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

[Kennedda]

Any suggestions as to what settings in my system may be related to this problem? I do repair preferences in disk utility as needed.  Thanks.

[shamus1585]

I agree with Brett.   My install of LR4 works fine for the most part with a few exceptions.  The slowdown occurs when I use a second monitor, fine otherwise.

I also noticed (another issue OT). That while burning to a DVD is fine, burning a couple of files to a CD is problematic.

Hoping 4.1 comes soon with support of ACR 6.7 as converting to DNG for my new 5DMkIII is an extra step and HD space.

[kwdaves]

Please be the guinea pig here and delete your previews and then recreate them. It may help if you also scroll throught your catalog and let it recreate the thumbnails. It will probable take a while.

[Tashka]

Addendum to my previous LR4 bug report:

Title: Unsynchronized Mouse Actions; Import Failure; Suspected Tag Issue

Problem Summaries:

Another devastating LR4 problem is that the code that processes user actions (mouse clicks, keyboard presses) is not queuing (buffering) the pointer location along with the user action requested at that location. 

This is one of the most basic programming necessities in modern asynchronous GUI's.  Instead, unbelievably, when a requested LR4 user action is finally executed (sometimes 2-3 seconds later), it is not performed on the location where the action was requested but wherever the pointer happened to be at the (later) time of execution. This concept is so basic and obvious, we are dumbstruck as to how Adobe did not catch it in Q/A, let alone have allowed it in its design.

I colored this fault as devastating because it can easily and inconspicuously cause any number of unwanted selections of catalog entries, tags, and so on.  That problem then causes: unwanted modification of images; tagging of wrong images; applying wrong tags to images; tagging of wrong selections with wrong tags; deletion of the wrongly selected items; ad infinitum.

Of course, one obviously needs to verify one's actions, but having to verify something as basic and ubiquitous as each and every mouse click in a high-end GUI program designed to perform actions on 10's of 1000's of images is neither feasible nor acceptable.  This behavior is akin to having to diligently monitor and verify each and every breath one takes.  Yes, it can be done, but you couldn't count pocket change let alone do an inventory count of a warehouse at the same time.

Example Problem Exercise:

Start LR4 on a library of 10-30k+ images (ours is 37k) converted from LR 3.6.

Set GUI to the OOB default of Sources/Folders in left pane, Thumbs browser in center pain, Histogram/Tags/Metadata info in right pain, and Thumbs selector row in bottom pane.  This is the exact same set up as we had in 2.x through 3.x with few problems and at least sluggish performance.

Ensure you have enough tags defined on right panel that they fill the screen (about 30-40).  We have about 200-300 but haven’t really counted.

In thumbnail browser, go to end, then page back to beginning (several minutes).

Randomly and quickly try to select 20 or so noncontiguous images using the Control-Click method.  Note how long a selection can take (0.5-1 sec). Also note how some selections get deselected while non-selections get selected because of wild unsynchronized mouse actions on the wrong GUI hit zones.

Note above action can be snappy upon first program invocation.  Repeat several times over several minutes to stress memory and caches.

With above selection active, now try to select a contiguous range of 20+ images elsewhere. Now note how long selection takes to complete which, for us, is the worst case of 1-3+ seconds.

With above selections, next try to quickly select a number of tags in normally rapid succession as in a normal production workflow.  Note how some selections don’t seem to take because of mouse action queuing issues.  This is more insidious because one normally selects several and if the last few look ok, one assumes the rest are.

Now exercise combinations of all above actions over, say. 20 minutes.  If your LR4 behaves as several others noted here, LR4 will slow to an unusable crawl as you are then required to click, freeze mouse, wait, then click again, wait for completion, ad nauseam.

Another Problem: Import Failure

We haven’t had time to replicate this but when we added 4k images to our image folder tree of 33,000 images, we those 4k images were correctly noted in the import summary and showed in the Last Import collection. 

However, after discovering that the faulty mouse queuing and image selection erroneously deleted some images, we went to Explorer and restored then last 20 or so images to ensure we got them back.  We then did another sync of the entire tree to re-enter them in the catalog. 

Horrors!  The import summary showed it was about to import 37,000 images – literally our entire catalog.  We cancelled it.  We subsequently tried to synchronize just the folders where we estimated the restored files were in.  That worked but was not conclusive because we were not sure if all the images in the folders were restored or not.

Suspected (but unconfirmed) Tag Issue:

Our last task was to update our 4k new images with location tags showing where they were shot.  After import, we sorted by Date Taken, went to the end, and then started moving back in time, adding location tags to the new imports. 

