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

[hamish niven]

dangled the carrot.

Lee Jay wrote:

hamish niven wrote:

Lee

Laws of returns -

how many 787 planes fly?

How many lightroom users?

Probably 100's to 10,000's more LR users, so properly coded and bug free software for the mass market should be viable.

So your justification is flawed

You don't know what you are talking about.  The pace of software development for the mass market is dozens to hundreds of times faster as well, and it has to be to meet the demands of customers.

The Shuttle software was 420,000 lines and was maintained and slowly developed one feature at a time over 4 decades by a staff of more than 200 people.  LR is over a million lines and is developed many features at a time over a period of a few years by a staff of a few dozen (total - including QE, marketing and management).  The former has to be essentially bug-free and that's why it's developed the way it is (slowly by a huge staff).  The later cannot be bug-free given the orders of magnitude of reduced time and resources combined with the increased complexity.

All consumer software has a large bug list.  The processor in your computer has a huge team developing it and I assure you it has a long errata list as well.  This is the nature of complex rapidly-developed consumer equipment and software.

I guess the same applies to wind engineering.

Bugs or no bugs, life dependant software or stuff for consumers, LR is software developed for business, for businesses like mine and many of the other professional photographers depend upon.

As the release date of LR4 came closer,  the all new 2012 processing came a reality, Adobe marketed to the great unwashed -  great software, and cheaper than before. Twitter sung its reviews and praise,  and books were written on the new all powerful LR4. The LR 4 beta process was very short and there was a tremendous amount of angst and concern of issues and errors that were to be addressed in LR4. Not LR4.1 or LR4.2 or 2013 when bigger faster quicker faster more powerful, faster and bigger computers came out.

Between LR4.0 and LR4.1 RC a whole new tab was introduced with better CA controls. I'd have been furious if I'd written a book only to have added a new section after the book went to print. I mean WTF.

Were Adobe aware that LR4 was fundamentally flawed, its design and core out of date and at the end of its life? Did they sell it to us all in this state, giving them another 2 years of development for LR5 with a new core software.  Should LR4 have been named LR#fail.

Bitching, moaning finger pointing and rhetoric aside, too many issues are damaging to the professional photographers, our work flows, compromising our time and efforts to provide clients with images and food on our tables.

Too many issues are frustrating amateurs, semi professionals and those who love using LR for pleasure, and to those who love deconstructing the wind and flow and ebb of pixels through its heady pipelines.

I don't care for your real world examples,even though there were some elements in them, then largely ripped apart by the poster above me. Prior to that ripping, they are not really relevant, as there are too many issues with the software to be out of beta, let alone paid for.

I don't care for for Kiwi Geoff thought policing, and other's who sing the Adobe's praise, when the consumers, the customers are right feel let down and many feel betrayed and ripped off.

What about the thousands or 10,000's of images in our catalogues? Many of those pictures may not be needed for a short or long while, but they are trapped in a flawed system. - at least side cars for RAW or the DNG's can carry information that ACR can take into photoshop, but that means everyone has then got to invest in photoshop 6.

Many many of us have invested one, two, 3 or more years using Lightroom, and are now held by the short and curlies, do we look for alternative software, or hope that LR 4.2 comes out and works properly?

I dont want to learn Capture one (again), I dont want to go buy it, I dont want to learn something new.

There is something wrong, very wrong with LR 4, and should be no excuses for what so many people have bought into.

[A_C_G]

Yesterday Bob Frost made a post listing a whole bundle of files to delete - catalogues, data, etc.

Following a request from me he posted a web address where Lightroom listed what was where. I called up that URL and whilst I was looking at it I was offered 'live help'. I had never been offerered or tried the Adobe support so I thought I'd give it a go.

In the end the Adobe helper said I needed to wait for LR 4.1. He'd been through all the suggestions of creating new catalogues, etc that we have rehearsed and repeated ad nausiam here.

However, one thing he asked me to do and which I have never heard suggested here is to create a Desktop Shortcut to the Lightroom Preferences folder in the depths of Appdata. I don't think it made one iota of difference but thought it might be worth mentioning here in case anyone around (a) understands why he asked me to do it and (b) feels it might be a clue to getting a more responsive LR4.

We are all clutching at proverbial straws. Could this be a pointer to a life raft?

Tony

[howmanypigginnamesdoitry]

Sorry I agree in principle. Adobe is nothing more than revenue generating with this sloppy piece of software, and no I don't believe they give a flying hoot about the customers complaining.

