well...for me it is better. NOT the best thing since sliced bread...but definitley noticable. It's now what I would consider "not irritating-usable." Which is to say that the lag on the sliders is just about gone under most circumstances, and the time between switching images is fast enough where I don't get irritated..(2 seconds) and when applying presets they take effect in a reasonable length of time (3 seconds).

No...it's not optimum...I'd like it to be better but clearly they've done SOMETHING to enhance it a bit.

I have been been VERY vocal about my displeasure of the poor performance of LR4 and now I'd like to be just as clear that they seem to be taking steps to improve it.

J

James Atwood

Participating Frequently

I've finally solved the Lightroom 4 develop module speed issues! The answer was right under my nose all along.. spend thousands of dollars!! I can't believe I didn't think of that earlier. It now runs great with the following:

- Intel Core i7 3930K 6-core sandy bridge CPU on the new LGA2011 fitting, with a basic overclock to 4.2ghz

- Antec Kuhler 920 liquid cpu cooler

- Rampage IV extreme motherboard, featuring lga2011 fitting and 8 slots for ram

- 32gb of ram

- AMD Radeon HD 6950 gpu, which allows me to connect my 4 monitors simultaneously

- One OCZ Vertex 4 SSD drive with windows 7 64-bit installed on it

- One OCZ Vertex 4 SSD drive with my catalog on it

Remember, AHCI or RAID mode must be configured in bios before you install windows to take advantage of the 6gb/s SSD drive connectors!

S

Scholle Images

Participant

Hey all, Mike here. New to the forum, and recently became aware of LR4 performance issues only by reading about them.

I downloaded LR4 trial from adobe a couple weeks ago onto my aging Intel Core2 Quad Q6700 at 2.66 GHz. It's Win 7 with 4 gig RAM, onboard Intel Q35 graphics chipset, and running 32-bit.

I hate to say it, but it's running flawlessly so far, and the sliders work in real-time with no lag. I exported 200 NEF files to JPG in about 13-14 minutes last night after applying user presets to them.

Now the reason for this is NOT to brag. I have read on some other forums that there are other "old" dual and quad core intel boxes that run this software fine. I don't know why, and I don't know if it's all of them. I read somewhere else that one person identified it as anything other than ATI graphics cards that are slowing it - but I don't think that's the case.

Why am I saying all this? Because I actually cancelled an order for an iMac after reading about all these performance issues. Yes, I was excited to to have a new 27" i5, but now it's not going to happen. I'll buy another drive for my existing system and likely purchase LR4 to continue using it on a 3 or 4 year old system.

I *want* Adobe to fix it because I'd love to be able to justify the new iMac. And since I've experienced LR4.1 without any issues, I know it's possible. There has to be a common component (hardware) for why so many are having this problem. (IMHO)

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

Scholle Images,

to place this in perspective, I have run LR 4 on a C2D machine since it came out and had no issues whatsoever. I am now running it on a retina Mac Book Pro with a Core i7 and it runs flawlessly and super fast. I would like some more support for the retina display than the accidental support LR has in Library (just conincidental I think) but apart from that it is just fine. I see no reason to think that it would not run as well on a new iMac. I don't want to shove the problems of the people that are having issues under the rug, but you are unlikley to experience similar issues. I doubt any vanilla, out-of-the box Mac that is not bogged down with crappy antivirus software will experience any issues.

rmherzog

Participant

LR4.0 and 4.1 is very, very slow. I can't believe that Adobe has done nothing to improve the speed issues since the release of LR4 and LR4.1

I think Adobe is feeling that all that pros that use LR, will go away and use some other program, perhaps Capture One from Phase One, I'm going to try it. LR 4.1 is slowing us (professionals) down to a crawl with production. It is no longer an application that can be used in a professional production workflow. It is at best, an application for the joe consumer that shoots jpegs, not RAW.

I'm using a new MacPro with these specs.

processor 2 x 2.66 GHZ 6-core Intel Xeon = 12 cores

memory 48GB 1333MHz DDR3

graphics ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024MB

startup drive is a 2TB 7200rpm with 1.65TB of free space

areohbee

Legend

I think it would help to quantify.

For people who have fairly normal performance (but its still slow), it may help to use

EditInLightroom if you have bunches of very hi-rez files to process. How well will it work for people who've abnormal performance? - dunno.

~R.

A

AndreaThomasNC

Participant

I have Windows 7 64 bit and 8GB RAM - and LR4 is slow. LR3 was great on this system, and if I change the process version back to 2010, it's fast, but obviously that defeats the whole purpose of upgrading to LR4. Brushes and spot healing tool are almost unusable for me.

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