I was also experiencing unusable slowness in both the beta and final LR4. After the following tweaks, it's at least as snappy as LR 3, and a bit faster in several areas. First my computer specs.
AMD Phenom II X4 965 processor
8 gigs of ram
5600 RPM 1TB drive
Windows 7 64bit
Here are the things I did to my system to speed it up.
1. Add exclusions to my antivirus real time scan for *.lrcat, *.lrdata, and the location of the directory that holds all my catalogs. The steps vary between antivirus vendors, so check yours for specific steps. The idea here is that your AV is not reading every write Lightroom makes to scan for viruses. This speeds up disk IO in Lightroom quite a bit since there's not another program accessing the files at the same time.
2. Disable windows indexing down your Lightroom catalog tree. You can do this by right clicking on your main catalog folder, and then properties. Under attributes, hit the Advanced button. Uncheck the box for "Allow files in this folder to have contents indexed in addition to file properties". Hit the OK button. On the folder properties panel, hit the OK button again. A Confirm attributes dialog will pop up, Make sure it's asking to disable indexing, and the "Apply changes to this folder, subfolders, and files" radio button is selected. Then hit the OK button. It'll take a bit to process for large catalogs. The idea here is the same as the previous tip. You really don't want anything accessing your catalogs while Lightroom is trying to read/write them.
3. For desktop computers, disable CPU power throttling and hard disk sleep. For laptops, it can shorten your battery time when you're unplugged, and it's up to you if you want to make that tradeoff. You can always switch between profiles too. In the "Power Options" control panel, click on the create power plan link on the left hand side of the pane. Pick the High performance radio button. Name the plan whatever you like. Hit the Next button. Make sure the turn off display and put the computer to sleep dropdowns are set to Never. Hit the Create button. Now on the Power Options control panel, hit the Change plan settings on the right side of the new profile you just created. Then hit the Change advanced power settings. Hit the Hard disk twistie to open it, and then open the Turn off hard disk after twistie. Click on the blue part of the Setting: under the "turn off hard disk after" twistie. Set it to 0. That disables the hard disk sleep. Hit the OK button. Then on the Edit Plan Settings window, hit Cancel. (kind of counterintuitive, but it saved the hard drive setting. Make sure your new plan is selected in the Power Options control panel, and close that window. This ensures your system always has 100% cpu resources, and the hard drive never shuts down. The default usually slows down the CPU to save energy when the computer is idle. However, there's a ramp-up delay that can cause things like sluggish sliders in lightroom. You also don't want to be waiting for your hard disk to spin up if it goes to sleep.
4. When you start Lightroom, It's CPU usage at normal priority seems very conservative. Anything else that wants CPU time gets it, interfering with Lightroom. You can fix this by starting Lightroom, and then hitting control-alt-delete, and opening "Start Task Manager", Go to the processes tab, and click on the "Image Name" heading to sort the list alphabetically. Then find lightroom.exe, and right click on it and select Set CPU Priority in the popup menu. Then select either "Above Normal", or "High". Either one should work, but I use High. At this point Lightroom should be very responsive. The only problem with this step is you need to do it every time Lightroom starts. There is a way to save the priority however. I found a neat program called Prio Priority Saver. Google it. Once installed, it will save your priority choice you make in the above task manager step. I'm sure there are others as well. Prio is free for personal use, and $20 for your business.
I hope these tips help you, but as always; "your mileage may vary" These steps are what got me to the point where Lightroom 4 became fun again. The next thing I plan on doing is getting a SATA3 SSD to run my current catalog on, archiving to the 1TB drive whenever I switch catalogs. That'll remove any disk lag I've got from my slow slow hard drive.
Good luck!
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