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

[DNJphoto]

Hi Folks. Im yet to read the 10 pages before this post but I'm yet another person having issues with the slowness of Lightroom 4.

Current specs:

I72600K @ 5Ghz

GTX570 graphics

32Gb DDR3

120GB SSD SSD as boot.

Storage wise I'm using 2 Adaptec 51645 series running a complex raid setup. Suffice to say the Read/Write speed exceeds 1200MB/s so hardly a bottle neck. There is a 500Gb Raid 0 partition set for scratch disk. ( Which in LR4 they limit to 200 odd GB )

What the fruit cake does it take to get LR4 to run well? A 16 core system with 120Gb plus memory and a 24x SSD RAID 0 setup?

( currently running the 4.1 version )

[MarceloTrad]

yeah...Adobe and Intel are planing to rule the world with a new i11 with 22

core @44k/hz and Lr4 Capable HyperThreads!

Marcelo Trad

[Jao vdL]

Actually it seems for some perverse reason that the faster the machine the

slower LR4 appears to people. Perhaps this is an expectations issue (people

with monster machines expect their machine to fly through everything) but

there might be something real here. As a datapoint, I mainly run LR4 on an

older generation Mac book air (core 2 duo) with only 4 GB of ram. It is no

slower than LR3 on this machine except for develop being slightly slower

because of the more intensive processing it does. I edit 80 megapixel

16-bit tiffs on this thing (often stored on an external USB 2 hard drive)

without much issue. Sometimes have to wait a few seconds for those monster

files to load. If people have issues on i7s with gobs of ram something is

awry.

[dorin_nicolaescu]

Jao vdL: Actually it seems for some perverse reason that the faster the machine the slower LR4 appears to people.

Ok now... what's Lightroom maximal system requirements?

I never ran Lightroom on a powerful machine and never ever had speed issues since version 1.0. Now I have last gen Core i3 550 ith 4GB at work; before that, I had Pentium 4 with 1GB for most of Lightroom 3's life cycle. At home, I have an Athlon x2 since the beginnig of Lighroom 2; I ran Lightroom 1 on single-core Sempron.

Go figure...

[MarceloTrad]

I had a Centrino 1.8ghz with 4gb ram and no video card until last year with

Lr3.6 working with no issues!

Now I have a i7 with 8gb ram and Nvidia Quadro running Lr4.1 and I´m

wishing I had my old centrino crap with 3.6 on it!

If you did not had problems please send us all the miracle solution please!

Thanks

Marcelo Trad

[Guest]

MarceloTrad wrote:

I had a Centrino 1.8ghz with 4gb ram and no video card until last year with

Lr3.6 working with no issues!

Now I have a i7 with 8gb ram and Nvidia Quadro running Lr4.1 and I´m

wishing I had my old centrino crap with 3.6 on it!

If you did not had problems please send us all the miracle solution please!

Thanks

Marcelo Trad

It's extremely strange that there appears to be no miracle solution.  I'm still amazed that my PC is doing at laest 3.8 BILLION things a second and is STILL ridiculously slow when editing some images.

[MarceloTrad]

How would we make Adobe read all this posts?

Marcelo Trad

[bob frost]

From: "MarceloTrad

How would we make Adobe read all this posts?

This is a User-to-User forum where we are supposed to help each other. If

you want help from Adobe staff, you should post on their forum -

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/products/photoshop_family_photoshop_lightroom

Bob Frost

[andreas603]

Marcelo, thats because this is the wrong place to post!  As noted before, this is NOT an adobe regulary watched area...none of the forums are...Thats why I would encourge anyone and everyone that is having this problem to post at the below site which is the official Adobe support community and bug reporting site.  Specifically the thread about sluggishness is here:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lr4_0_reacts_extremely_slow

[MarceloTrad]

Thanks guys. I will do this and hope they listen!

Marcelo Trad

[DNJphoto]

I import 250 Sony NEXC3 RAW files which are 16mp for reference.

.. Wait till thats done.

.... I then go to export them changing the long edge to 1600. This takes 10mins.

Canon 5DMkII I Import 1200 RAW files which are 22Mp each.

.. Wait till thats done.

.... I then go to export them changing the long edge to 1600. This takes over 90mins.

I think that is slow considering the system at hand. Im willing to do a screen video and upload to youtube to show my experiences. However I'm not aware of the software for recording screens which is free.

