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

[quenton8]

Once the develop is open, there are no more disk accesses.

I don't write .xmp files or .dng files, so the only updates are to the catalog which is on c:\

I have USB-3 ports so I could upgrade, just never felt the need to.

Export?  I guess it has to access  the main phopto, never thought of that -- but if I export 5 or 10 photos I don't see it slow,

more might be, but I see that as a background activity so I don't worry about it.

At first I kept the originals on the C:\ drive, but had space issues -- moved them to USB-2 on Win-XP and did not notice

much change.

[LR_Mowang]

I would have thought there was no more disk access, but if you start the

MS performance monitor you will see LR accessing the disk. And the

number of processes open is huge.

[A_C_G]

"There's no way in the world you can fairly expect LR to perform on a system with 2gb ram"

But it does. Well 3.6 does.

Sorry to challenge the opinion with fact.

Tony

[quenton8]

OK -- I am one of those nasty people who does not seem to have a performance issue

I have a 4-core CPU, Win-64, 8Gb

I started the MS performance monitor and ran LR4.

Picked a photo and sat dragging some of the sliders non-stop back and forth.

Response (updating my view of the photo) was basically instantaneous, so far as I could see.

I tried, exposure, black, shadows, sharpness, noise, contrast, clarity ...

Memory sits at 2.64Gb, and changes at most +/-0.01Gb (2.63 to 2.66).

CPU's (all 4) go up to abouit 66% (all of them), except for noise reduction where

I was able to push them to 80%.

Again, my photo's view was updating continually and so far as I could see

instantly following the sliders.

No additional processes created that I could see -- just the one "Lightroom Process".

[Scooby007]

"There's no way in the world you can fairly expect LR to perform on a system with 2gb ram" But it does. Well 3.6 does. Sorry to challenge the opinion with fact.

Tony

If you're used to X speed, then it will become satisfactory. And if it is then good. And of course having X speed in LR3 and LR4 being much slower isn't acceptable.

I prefer to run software at the fastest possible speed I can so I don't waste time, and since you can get a vertiable supercomputer at $1k for an excellent win764 tower for example, there's little reason to spend three times as long doing everything on your computer. Plus memory is about the cost of a nice dinner, and it's never been more useful. I can't imagine you aren't swapping all the time with 2gb ram, and that makes performance tank.

[shamus1585]

There may me multiple issues that slow LR4 down, but mine seems to be running a dual monitor.   Not sure if its an NVida problem with LR4 (didn't happen on LR3) or just LR4 with all brands.  LR4 works fine with one monitor on my system, no slow downs.  Curious to see if switching the video card makes any difference.  I have a feeling - no.

[BCormier]

Yeah I would not be complaining if Lightroom 3.6 ran slow as well, but it was actually quite snappy on my machine. Ran perfect. Lightroom 4 isn't even that slow. Just a couple parts of it which led me to believe it was a software problem and not a result of my hardware.

[kiddid]

All the tricks not helping, I'm exhausted, back to Lightroom 3.6,

[Marko_Ch]

My system : Laptop Dell E5500 Core2 Duo , Win 7 32bit, 4GB , e-dock with monitor.

Intel graphics : driver settings - multimedia - disable all tweaks and film mode detection ,  quality slider - fast

Lightroom 4 options:
Library - Previews - Render 1:1 previews
Preferences - Interface - Use system preference for font smoothing
Edit - Catalog settings -  File handlings - Standard preview size 1680 ( My monitor native resolution is 1680x1050)
Edit - Catalog settings -  File handlings - Preview Quality - Low

Created exceptions in  Norton Internet Security
and disabled Windows indexing services on :

C:\Users\......\AppData\Local\Adobe\CameraRaw\Cache
C:\Users\......\Pictures\Lightroom

Lightroom 4  is now  fast like Lightroom 3.6 ( with 3000 NEF, amateur work )

Marek

[bob frost]

From: "Marko_Ch

Edit - Catalog settings - File handlings - Preview Quality - Low

That is something I haven't tried - using low quality previews. I must do a

comparison of processing power/time needed for high or low quality. That

might well affect not just initial preview rendering, but also preview

updating while moving sliders.