We got suspicious of a possible tag loss issue when it appeared that the location tags were missing from not just the expected 4k new imports, but also from the next previous 7k.   We were quite confident (but could be wrong) that we had updated most of our 34k images prior to the last import yet none of the latest 11k images (4k of last import plus next latest 7k) were location tagged. 

We suspect we are drinking the wrong Kool-Aid, some tags got erased in the 3.6-4 catalog upgrade, or 4 LR is not seeing some tags that are there.  Sorry we can’t confirm more at this point.

We will attempt to reload our v3.6 catalogs from backups and comapratively review these same issues in our still installed v3.6.

Hope that helps.

XOR42

[Kamalakanto]

Re: Lightroom 4 is slow     

Use this punblished article to Fix Lightroom 4 Slow Issues

https://help-internal.adobe.com/content/help/en/lightroom/kb/optimize- performance-lightroom.html

Optimize your hardware and OS  

     #

• Exceed minimum system requirements
• Use a fast hard drive
• Make sure that you have a large enough hard drive and enough free space
• Video cards
• Run Lightroom in 64-bit mode (Lightroom 4 and 3)

[SistersCountry]

Use this punblished article to Fix Lightroom 4 Slow Issues

https://help-internal.adobe.com/content/help/en/lightroom/kb/optimize- performance-lightroom.html

That link is not working for me. Is this the same article maybe?

http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html

[Kamalakanto]

http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html

[A_C_G]

sury

That link says this "The minimum system requirements to run Lightroom are just that: the minimum you need for Lightroom to operate. Additional RAM and a faster processor, in particular, can yield significant performance benefits."

The problem that this thread is addressing is that Lightroom does not operate in the minimum spec for quite a number of posters. They are not deprived of performance benefits as they have a piece of software where the sliders are too laggy to use for the reason people buy it.

Add to that there are a number of posters with hugely enhanced specs having a Lightroom 4 that is not operating well enough in a way that makes it useable for their photography.

Tony

[Kennedda]

I agree as I have a fully optimized Lightroom setup on a Mac Book Pro. I read through the article and checked off all the recommended actions for Lightroom and the performance remains low. There is a severe performance difference between version 4 and 3.  I advise others on the use of Lightroom and I would recommend not upgrading now.

[randydellingerLR]

Possible solution: I left LR4 running for 10 hours w/o using it and now it's much faster, almost at LR3.6 speed. Perhaps it was converting my large catalog (82K photos) in the background which was slowing everything? I hope the speed lasts!

[SnapshotNinja]

I am on a Quad 4GHz machine w/ 12GB of ram.  My catalog & images are on 550MB/s read/write SSD drives.  Yet LR4 is very sluggish.  LR3 was responsive (still slower than I would like, but worked fine), LR4 is almost like running a Java app at times.

[Guest]

Java apps aren't generally slow.

If there are other slow applications there might be a bottleneck in your hardware or system configuration.

On my system - 2 year old i5-750, 4 Gb RAM, Windows 7 64-bit - LR4 runs mostly as quick as LR3.

You should also more clearly define, what actually is sluggish, and how is sluggish to you (i.e times images needs to get rendered, how responsive sliders are etc.)

[SnapshotNinja]

Many java apps are slow (visually) but not all, I agree especially with newer runtimes, but I think it gets the point across.

Image render times are very slow, moving around the catalog is very slow, sliders can be slow at times.

It is not a bottleneck in my system.  My system is faster for most everything else and runs LR3 very well. I have brand new $600 video card and 4 top of the line SSD drives.

[Mag_74]

I installed a big update from Nvidia ( 130 Mb ) in windows update.   After that it´s working smooth again.   Before I was just like many above has explained. 

[Wanchese_West]

I just did the Nvidia update too, after reading your post. Muuuuch better! Though improved, there is still too much granulaity in the sliders.  The crop tool works perfectly. Thanks Mag_74!

Also, the transitions between Library and Develop modules are now snappier than in LR3.6

[bob frost]

Mag_74 wrote:

I installed a big update from Nvidia ( 130 Mb ) in windows update.   After that it´s working smooth again.   Before I was just like many above has explained.

Graphics card drivers are a notorious cause of all sorts of problems. And LR has suffered a lot over the years from old drivers. You can register on the nVidia site to be notified by email every time there is a new update. Win update doesn't always seem to notice them.

Since I don't play games, I only install the basic driver, not the 3D this, that, and the other. The less you have to go wrong, the fewer problems you will get!