[cschenk599]

I've been using LR4 for a couple of hours. The slowdown everyone is reporting is definitely something that builds up over time since I never noticed anything from the start.

It starts with some slider lag in development and builds up to getting unusuable (every action take several seconds, the program turns into nigh-crash mode, crashes eventually).

The funny thing is: After having tortured my machine with it for a while, LR4 won't even reboot after crashing. There are definitely some memory issues going on with LR4. As it stands,

LR4 is unusable for me and I'm glad that I've got a very cheap upgrade.

I don't have the fastest machine on the planet, but it should be more than enough for LR4.

-i7 2630QM

-8GB RAM

-Nvidia gtx 560m

Yes, its a notebook and no, it's not overheating. It's barely peaking 40°.

[DNJphoto]

Ok,

I've rang up Adobe Tech Support in regards to the issue. All they did was take down my specs, do some CMD to get to enable a seperate Admin account and see if the issue occurs. Well ofcourse it still happened. That was level one Tech support. :S

Now waiting for Level 2 support to call back within 72 hours.

Apperantly there is onyl 3 levels of support but considering the "Advanced" skills of level one I think even level 3 will be stumped.

I also did ask Adobe direct " Do you not realise you have 500 replies on X page regarding the slowness of this software?

Adobe: " That is user forums, We don't have anything to do with that page"

[A_C_G]

"That is user forums, We don't have anything to do with that page"

When a user looks at the Adobe logo at the top of the page and the copyright message at the bottom the 'user' is unlikely to assume that Adobe have nothing to do with it.

It's five years since I retired. At that time, when I had problems with my office PC, the off-site IT support logged into it, over the phone line, and did a remote diagnostic. I am sure technology has moved on in those five years. Why does not Adobe use it? My PC is standing by for a call from Adobe.

Tony

[jsakhtar]

Have you all tried turning off OpenGL in the Preferences|Interface. It might help some of you. That or upgrade your video card drivers since they are providing the OpenGL implementation.

I think many of these suggestions would apply here: http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/gpu-opengl-support-photoshop-cs4.html

I am using 4.1RC and it is much faster. The develop module takes some time to load on the first time, but subsequently is fast.

[mrTortex]

After giving up with LR4, and trying to edit a couple of thousand shots from a recent shoot, I decided to give it another go.  It's now running at a useable rate for me, not lightning quick but not the wading through jelly performance of my first few tries.  I did this:

1.  Deleted LR4, Spotlight search and kill of anything left in my libraries.

2.  Software update & system restart.

3.  Install LR4.

4.  Create a new libray, not an upgrade.  Drag in my images and leave it running overnight to do whatever it does.  At this point my system was running much harder and hotter then it ever did with LR3.x.

5.  Restart system.

6.  Use LR4 and notice the big difference.

I'm running on a MacBook Pro, i5 2.4GHz with 8GB of RAM, running to a 27" cinema display in clamshell mode.  I have Lion 10.7.3 with all updates.  My images are RAW shot from a Nikon D700, D7000 and Fuji X100.  All my images are stored on a 3TB GTech GDrive hooked up with USB 2.0.  I have an SSD as my main drive, but that only has applications and the OS on it.

Hope that helps,  it probably wont, but hope it does.

[DNJphoto]

Well I spoke with Adobe yesterday. they agreed to having their conversation recorded. Which last a mere 2 hours. Some of the things the Floor manager stated in the call was astounding. None the less I personaly have made sure they have seen this thread.  I questioned them if they value their customers and if they did why couldn't they offer one reply? In my belief Adobe didn't know which way to run. First stating they were aware of this thread and saying their working on it, to saying it's a Operating system issue to then saying it's a System issue to then saying it's a software conflict issue. To then the Floor managing stating that he is simply "guessing". 😐

Honestly folks, I asked all the questions that I could think of to Adobe in order to find out what the heck was happening, when something will be done, when will we be informed, how they value their customers etc.

It was a quite in-depth phone call which I'd more than happy to add to this thread if I can quickly learn how to fix up the recording. 