Bob Frost

[BCormier]

the low quality previews do help a bit when zooming in and adjusting sliders! thanks for the tip!

[quenton8]

I am curious -- of those who have serious slowness problems with LR4 -- how many are using SSD's for the drive holding either the catalog or the photos??

I ask this because we ran into a problem with an object database we use running on SSD's -- its lightning fast except when we do a long series of writes, the longer

the sequence of writes goes, the slower it all gets, and attempting to run anything else while that is happening is terribly slow.

Just a thought.

[kiddid]

My Lightroom 4 katalog and photo is on non SSD 7200RPM different drive, Using win7 x64 ram 8Gig i7, dual monitor with ATI 5850. Lightroom 4 is unuseable to me due to very slow process. Already tried all the tricks mentioned.

My conclusion is Lightroom 4 is not ready yet, yes some have no problem but many have expererienced the slowness problem.

Never had problem with lightroom 3.6

[David J Fardon]

Hi all,

I just solved my issues by doing 3 things, as suggested above:

• Updating nvidia drivers: Win7-64bit, 2GB GTX-560 by updating to 296.10, from whatever version was out in Nov 2011.
• Moving Catalog and ACR cache folders to SSD - not moving previews folder.
• Excluding lightroom cache and catalog folders from MS security essentials anitvirus.

Issues were:

- long time switching to develop module

- very inconsistent performance on 36MP Nikon D800 raw images

- laggy and slow performance generally

I think the updated drievrs helped problem 1 more than anything, but can't be sure.

This is on a SR2 - dual hexacore /24GB RAM at 4.0Ghz.

Hope this helps somebody.

[pdeeh]

On 13 March (reported above) I created a new catalogue, importing around 2000 images, and this seemed to provide significant speed improvement.

In the past 7 days I have added only 220 images to the catalogue but I am now finding the same symptoms as with the converted catalogue ... very sluggish, jerky responses, 3 or 4 seconds to swithc between modules, significant lag when zooming images in the develop module, slow exports with 100% processor usage, very slow response/high processor usage when making adjustments (especially denoise)

Same kit as before:

Lenovo G770 (i7-2620M, 2.7GHz

6GB RAM

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

LR4-64-bit

[oasselin]

Just wanted to add my voice here... LR 4 is slow to the point where it's unuseable for me. Luckily I didn't uninstall 3.6, so I'll just keep using that until LR 4 gets a speed boost, I truly hope that happens, otherwise I'll have to look for another RAW converter....

The increase in speed when going back to 3.6 after struggling with 4 is dramatic, just unbelievable. Hard to believe they're different versions of the same software.

I agree with previous poster who thinks LR 4 is not ready.

[Lou Dina]

Like others, I also wanted to add my voice to complaints about how slow LR4 is. I'm on a Mac Pro, 8-core, 2.26 MHz, 16 GB RAM, 256GB Solid State Drive, four fast HHDs, etc. It's a pretty fast machine, but LR4 is a DAWG! It often takes 4-5 seconds for sharpening to show up in the detail tab, another 4-5 seconds for a new image to display, etc. Sliders are herky-jerky and slow. This is NOT real time performance. I'm processing Canon 5Dmk2 files that have been imported as DNG files.

I also created a new catalog, hoping it would help. If it did, it isn't enough. Turned off the Catalog Preference to Automatically write changes to XMP. The catalog and previews are in the same folder.

Performance is unacceptable, which is a shame, since many nice features have been added. It needs some serious rework to speed it up. Adobe should be ashamed to release a product that is so obviously slow. It's not possible that they didn't know this before rushing it to market.

