Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 4.x

[bcormier]

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

[eswrite]

I have a much faster (and newer) system, with twice the amount of RAM. I'll test tonight and see if I notice any slow-downs, but, like with all software updates, it may well be that LR 4 now demands more of a system, and your PC may just be on the borderline of acceptable resources for optimum performance?

[Guest]

On my i7 Quad Core, 16Gb DDR3 RAM, 2Tb SATA II Hard Drive PC, Lr 4.1 is noticeably slower than Lr 3.x. For large jobs (processing high quantities of photos) I am now using DxO Optics Pro which processes very quickly. On Lr 4.1 I would have lost many clients at the speed that Lr 4.1 processes.

[SavagePhoto-lItHqa]

DAVE - DXO is indeed VERY fast but the browser and its inability to cache and display changes makes the program overall slower for me. How are you dealing with that aspect of it?

Just a side note - I have changed the setting to recieve emails a few times - as long as adobes doesnt record those settings and keeps sending me emails I will keep speacking my mind

[AndyYau]

The release version is as slow as the beta version. I am testing both on my Mac Pro 3GHz 8 Core, 16G Ram, hard disk is Raid0 x 3.

The response is unaccpetable.

[DdeGannes]

Its possible that it has to build new previews and Camera Raw cache.

[Mike Guilbault]

I'm on a MacPro dual 2.8 quad core w/20GB and it works quite well. 

[bcormier]

It seems like I mostly have lag when switching to full screen or going into the develope module. It also seems though that this is only for the first few mins I have it open. If I go to the develope module it will be slow the first time and fast the rest of the time. Hopefully they will fix this. The new develop and video features are too good to go back to Lightroom 3.

[Armin-H]

I am on a Mac - LR3 was very fast - LR4 is unuseable SLOW 😞

[Michel_13]

Yes, same conditions for LR3 and LR4 : LR3 was fast, LR4 is very slow. A trick indicated by a user, make LR4 working better but after a certain time, rebooting or so, LR4 is becoming slower. So much posts concerning speed (actually very low speed) couldn't be only the fact of users configurations. My LR3 library is 30 more bigger than the one of LR4, configurations are the same concerning previews aso.. Even DxO which was not the fastest RAW software in the past, is now faster as LR4 !

Curious thing that even LR3 was a little bit slower from time I installed LR4 beta, replaced now with released LR4.

I think I will not upgrade to LR4 until I've retrieved speed of LR3, particularly because from my personal point of vue, LR4 is NOT a major release.

[bob frost]

Michel_13 wrote:

Curious thing that even LR3 was a little bit slower from time I installed LR4 beta, replaced now with released LR4.

One of the things that both LR3 and LR4 share is the acr cache, which stores the part-rendered .dat files (for raw files) to speed up going to 1:1 views. I've always been suspicious as to how well they do this sharing, and I would suggest deleting the acr cache (Preferences/filehandling/purge cache) and letting LR4 build a new one without LR3 interfering with it. See if that helps.

Bob Frost

[Michel_13]

Bob, thanks for your advice, I will try this and see what happen. Another thing I'm trying is to install LR4 alone on another system, with no LR installation at all, to avoid some shared files with LR3 ? This should give the right information if no improvment, where to look : propably graphic driver.

[rbphotog]

I'm agreeing with Armin-H.  LR4 is running incredibly SLOW, not like LR3 for speed at all.  Just making brush or cloning adjustments causes a 3-5 second lag for them to take effect.  Not acceptable for Adobe products.  I'm running  Mac Pro QuadCore Xeon w/ 11GB or RAM.  That should be sufficient to tame just about any beast of a program.  The lag occurs even without any other programs running.  Why should that be? 

[rpavich1234]

They need to clean up the code....it's just sloppy coding. There should be no reason that LR4 causes this kind of havoc on such large machines.

[j. scriba]

Compared to LR3 I do feel it's a lot less responsive.

Moving sliders like clarity produces so much lack that it's kind of impossible to get a feel for subtle changes.

I'm on OS 10.7.3 on a 8-core 3GHz Mac Pro with 24GB RAM, so I don't think performance is due to a lack of system resources.

I like LR3 for the immediate response of controls. That feeling is gone with LR4.

The development algorithm is clearly different from LR3. It brings out a lot more levels in deep shadows.

It's hard for me to say if that's a good thing, yet, but the fact that everything is so sluggish makes it hard to have fun testing the impact.

When I look at the CPU load on the activity meter, something as simple as changing the black level in LR4 produces a massive spike of activity on all cores. A similar manipulation in LR3 is hardly noticable. No wonder the sliders don't really follow small changes.

[Guest]

Hi Folks!

I allready wrote in the beta time in the therad about that lr4 beta was sluggish. I wrote this:

I Installed LR4 Beta today on 3 Machines. I worked on 5DMKII raw files. dng and cr2 files.

Here are the hardware settings:

1: I7 930 overclocked to 3.8ghz , 128gb ssd as boot disk, 3 raid 0 disks (6 x 1.5TB) for datas and as scratch disk for cash and so one, 12gb ram, nvidia gtx570, win7 x64 ultimate

2: same as nr one, just a quadro 4000 as grapics card.