I tried to get a refund on the abysmal piece of trash tha is Lightroom4, and was flat out refused.

OK they got my money this one time, but I'll never buy it again and I am currently triallign  a couple of alternatives.

Fed up with the never ending greed of big companies like Adobe and I encourage people to stop whining, and vote with your wallet.

If you're not prepared to stop buying Adobe products, stop whining when you realise they're poor quality.

Over and out.

[DNJphoto]

Geoff I'm not sure what you mean by your statement. Care to elaberate?

Wasn't getting anything out of my system. I was merely speaking of the frustrationn of having Adobe simply shrug of customers on the basis they have recieved their money. In all seriousness Adobe has had how many replies in this thread; how many in other threads? It's all falling on deaf ears.

[Lee_Jay]

DNJphoto wrote:

Geoff I'm not sure what you mean by your statement. Care to elaberate?

Wasn't getting anything out of my system. I was merely speaking of the frustrationn of having Adobe simply shrug of customers on the basis they have recieved their money. In all seriousness Adobe has had how many replies in this thread; how many in other threads? It's all falling on deaf ears.

This is a user-to-user forum.  Regardless, they are monitoring.

[glugglug]

I upgraded my PC - new motherboard, CPU, RAM, SSD drive and did a completely fresh installation of Windows 7 (64-bit).  I then installed Lightroom 4 as one of the first applications (after pretty much all the drivers and Windows Updates).  I did not installed Lightroom 3.6.

This shows, as I believe, that the problem is not a matter of catalogs or upgrading  or machine spec but a problem with LR4. I do some farirly heavy duty video editing on my machine with no performance issues. LR3 worked well on this machine, LR4 does not.

For example, when moving from one image to another on monitor one, the second monitor goes black for two or three seconds before showing the new image. With 3, this change was instantaneous. The fact is that if I were to upgarde all my hardware to the very latest available  it would just about double the speed of my machine and this would simply mean LR going from border unusable to unacceptable.

I love the software and will stick with it for the time being but It is spoiling my enjoyment of my work and I can't let that go on.

Someone mentioned that it was better to register specific problems and report them as bugs. I don't agree. All the problems I have are well documented and reported already. The more people who add their thoughts here, the more pressure and reason Adobe staff have to find out and correct wat is going on. Adobe are an experienced and bona fide company. They will no more want this situation than their users and I have no doubt they are paying attention.

[andreas603]

had to chime in...continue to watch from sldelines but I can't let this one go:  ChugChug said: "The more people who add their thoughts here, the more pressure and reason Adobe staff have to find out and correct wat is going on. Adobe are an experienced and bona fide company. They will no more want this situation than their users and I have no doubt they are paying attention."

Sorry to be rude but for the 100th time ADOBE DOES NOT MONITOR THIS FORUM!!!  If they do, its unofficial. They DO MONITOR the bug forum that we've been mentioning 1000 times already.  That is where you have to put pressure on them.  And I COMPLETELY disagree with your statement that you should not report this as a bug...you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD!!!!

Adobe is a 'bonafide' sofware company.... Where do I start....if they were bonafide, they'be have fixed this already because their bench is 100s deep of people who live breath and sleep this product and the product family.  If LR4 Beta didn't have the problem but the released product did, this is not rocket science.  I am in agreement with several of you who believe that since the product has been released, less resources are put on maintenance and more on new product and that we will most likley not see this fixed until the next major release....unfortunately...

My vote for the moment is Capture One Pro from Phase One....wayyyy too expensive and also doesn't work yet with Canon 5D MIII, but its SUPER fast...esp tethering, which I do alot with for events.

[Guest]

"Sorry to be rude but for the 100th time ADOBE DOES NOT MONITOR THIS FORUM!!"

Ah, BS - I quote directly from John Nack's blog this am (refering specifically to installer issues but I read it as a general observation):

PS–Engineering manager Eric Wilde says, “Please ask people to reach out to us on the forums if they have trouble. There’s lots of engineering folk reading our forums daily.” (emphasis mine)

Nuf said...

[andreas603]

you left out the part where I said, "If they do its unofficial".. This is an OFFICIAL User to User forum and it serves its purpose well most of the time but this particular problem with LR4 is now clearly beyond the point where we (we being customers that paid for the product) should be advising Adobe on what we *think* is the problem.  Its a free world and folks are certainly free to continue tinkering getting modest tweaks here and there..and I commend many folks trying...they are obviously savvy but the problem remains....