Lou

[slarti3]

Lee Jay has found a very neat trick that may literally quadruple slider performance in some instances:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/977664?tstart=0

I checked it out myself: got lucky. Everything is smooth because I'm just under 1/4 of the original resolution and my 2nd gen i7 can hold up with that. But going full screen is a total game changer.

[SistersCountry]

I would like to report in with success in getting my LR4 running very smoothly including dual monitor activity even 'Live' at 1:1 zoom on 2nd monitor. I did upgrade computers toward the end of the beta so it is a little hard to keep track of the performance changes linearly but after some spotty periods LR4 seems to be running much better than LR3 ever did on the earlier computer I had and that was certainly not the case a few days ago. Unfortunately, as I have done quite a few of the optimizing suggestions, there is no one magic bullet I can point at. This is a powerful computer that did run as a laggard for a bit so this seems to be a case that says that even if powerful processors are tripping up somehow this can be 'tuned' around.

Configuration:

i7-2600k

8 gigs 1600mhz Ram

p68 Intel motherboard

nVidia GTX 460-2

Dual Samsung Syncmaster 2493 HM 24" monitors @ 1920x1200

C: 64gb Samsung SSD drive = WIndows OS only

D: 250 meg 7200 HDD = Program Files/User Folders/LR Cache@35Gb (now holds catalogs/previews)

E: 1 Tb 5600 HDD = Newer Photos and other data (previously held catalogs/previews)

F: 2 Tb USB 3.0 External = Older Photos

3 USB 2.0 External Backup Drives

Environment:

Windows 7 64bit Professional, Adobe Design Premium CS5, MS Office Pro 2010

Windows managed swap file (highly researched with my SSD, might do differently with HDD OS)

Main Lightroom Catalog = 94,000 images most being 12mp Sony .ARW Raw files

Secondary smaller Catalogs (not tested, one not converted yet)

jfSmugmug Publish/ Picasa Web Publish Services

History:

I installed LR4 beta on my previous Core 2 Duo/4 gigs ram and that gave me the kick in the pants that it was time to finally bite the bullet and upgrade hardware as it was pretty clear that Lr4 was going to be too demanding on that one. Had a lot of performance trouble at the beginning especially with photos imported from LR3 catalogs, less with fresh photo imports. During the beta period I built the new computer spec'd above and then ran the beta on that for just over a week until the final release came out.

With the final release installation I failed to uninstall the beta before running the final install so my install was an 'overlay' from the get-go. This is counter to procedures that have been suggested subsequently of making sure to uninstall the beta and to do a fresh install but I didn't notice any problems doing it this way. My first catalog conversion was from the beta catalog I had been using for a couple months. Performance seemed not too bad as I recall, though not as fast as I had hoped. After testing this I then did a conversion of my main catalog which held 87,000 photos at the time. Speed was not ideal after this so after watching the forum patter I followed a recommendation (from Victoria?) to export out of 3 first and then do a fresh import from the exported file. I trashed the original conversion and started over with as little baggage brought in as possible. This may have helped a bit. I have now combined the main catalog with the converted from beta catalog to a total of 94,000.

Key Points:

- My catalog was running so-so at the beginning but then seemed to suffer a slow-down last week which finally peaked at 1.5-25 second delays. It was not this slow at first.

- I also did not do much early dual monitor work so my baseline on that is lacking a bit.

- My LR Cache is on my fastest HDD drive D: where my program files are (including LR). The cache is set for 35Gb although less than 5 are in use.

- My previews are and have been set to build at 2048.

- In thinking back to what I may have done that could have contributed to my biggest experienced slow down there are two things that have a timing coincidence that I wouldn't have expected to be a problem. First is I optimized the catalog. Second is I turned on and setup my Exif Overlays. Most likely coincidental but my brain keeps going back to the overlays for some reason.