[BKKDon]

Hi, For a comparision I use a HP Pavillion DV-4 (3 years old) for my travelling machine and it has the following set up:

Lightroom version: 4.1 RC [820174]

Operating system: Windows 7 Home Premium Edition, Version: 6.1 [7601]

Application/System architecture: x64

Physical processor count: 2 x 2.5 GHz (Dual Core Centrino 2)

Built-in memory: 4062.9 MB

Real memory available to Lightroom: 4062.9 MB

Real memory used by Lightroom: 458.0 MB (11.2%)

Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 484.5 MB

Memory cache size: 276.3 MB

System DPI setting: 96 DPI

Desktop composition enabled: Yes

Displays: 1) 1280x800

Adapter NVIDIA GeoForce 9200M

Dedicated Video Memory 512 MB

Typically it will take up to 10 seconds to start-up Lightroom 4.1RC and the first time I switch to the develop module it may take up to 5 seconds. After that there doesn't seem to be any lag in either processing or using the sliders. The

My typical workflow is: 1) Import CR2 files; 2) scan and mark those for rejection; 3) delete rejected photos; 4) convert all that are left to DNG deleting the originals.

My desktop machine is a Sony Vaio VPCL-218FG with 2 x i7 quad core processors (8 physical processors) with 8GB ram, 1024MB video memory (NVIDIA GeoForce GT540M) and that is a lot faster.

Hope this gives you some idea of the configurations that seem to work.

[lauralobiancosword]

I downloaded the trial version of LR4 and WILL NOT be purchasing it.  It is PAINFULLY slow.  I usually can upload a few hundred pictures in a few minutes with LR3.6.  It has been over an hour now and my raw files are still not uploading.  The develop module is unresponsive as well.  Changes take a few seconds before they show up. 

[J_Chin_Photography]

OMG!  I just tried to edit a small set of photos in LR4 and moving around is painfully slow indeed compared to LR3.6.

All I did was go into Develop, crop the image, press "2" to set the rating and press "G" to go back to Library.  From the moment I pressed "2" followed by "G", it was more than 15 seconds to get to Library.  In LR3, that was like 2 seconds.

WTH did Adobe do to slow it down so much for the same exact steps?

[Madscape]

Shame on me for not trying LR4 out , I just purchased the upgrade. Although I can see some nice new features. The lag time when using sliders or the adjustment brush is PAINFULLY slow...it renders this an unusable program to me. I also dont appreciate the fact that When I try to toggle over to CS5, I am prompted to download bridge 7.0 which isn't even available for download yet. This product WAS NOT ready for introduction yet . My computer absolutely Screams with any other photo editing task in LR3 CS5 or many others. If you haven't bought this yet  DON'T till you read that things have been resolved. My guess is it won't be for a while ... what a shame ...

[steve@steveanchell.com]

Whew!  I thought it was me.  Misery loves company so I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one that is two days behind deadline on a client's project because LR4 is taking so long to render images, change from one image to another, apply a brush stroke, and crashing!  At first I suspected it  might be the new Seagate external hard drive I was using, so I moved the entire folder of images (3300 images) to a hard drive I know works well.  Same thing.  So then I moved the entire folder of images right onto the Mac under Pictures, to make certain it isn't an issue with external HDs in general (I don't normally keep images on the 1TB internal Mac drive; I am only using 1.6GB of space with all my programs and have 10GB RAM).  Same problem.  Photoshop, Word, Outlook, Acrobat, et al, are working normally.  The images only bog down in LR4.  I don't believe the LR4 images are backwards compatible with LR3 or I would dump the new program.  Anybody else have any ideas?

[gregkmeyer]

Why don't all you guys just revert your default process to the 2010 version

so that LR4 tests all the images as LR3 does. If you have to revert to LR3

anyway, that's the processes your using there.

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[Madscape]

I went in last night and upped the Camera raw cache... (  Edit/Prefrences/Filehandling/ ).... to 20.0 and it seemed to help things a little....

[steve@steveanchell.com]

Greg, A good solution for the short term, thank you.  I have spent three days working on 14 images that would have taken 1 day in LR3.  I was just starting on the last image when your e-mail came in!  I wish I had gotten it sooner, would have saved some of my hair.  Using process 2010 the edits are almost instantaneous on my Mac.  Anyway, I hope Adobe can address this issue with process 2012.  As it is, it is unusable, and I don't appreciate Adobe releasing it in this state.  Until now I have recommended all of my students use LR.  Maybe a good time to take another look at Aperture.