3: mac pro with 2 intel xeon 6 core prozessors, 12gb ram and ati hd 5870, osx 10.7.2 lion

Conclusion. When working in Process 2010, everything works realtime, fluid, perfekt. switching to process 2012 it is simply AWFUL. moving a slider and 1/2 - to 1 second untill i can see the results in the pictures. it gets realy bad, when i turn on the sharpness and the lens correction. it is simply not possible to work on this piece of software. completely useless at this stage.

These are pretty high end machines with a lot of power. i know lr4 is BETA, but the performance must grow about 800%, or lr4 will be useless for a smooth workflow.

I just red, that a person called COW answered in this thread that lr4 is fine now and fast! i tried to reply in that thread, but now that thread is set to READ only for me, so i have to write here.

i installed the software on all these 3 machines today. i imported the catalogue and ...bam. sluggish like HELL. unbelievable. 7D files and 550D files are a little bit faster but hell it is still sloooowwww.

i did the trick like lee told me in the other thread and i tried to import fresh and clean cr2 files driectly to the 2012 process. like in the beta it became a liiitttlleee bit more fluid. but just a little bit. so i decided to clean my complete preview database and my cache and let it completele rebuilt. i did that on my mac pro dualprozessor machine which runs on 10.7.3 lion. lr4 is installed on a samsung 500mb/sec ssd and the pure cache disk is another ssd wird 128gb. just for cache and preview database and catalogue. i think this is quite as fast as it can be.

so i completely renewed everything and.....again. a little bit faster but agins much to slow.

when you have the lens correction turned off and sharpness turned off, it is likely useable. when you turn on a second monitor it beginns to get slower. when you add lens correction and detail/sharpness........bam. slow as hell. i recognized the cpu usage and saw that the usage was unter 8% on all 12 cores. no cpu usage and unbelievable slow??? working in lr3 is completely flawless. not one stuttering or anything. i am completely not satisfied with this piece of software - sorry!

i heard a trick from a friend of mine who told me, that not the cpu power is important. lr4 uses the ram and the faster the ram is, the faster is lr4. so we built in a new ram from 12gb up to 24gb. the old ram had 1330mhz and the new one had 1800mhz. the speed raised up but it is STILL not completele fluid. when i did some adjustments to a picture, the sliders become unbelievable slow, as more and more you move them. on all my machines.

adobe, i really like lr and i grew up with this product. i allready even bought the upgrade. but no...this is not a piece oft software that can be used for a fluid und fast workflow. it can be used for single pictures to create really good results....yes, but not for a fast and fluid workflow what lightroom once stood for.

Sorry to say that but you have not completed the mission. it was a failure. having lr4 and a user who prefers lr3.6 should not be the goal!

Resolve these problems please as fast as you can guys!

King regards Frank!

[shamus1585]

I just upgraded and found the same.  I am running a Dell i7 w/ 12 gigs ram, NVidia 2 gig card with llatest driver.

The develop module is where I noticd it.  with the 2010 process, seemed fine, but when the conversion was made, moving some of the sliders took approx a second for the slider to move and image to update.  Hope Adobe figures it out.  Will be using LR3 on any big jobs for now.

[lam@kellmodern.com]

Hi Frank! I just read up on your post from 7 months ago. Have you figured out a solution. I'm in the same boat. When you have a moment please let me know what you think? http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1057108

I have no faith in Adobe stepping in to admit their poorly sluggish piece of software!

Thanks,

Lam

[bcormier]

So it seems that the slowness could possibly be because of the new process version. I updated my whole catalogue to the new version so I am wondering if that's causing the lag. I will have to try importing some fresh raw files and see how they do. Maybe it's because of the upscale from 2010 to 2012?

[hinzo]

Upgraded today and clearly the 2012 process is so slow and sluggish compared with 2010.

My machine is Quad i7 12GB ram 64-bit,

[eswrite]

Hmm. Quad i7 here with 16GB of RAM, operating on Nikon D7000 16MP raw files. I can't see a speed difference between 2010 and 2012. In develop module, exposure, shadow, highlight sliders move at the same speed. Which sliders were you folks trying.

[jeret44]

I upgraded to LR 4 a couple of days ago.

Could it be slow because the program is using more virtual memory than real memory.  I went to the help menu and clicked on system info.  Here is what I found.

Lightroom version: 4.0 [814577]

Operating system: Windows 7 Home Premium Edition

Version: 6.1 [7601]

Application architecture: x64

System architecture: x64

Physical processor count: 12

Processor speed: 3.1 GHz

Built-in memory: 12279.0 MB

Real memory available to Lightroom: 12279.0 MB

Real memory used by Lightroom: 1287.8 MB (10.4%)

Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 1906.2 MB

Memory cache size: 226.4 MB

System DPI setting: 96 DPI

Desktop composition enabled: Yes

Displays: 1) 1920x1080

From what I understand, virtual memory (using the hard drive as memory) is really slow.  I couldn't find anything in the preferences menu in LR 4 having to do with memory usage.

I am not a teckie, so I may be off base with this.

[Firillu]

I have a problem with importing and using the LR3 caralogue so I started a new cataloge to test with a few images. (47 photos only)

I expeience the same slugishness on a MacBook Pro 2011, 8Gb RAM, Lr4 unuseable for my day to day work compared to Lr3. What a let down - have to switch back to Lr3, I'm glad I haven't paid for it yet.

[hamish niven]

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.....

[AndyYau]

Cache files and previews file were both deleted. But the speed is still exactly the same on my Mac Pro 3G, 8-cores.