What I have done, all or any of which may have helped cure the sluggishness:

Followed Subdoods excellent advice on page 6 of this thread (thanks dood!):

- Created exceptions in my Norton Internet Security for .lrcat files and excluded the catalog and preview folders from any Norton scanning. [ I am a MSAccess programmer and I know how critical this can be in improving database performance for Access .mdb files. This could be a significant factor and I wonder if there might be other SQLLite exceptions that might be implemented on top of this?. ]

- Disabled Windows indexing services on the catalog folder trees. Makes total sense to me. 

- Disabled the CPU Power down and Sleep modes.

- Bumped LR's CPU thread usage priority to High! under Services. Another one that makes tons of sense. I did download and install Prio Priority Saver to facilitate this as suggested. This could be important.

Other things I have done:

- Following another suggestion I downloaded the latest nVidia driver for my GTX 460 v2. It appears that this driver is only a few weeks old. Always good to do.

- I moved my catalogs to a different drive than any of my photos are on. I went back and forth on this setup as I kind of wanted to have the catalog and the cache on different drives and these two are my fastest outside of the SSD OS drive. I went with the catalog and photos together and the cache separate but now I think that moving the catalog to the fast drive with the cache away from the catalog may have been a big contributor to speeding things up. I have not yet played with moving the cache.

- When I built the system my research had led me to believe that LR would be relying on the processor much more than the ram as long as I had around 8 gigs. I went strong on processor and medium on ram. What I see now though is that my Task Manager shows good utilization across all of my cores but also that my ram usage has regularly crawled up to 7.5 out of 8. I have 8 more gigs coming UPS tomorrow as I think LR4 may actually put to use more than 8 if it is available from the looks of what I am seeing.

What I did not try that has been suggested:

- Turn off reverse geo-coding. Never got around to it, my photos aren't gps tagged and I haven't dropped that many on the map yet.

- Rebuild all of the preferences folders. I was going to but hadn't gotten around to it when things kicked into gear for me.

Other notes:

- I am sure I have left out some things here.

- I have not yet had a chance to experiment with Lee Jay's findings on the image scaling. With my resolution and image sizes my views should be less than 1:2 naturally. I will look forward to playing with that.

- I am knocking on wood that nothing changes for now!!!

Ciao,

Gary

[subdood]

Hi Gary,

I'm glad some the suggestions I made worked out. After that post I did

something very similar to what you did. I pulled a 72K RPM drive out of my

PC bone yard, and added it to my machine. I set my raw cache to 20 gig, but

left it in place, and made sure the indexing and AV exceptions were in

place. I then created new catalogs on the new drive, and imported the old

catalogs with 100% previews set to the new drive. I've imported the last 5

years over, and Lightroom 4 is running faster than 3.6 did. I think

dividing the IO across two buses and minimizing the disk hits to the

catalog and images did the trick! I have two displays as well.

Disk IO seems to be the main performance issue that I see. Splitting the

cache and catalog/images allows the system to access both simultaneously if

desired, My 72K drive measured twice as fast as my slow 1tb system drive,

so I'm sure that doesn't hurt either. I've got a 2 year old AMD, so my

system isn't all that. I rarely see LR4 hit my CPU's at 100%

I had to work at it, but I'm a happy camper, and loving LR4. Even if I were

still having issues, I'd hang onto it and wait. I'm sure there'll be a

point release to coincide with Photoshop CS6. I look at it like this. The

upgrade was less than a couple of bad restaurant dinners for my family. The

difference in ACR 2012 is nothing short of amazing, and even running slow,

I'd rather have prettier pictures and a little patience at the end of the

day. It still beats spending 6 hours over an acetic acid stop bath to get a

handful of selects printed any day!

-Mike

[bob frost]

What a lot of people don't seem to realise is that LR4 can process your images just as LR3 did! The processing in Develop has 3 methods - 2003 (the original), 2010 (in LR3), and 2012 (the latest). As anyone reading this thread knows, the latest 2012 develop process needs a lot more cpu power than the older methods.