On your last point if Mr. Wilde is asking people to reach out on THIS forum where is their feedback/response/update/help!?????

[Samoreen]

andreas603 wrote:

you left out the part where I said, "If they do its unofficial"..

So what ? What's the difference if they get the information officially or unofficially? Do you mean that a developer who has been unofficially made aware of a bug, is able to reproduce it and knows how to fix it will deliberately ignore it until it becomes "officially reported" ? If they work this way they should be fired.

Do you really think that an "official" bug report is more considered than an unofficial one and has more chances to be fixed? There are "officially reported" bugs in LR that are present since version 1. Never fixed but "official" (because of this, I'm confident that they'll be fixed before I pass away).

[Guest]

Divide and conquer...

We are all fighting to sort of impose our view on those that don't share it with us. And this User-to-User forum has become a User-vs-User one.

In the meantime : LR4 still doesn't work. Adobe has our money. Our work is delayed (and has become a burden to do instead of a joy to do).

Let's put aside our differences and focus on the most efficient way to demand from Adobe a solution and get it rather fast.

[glugglug]

We are all fighting to sort of impose our view on those that don't share it with us. And this User-to-User forum has become a User-vs-User one.

In the meantime : LR4 still doesn't work. Adobe has our money. Our work is delayed (and has become a burden to do instead of a joy to do).

Let's put aside our differences and focus on the most efficient way to demand from Adobe a solution and get it rather fast.

That's it in a nutshell.

[DNJphoto]

As I point out before. A class action. I know where in different locations however if we could muster a group to meet at the headoffice at each head office location. To demand for answers for Adobe it's sure to shove the stick up Adobe.

At the moment were pack of ants which Adobe is standing over. Form a group and I think Adobe would then take action. How els

Heck I'd take them to court if I had people willing to joing me from Sydney in Australia..

I got a record phone call from managers in Adobe breaking the law refusing a refund which is illegal given the Software user license agreement Adobe supplies which cannot exclude the local legislations. It's simple really Adobe state they offer a 90 day limited warrenty NOT excluding local legislation where you bought the product. My local legislation "clearly" states if the product doesn't do what it was labeled as doing or you wouldn't of purchased it if you had of known the fault you are entitled to a REFUND.

Heck when I was on the phone to their support and they were viewing my screen via remote assistence I showed them this forum and put it to them. Their just full of umm and arr's and didn't know which way to run. The fact is, with the evidence of contact, them admiting their name on the phone and their position and my phone clearly showing Adobe head offices number I would hope I have enough evidence to put it to Adobe that they are "illegally" refuting a refund.

[gbdid]

Don't we just want Adobe to find the fault and fix it, I'd much rather that than a refund.

Hard to hang in there though.

[MaxPowerPhoto]

Hi guys, new to the Adobe Forums!

I want to share my experience from upgrading my LR version 3.6 to the LR 4 release version that I purchased a few weeks ago.

Firstly, I use the following system:

27" iMac 2011

i7 3,4 GHz

16GB RAM

AMD Radeon HD 6970M, 2GB RAM

2TB HDD, 7200 rpm

OSX 10.6.8.

Now to the program itself, I am running 4.1 RC2

I'll admit that I'm not that much of a in-depth user, so when it comes to cache, preview sizes and that sort of thing, I never touched anything but the cache which I changed to 20GB's and left everything else just the way LR3 / 4 had it preset.

So I read a lot about the performance issues that users were having, but for imaging you always want to be on the newest level of software to enhance your creative workflow and give you new tools, and I liked what LR 4 offered. So I went ahead and got a copy and went through the process of installing it and then upgrading the catalogue. I was worried that I

would have to set everything up again but instead LR4 loaded up just like 3.6 did with all my presets, watermark, custom logo etc. In the Library module i did not really run in to any problems. Neither in the Develop Module, everything was just as snappy as it was in LR 3.6.........and then I updated some images to PV 2012 to edit them individually, Imported new

photos directly with the new PV 2012 and these are the things that I found where LR 4 gets sluggish / laggy or locks up my computer for a few seconds:

- Compared to PV 2010, zooming into an image and then dragging it around with the mouse seems fine at first. As soon as I make a few adjustments with PV 2012 to the basic panel, tone curve and some things such as defringing, sometimes some denoise and sharpening, sometimes leaving the detail panel untouched completely -->

things seem to go south. With that I mean the zooming becomes more laggy and then moving the image around whilst zoomed in is very laggy. While dragging the cursor the image hiccups, refreshes very slowly and in few cases I get the little beachball.