Bob Frost

[BCormier]

I have noticed that preview and applying presets are super slow. Probably the slowest thing about lightroom 4 besides the initial switch from the library to the develope mod.

[Screenynamettr]

Too many people are just posting the specifications of their PC's/MACS. Anyone with an ounce of common sense can tell from reading this forum that LR4 is running slower than it should and that Adobe are looking in to it.

It doesnt matter if you have 10 "Top of the line" SSD's or a dozen core processor with 64GIG of RAM or the NASA space station. Use LR3 in the mean time, afterall 2 weeks ago thats the only option you ever had!

I can assure everyone that LR4 is leaps and bounds above LR3.X for RAW editing.

[Guest]

Screenynamettr wrote:

Too many people are just posting the specifications of their PC's/MACS. Anyone with an ounce of common sense can tell from reading this forum that LR4 is running slower than it should and that Adobe are looking in to it.

It doesnt matter if you have 10 "Top of the line" SSD's or a dozen core processor with 64GIG of RAM or the NASA space station. Use LR3 in the mean time, afterall 2 weeks ago thats the only option you ever had!

I can assure everyone that LR4 is leaps and bounds above LR3.X for RAW editing.

No it isn't. Lightroom 4 isn't running slower than it should - for many, many people. It runs slower for some and this apparently does not depend on hardware spec, but more likely on difficult to track down system configuration or driver specialities. There are bugs in Lightroom, bugs in drivers, and some hardware components may not play nicely together, when Lightroom 4 runs.

[sparksdjs]

LR4 is not "leaps and bounds above LR3.X" if you can't run it in a reasonable fashion on your machine.

[Screenynamettr]

I guess as you have not had a proper chance to use it you might feel like you have been dicked. Just use 3.6...the process version of LR4 is what I was refering too, so much better.

Good luck.

[sparksdjs]

Yeah, 3.6 is still there to use.  The irritating aspect is paying for an upgrade that is useless.  It would be a different matter if this were a 3.7 and free.

[adventure_photo]

I too was experiencing extremely sluggish performance.  I had 147,000 images in my catalog from LR 3.6.  I did have the beta installed and when I installed the final release version of LR 4, I just upgraded my original LR 3 catalog to the new version.  After some frustration experiencing slow everything including switching between modules, adding labels and flags, adjustment brush slowness, metadata updating, aquiring thumbnail previews, etc.; I decided to create a brand new catalog, then did a File> "Import from another catalog..." and imported from the catalog  that was originally converted from LR3>LR4 and things are way better now.  Everything now seems as snappy or snappier than before running LR 3.6.  All of my metadata, flags, labels, develop history remained intact.  Granted it did take several hours to import that many files but it seems much better now.  Not sure if this will help anyone else out, but maybe worth a try for those that are at their wits end on this.  I'm running an iMac Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, 6 GB Ram, OS X 10.7.3 if anyone cares or needs this info.

[Kallithea]

I haven't imported any old catalogs yet from LR 3.6. I'm running OS X 10.7.3 on a quad-core i7 machine with 16GB of RAM and an Intel HD Graphics 3000 graphics card. Painting with brushes and moving sliders is incredibly slow, especially painting with brushes. There is also a problem when using my Wacom Intuos 4 tablet and trying to pan around in an image with the grabber hand: the image will not stop moving after I put down the pen (it will keep moving in the last direction I pushed for at least another couple of seconds). But painting with brushes...wow, it's like a throw-back to Aperture 2, only worse.

[googull]

I followed suit and upgraded my NVIDIA win-64 drivers moving from 280.26 to 296.10.  They can sure release a lot of updates in 6 months.  Like other posters, I don't play games so usually don't screw with what works and LR3 and Adobe CS5.5 have had no video issues.  Following the driver update, performance in all regards, returned to near typical LR3 levels.  But I am not sure that Video drivers was the true cause of trouble.

I later realized while upgrading my 2nd Catalog and renaming it that I had forgotten to rename the origional upgraded Catalog properly (I had failed to rename the 11GB preview cache).  Of course LR4 built a new cache without any indication that it was doing so and I suspect that is what I was fighting while perfomance was so sluggish. I properly renamed the 2nd converted Catalog (containing 47,727 RAW Nikon Images) and performance remains smooth - almost as smooth at 3.6 (moving between modules remains slower than I am accustomed to but no more show stopping slider and cropping issues. 

No way for me to be sure if any of the above truly addressed the problem and I am avoiding the import module untiI I get a few backlogged projects out the door but perhaps my experince and mistakes may help someone.