So if your computer is not yet up to coping with 2012, just continue using the 2010 method in LR4 i.e. don't upgrade the develop method by clicking on the asterisk, and for new imports go to camera calibration and select 2010 as the Develop method.

Then you have all the other benefits of LR4, maps, books, softproofing, etc, without the pain of 2012 on a slow computer. That way you get to keep your Recovery and Fill sliders that a lot of people like, but you can still upgrade to 2012 in the future when you upgrade your computer, or when Adobe finds ways round the processing problems.

No need to go back to LR3; that's shooting yourself in the foot. Just use the 2010 Develop process that is preserved for you to use in LR4.

Bob Frost

[A_C_G]

That's progress Bob. Your point about 2010 and 2012.

I've kept quiet whilst the 'heavy mob' with their super-dooper computers outgig each other. My studio is not even on the internet but at least has mains electricity so I don't need to pedal a generator!

But I do use a PC with 2 gig RAM and it has never been defeated by anything until now.

For interest I looked at what Adobe would need from you before taking however hundred dollars of our money before supplying Lightroom 4 and the spec is:-

Windows

• Intel® Pentium® 4 or AMD Athlon® 64 processor
• Microsoft® Windows Vista® with Service Pack 2 or Windows® 7 with Service Pack 1
• 2GB of RAM
• 1GB of available hard-disk space
• 1024x768 display
• DVD-ROM drive
• Internet connection required for Internet-based services*

I've seen that link where 8 gig is recommended. When LR 4.1 comes out it will be interesting to see if 2gb is enough to run 2012 - if not I for one would want to know what development differences there are between 2010 and 2012. I love buying new toys - but hate the time wasted transferring all the software and images from old to new.

Tony

[kiddid]

Bob,

i wonder why people buy/using new software but cannot use the full feature as promise by the vendor?

Adobe new feature is not a new beast than require the very brand new technology, you have to consider than the lightroom 4 coding/programing might be not optimized yet in coding itself or hardware related.

[Jasonized-nfnCsn]

Sadly, I think I have to give up on LR4.  I have work to get done, and don't have all day to spend on one image!

This is not a "need new computer" problem, nor do I see it as a "2012 vs 2010" problem...  I have a Mac Pro with 8 cores, 16gig of ram and fast SCSI internal array.

But when it takes 5 seconds to move from library to develop, and almost 5 seconds to bring up the crop tool...  Not to mention waiting for the sliders to be applied..  there is a problem here.  Oh, and don't even ask about the book module... <sigh>

I liked the features of LR4... I just wished they would work!

Maybe 4.1... more likely 4.3, if past experience with LR3 was any indication.

Cheers all!

[andreas603]

I too am giving up.  Will try to get a refund but don't know policy... I'm quite burned out on this thread and so many folks that have so much horsepower having problems.... I simply don't have time to make the tweaks that some have mentioned nor do I think I need to upgrade my hardware.  Adobe should be smart enough to know that LR4 should be as fast if not faster than LR3 on at least the majority of its clients systems....that means that at least 51% of us dont have an SSD nor have 12 cores or 32 GB or RAM but instead have a system between 1-3 years old and...here is the kicker...not need a new machine in order to get a few new features (most of which I dont use...Books, GPS, really?)  Remember how this product is positioned in the marketplace...its for professional photographers who *process a lot of images and need tools to make that process efficient*....resulting in TIME savings processing and MORE TIME TO SHOOT and make more money.  LR4 does not live up to that objective...LR3 does mostly...  Has anyone ever compared Photo Mechanic in terms of ingest and review speed..absolutely the best...no, doesn't have all the stuff that LR4 has but I'm considering switching back....

Folks remember why you use LR-  If you're a photog and your time is valuable, I think you should consider going back to LR3 if not take a look at Mechanic....

No more HW specs please!