- What really blew my mind or what I can't get my head around is the detail panel. Some people recommended switching it off and then working on the image to make it more speedy due to the way LR 4 renders noise. BUT: Once I turn off the detail panel, it takes about 5 seconds for the deactivation to take effect and then LR 4 becomes

completely unuseable. It freezes, trying to move the image around results in huge hiccups and the beachball pops up. It does move after a while but remains completely unuseable until i swith the detail panel back on (all LR standard values) and it's back to normal. CPU activity also skyrockets during the swith off, both system and user.

What's really weird is if i swith back to PV2010 and play with that switch, it is instantaneous and speedy, no problems with slowdowns or lag. Just like a lightswitch.

- Denoise in general takes longer to take effect. It wasn't the fastest in 3.6, I would say both noise and sharpening took longest to take effect there, but this is slowed down considerably in PV2012 making monitoring suble changes completely useless.

- Other sliders seem to be almost the same when compared to PV2010, perhaps with a few milliseconds more lag on some of them, depends on the amount of work I have done to an image as per the previous bullet point.

That is all I have to add so far and when it comes to exporting and such I can't really say that I found any problems with that. I find it strange that even some people here in the forums with higher spec machines have "worse" problems such as lag that lasts for multiple seconds and so on.

Well I hope this can help some of the folks at Adobe working on the update. I tried to explain exactly where I am experiencing slowdowns. Should I feel lucky though? I feel as if while still have very annoying issues with the software, it could be far worse from what I have read, even with machines that cost 2-3 times more than mine...

Hope this helps and coincides with some of the things that other users have experienced. Any feedback?

Cheers,

Max

[MaxPowerPhoto]

Whoops... Sorry guys no idea what happened to the formatting there.

[kwdaves]

This should be made sticky.

The following is a quick screen capture of me playing with LR4 RC2 this morning

complete with missteps of my own (or can I blame Adobe?) and an example of

the biggest problem I have with LR4- the tendency to jump off of a selected image

when I just move the mouse.

http://youtu.be/JMH98CGkvtU

The above is a direct link to my youtube page. Lr4 does not appear to be compatible with Adobe's new Flash Player and/or Youtubes

beta uploader.

Message was edited by: kwdaves

[A_C_G]

I've done what you suggested Bob and I see no difference.

EDIT. I thought this would appear against the Bob Frost message about deleting all catalogues, previews, etc. That is what I am referring to.

Sorry.

Tony

[areohbee]

One thing:

I just had a case where Lightroom was performing sluggishly, and I noticed it was idling at 40% CPU usage. Dreamweaver was idling at 25% CPU usage. I killed Dreamweaver and Lightroom's idle usage went back to around 1-2% (my background plugin process consumption), and performance went back to normal.

Take with salt - It wasn't quite that simple (there were some other intermediate things done too...), but the bottom line: Lightroom was busy getting tripped up by something it shouldn't, and once alleviated, returned to normal functioning. Dreamweaver had similar symptoms, and I believe the two may have been related somehow...

R

[Guest]

A C G wrote:

uphotography,

For me a useful post. It does seem that I am going to have to wait for LR5 (I started by saying 'we are' until I remembered all the folk around here who say they don't have a problem) for software that runs smoothly.

In the meantime do I jump ship and move to Corel Aftershoot Pro - or do I move back to the 2010 process alternative in LR4?

You say "As much as I like some of the features in LR4,". Would you like to list them? I'd never use LR to make a book, a web folder or a map. All I want it to do is to produce the best tiff or jpg from my RAW files. I like the new slider arrangement in LR4 - but are they actually extracting more from the RAWs than 3.6 did? If not then I'm stupid not to move back to the 2010 process.

I worked on some pretty tricky images yesterday, using 2012, and love the results. Does anyone think I would not have done so well in 3.6? I suppose I ought simply to try. In fact I will - but I'd love a second opinion.

Tony

No, I don't use book creation. That's one of the things that baffles me. There were several suggestions on how to improve LR (from 3 to 4) and instead of delivering a sturdy LR4 , Adobe gave us a tool full of things that are not that important (in my opinion). It looks to me that Adobe wants to play catcher, pitcher and bat at the same time.

