Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 4.x

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. 

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.

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.

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"

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°.

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.

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 )

Ok, so I downloaded and installed Lightroom 4.1 RC since it was impossible to work with LR 4.0.

I've seen that many claim that slider lag and speed problem (specially when using a second monitor) are gone in LR 4.1 RC. Well, I agee with that... partially.

These are my findings:

LR 4.1 RC does indeed solves the speed and lag time when using a second monitor... but only for a "short time". I cannot edit a whole wedding without LR 4.1 going nuts, slow, irresponsive and plainly doing things that I cannot even find the logic behind.

When using Survey on a second monitor, the first 100 photos (in sets of 6-9) are ok. From then on, it takes sometimes iterally minutes to get to do its fancy reordering when a photo is deleted or even to delete a photo from the surveyed group.

When moving to the Develop module, the first time takes a bit longer, as expected, and then further changes to the Develop module go fast. Actually as fast or faster than 3.6. BUT after some time, it becomes a nightmare again to move to the Develop module AND back to the Catalog module.

I have found that sometimes, after all the crazyness start, sometimes a black rectangle appears as a background to my photo info in Loupe mode. At the beginning, the black goes away after some time, but I've got to points where it just stays there.

Generating previews under some circumstances is slower than you can imagine.

Toggling the second monitor on/off with F11 works... sometimes... Sometimes LR decides that I need my second monitor and brings it up, sometimes, for no apparent reason, it turns it off.

And now moving on to Photoshop. I have CS5 which until I installed ACR 6.7 was amazing! CS5 + LR3.6. Great combination. CS5 + ACR 6.7 + LR 4.0 (4.1) Makes me want to stop with photography or simply go back to film and not work behind the computer anymore. Yes, it is that bad on this end.

I have noticed that Photoshop has started to be unstable, to the point that I close the program and it leaves a process running behind taking care of 6 (yes, six) Gb of my physical memory. I would say that that is a pretty big chunk of memorey use for a "quick launch" executable.

LR keeps craving memory and resources, specially CPU, even when doing practically nothing. And it has also decided that it is on trial now... Apparently the money and license from Adobe LR4.0 is not good enough for LR4.1.

Last but not least, actually, this is probably one of the MOST CRITICAL points is that any image sent to Photoshop and back to LR, even without any editing (just DNG - TIFF conversion) results in an image where many things change in a quite obvious way. Brightness, contrast, and much more! (In B&W it even looks like a filter was applied so sometimes the oranges get dark and the blues lighter). I mean, consistency should be priority number one and this is far from acceptable.

I mean, this is not me using a third party program that might not work very well with Photoshop, or... whatever, this is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom with Adobe Photoshop...

Adobe, get your act together. Stop with the bells and whistles (like Blurb for LR) and work on the core that we ALL need.

Thanks,

If you want more details on how I use LR / Photoshop or system configuration, please let me know.

Cheers,

p.s. I have a pretty solid system with an intel i7 3+ GHz, 12 GB RAM, 1 GB Video on Card, Can't remember what card I have right now but I remember it was one of the best when I bought it. All HDs are eSata at 7200 rpm. 64 Bit OS. and some more bells and whistles.

Here is a question to anyone, past posters and new posters. On my system, I have one GPU driving out 2 monitors—the main screen via DVI (digital) and the secondary via VGA (analog). To re-summarize my system configuration:

Windows 7 Home Premium x64 @ Core i5 750 2.67 GHz

nVIDIA GeForce GT 430 (with 96 CUDA Cores and 1 GB of memory)

16 GB DDR3 SDRAM

7200 RPM hard drives (C and D internal, AHCI configuration)

Comments:

I have the latest drivers installed for all hardware on my system.

I don't have many simultaneous programs concurrently running when I am working on Lightroom 4.1 RC (maybe I'll have Photoshop CS5 opened).

LR is installed on my C-drive with a dedicated cache, allocated 50 GBs on the D-drive.

[Redacted]: My catalog size is small. I have the "sessions" workflow. Each of my catalogged session is NO MORE than 200 frames from my Canon 7D. This is a workflow I adopted from coming from PhaseONE CaptureONE PRO. For example, if I am shooting for Client ABC tomorrw, that shoot would be catalogged in itself and the final archive size will not go pass beyond 200 images. Does that make sense?

What I've Done:

The impeding performance problems I experience happens when I activate the dual-monitor option within LR (pressing F11 key). I normally like to have my 2nd screen show thumbs and grids while my main screen shows the main panels and the image I am working on. I even tried moving my main screen (with working panels) over to second screen and moving the grid display onto my main screen—essentially swapping the panels while the main screen is connected DVI and the second screen is still on VGA.

I deleted the cache files via the "Purge Cache" command.

I also deleted the ...Previews.lrdata file and did not notive significance improvement in performance.

Results:

During my normal usage of LR 4.1 RC, I experience instabilities. For example, when I copy settings from one RAW file and applying to a certain consecutive sequence, sometimes my LR would crash and sometimes it would work. There is that "randomness" in behavior. This was the norm. The problem when away when I depressed F11 to turn the 2nd monitor off and only have LR using one screen; however the stability problems came back and persistent. I do not know how else I could objectively quantify to assist the development team hunt this bug down to extirpate it completely. Sidesteping from stabilities issues, I could also detect and experience slider lags. Grabbing the sliders is at times insensitive. I have to truly target the center of the knob for my mouse to grab the slider so I could adjust settings.

Lightroom 4.1 made a lttle improvement on my computer! Blending out the Filmstrip helps, but i still wished a little bit more performance!

There is one very strange issue i found. working on 5dmkII, 7d and 1dmkIV files is quite fast now with 4.1 not perfrect but fast. i downloaded quite a lot 5dmkIII raw files from iso 100 till iso 25000. i imported these raw files in lr 4.1 rc1 and they qre much much much more sluggish than 1dmkIV, 5dmkII and 7d files. very strnage cause 5dmkIII files are not larger than 5dmkII files and do not have so mcuh more megapixels. whats the problem? i will have my 5dmkIII in 2 weeks and hey man.....this is pretty bad. working with 5dmkII ok, working with 5dmkIII BAD. Please fix that QUICK adobe or you would make my experience about the new cam very BAD *g* go go go :-)

king regards chris!