To give just one of the examples of things I like from PV 2012 is the possibility of having a white balance brush. Noise reduction is also a tad better. In general I find that I'm getting closer to what I had in mind when I shot the photo than I managed before. But, I can only do it 1 or 2 photos at a time. Then it is so non-responsive that I need to close it and open it up again. I feel I could be faster in a darkroom than with LR. The other day it took me close to 4 hours to export around 400 photos.

I cannot wait 1 or 2 years for LR5 to see if they solved the problem. Maybe then they also added other "convenient" features like a studio management tab. Maybe then they will sell LR with its own Computer as a way to ensure it works.

Corel AS doesn't support DNG? ok, then I stop dng conversions. Corel doesn't have the features LR4 has? Well, what's the use of having them if you cannot use them? Like I said, with LR4 I feel like I have a Ferrari, the highway for myself and no gas in the tank. I have work now, I have work "yesterday" and I have a great tool that doesn't work, and a good tool that works. It would be easier to wait if we would know for how long, what's the process, the diagnosis, ANYTHING.

I have to go with what I have, and that is:

• No information from Adobe
• A release that doesn't work (for me) + 2 RC that also doesn't work.
• Limited time to finish assignments
• A software that is not perfect but works (Corel AS Pro)

But that's it for me.

[LynneHarty]

uphotography,

Thanks for the software alternatives - I will check them out when I get time.

Lynne

[DNJphoto]

Their working hard on it but they have our money don't they Geoff?

Maybe this is a little of guided but I didn't think it was a deposit for Lightroom that I paid for.. Adobe advertised a complete working product. I didn't recieve the product as promised.

No matter how you put it.. I am have less funds and still no product.

We can try and bang our heads togather and come up with a soloution but for crying out loud isn't that defiying the purpose of buying the program in the first place? needs

Adobes needs to man up and honour their wrnty they give when they sell their products.

[Guest]

DNJphoto wrote:

Their working hard on it but they have our money don't they Geoff?

Maybe this is a little of guided but I didn't think it was a deposit for Lightroom that I paid for.. Adobe advertised a complete working product. I didn't recieve the product as promised.

No matter how you put it.. I am have less funds and still no product.

We can try and bang our heads togather and come up with a soloution but for crying out loud isn't that defiying the purpose of buying the program in the first place? needs

Adobes needs to man up and honour their wrnty they give when they sell their products.

EXACTLY!

[hamish niven]

I agree, uphotography, and DNJ

Thanks for being the thought police Geoff reminding us all to mind our P's and Q's

Aside of rules, guidelines and the like, most posters have paid to upgrade to a piece of software that is not functioning properly, is buggy and is slow. "Adobe are working on things" so we are told by people in the know(?) - you, Lee Jay and a few others who've taken on the role of advising in the absence of feedback and communication from adobe.

This is a public forum,  so peoples views, opinions and comments, groans and frustrations are expected and needed, valued maybe and even taken under consideration.

polite policing does not help, rather feedback and communication from Adobe in the form of what they are planning to do to help those who've invested in a product that should not have been released as a public beta let alone paid for.

[Lee_Jay]

uphotography wrote:

Lee Jay.

The problem is that you are trying to do what Adobe should be doing but in a less efficient way. You cannot ask around to try to find the "common issue".

This is a user-to-user forum, so I don't see why I can't.

There is a difference between slow and VERY slow. If you haven't experienced it then you cannot say what is a bug and what is not.

Yes, I can.  Some people have reported it taking as long as 15-60 seconds for NR to show up, for example.  It takes 1/3 of a second on my 13" core-i5-540M dual core laptop at 1920x1200 with filmstrip and second monitor both open.  It takes a half a second on myh 32-bit 2GB Core2Duo.  That's got to be a bug of some sort because regardless of what hardware they are using, it can't be 100 times slower than mine.

Something is going on with some people's systems, and I suspect it's more than one thing.  Some of them are things Adobe can probably fix with the information already supplied (things like memory leaks) and some things like this crazy slider slowness must be coming from some other source like cache timing or cache location permissions or some other such esoteric place.  I, for one, would like to find out what it is and report it, and I see no reason not to follow parallel paths of using this user-to-user forum while Adobe uses the feedback forum.  If we figure it out, we can report it to them.