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

[Guest]

@correspondanc & @ andyyau!

You both are completely right. in your 2 cases maybe you are used to a slower speed even out of lr3. maybe lr3 always was a little bit slower, but as i said, in lr3 were people capable of investing money in good hardwere on so they got a really, really realtime and fluid workflow, like i have in lr 3.6. in this case you guys got a slower pc and a slower lr 3.6 and do/can not see a difference between lr 3.6 and 4.0. thats completely ok. but you must understand guys like me who are used to work on a realtime lr 3.6 and now work with this, that is just like got my 5 year older computer back. not even high end machines are able to make a fluid and real time workflow and that is my real problem. yesterday a saw lr4 on the most powerfull mac pro you can get for money. doing most profesional videocutting on it and very high complex renderings using the most expensive quadro fx card. lr4 was not slower or faster than on my machines. it is like tehre is a door in lr4 that is closed for fast machines. as i allready said on my 12 core (24 threads) machine i do not have more than 8% cpu usage so lr4 (x64) does not take the whole power a computer can deliver! working in lr 3,6 my cpu usage rises to about 36%. i will try the trick terry275 wrote above and see if it will bring any difference!

king regards frank!

[correspondanc]

Frankc1978 : I think we do not understand each other.

I totally agree with you. When used to fluid workflow on your machine, going slower is not acceptable.

What I don't understand is why on your machine you go slower (a lot from you say), and , on smaller machines, there is no difference (I calculated as I stll run with both). It does not make sense ! LR4 just also run at a slower speed on my machine too.

My conclusion is that there is something different : graphic card, the way LR4 uses dfiferently some CPUs from some others. I don't know what it is but it is a combination of LR4 and the hardware. 

[A_C_G]

After two days struggling I have an LR4 running as fast as my LR3 (or if there is a difference I can't notice it).

Struggling because I did not know you could not load the paid copy over the beta test copy. It was unuseable in that mode.

If you have LR4 beta you need to uninstall it with Windows. You need to reboot. You need to remove all relevant .ldata and .lcat files and any LR4 catalogue folder. I also removed all the entries in the ...roaming/adobe/lightroom folder.

If you re-install you need to build a new catalogue of course.

If anyone around here from Adobe wants to claim my method is overkill then maybe the next person with problems will not to take such desparate measures - lucky them!

I should have spotted the clue. I loaded my paid for version of LR4 on two machines yesterday. One worked a treat. One worked like treacle. The first had not been used for the beta test and the second had...

All in the cause of progress. But at least my LR4 is fun to use again.

Happy days.

Tony

[Rgscharman]

LR4 seems to be a downgrade from 3.6. Definitely not what I expected from Adobe and from what I'm reading I'm not unique in my impression.

[gbdid]

I don't know if this is useful or not, but I thought that the 4Beta was a real dog, and I had uninstalled and reinstalled a couple of times.

Today I decided to try the Lightroom 4,  so I unistalled the Beta again, downloaded and installed the full trial  version and again it opened the few photos I had in the catalogue, and again it was really slow, and used 100% of the cpu for most of the time it was trying to do any adjustment.Quite disappointing really.

So I uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled the trial version, found the Beta catalogue which was in Pictures as Lightroom 4 Beta.Ink, and all related files,Beta Ink2 and data, and I don't know which of the two things I did, rebooting after uninstalling, or removing the catalogue but now I have a Lightroom 4 which responds very well.

Like I thought it should in fact.

[Rodrigo Gomez]

I haven't done any scientific test regarding this, but I have a dual screen setup and disabling the second monitor makes a very big difference. With both screens being used by LR4 any change to the RAW settings gives me a beachball. I turned off the second one and it feels much more responsive. I'm working on a Mac Pro, Mac OS X 10.7. Of course, disabling the second screen is not the solution. I still want to use both

I have a medium-big catalog (about 60,000 photos) and it's impossible for me to reimport it: I use constantly virtual copies, and those will be lost (as far as I know) if I just reimport the original DNG/RAW. So that is not an option for me (and I'm sure for lot's of people)

Regards

[Kirk Kelln]

Hi All. Count me as grumpy for how slow LR4 is. I have spent about 10 hours fiddling including doing a complete system restore. I will report fidnings but here are system specs:

i7 950 Quad core OC'd to 3.9Ghz - rock solid.

24Gb RAM using Mushkin Black OCd to 1800Mhz - rock solid

C: is RAID 0 on Intel Sata2 Controller, running two OCZ Vertex3 120Gb SSD

Scratch drive is mushkin Max Iops 240Gb SATA3 SSD on SATA3 controller

Photo directory is on 4Tb partition (two WD Caviar Black drives in RAID 0 on intel SATA2)

Three displays but LR running on two - powered by two MSI GTX 570 cards OCd by about 20% - rock solid - have SLI disabled

Both Lr3 and Lr4 repond much quicker when second display is turned off. Lr3 us easily usable with second display running - Lr4 is very sluggish.

I have uninstalled. Reinstalled. Backup recovery. Lr3 only. Lr4 only. Side by side. Sharing catalog. Seperate catalog. Virgin import to LR4 to make brand new catalog. Does not matter - almost identical performance problem with LR4 (compared to LR3) under all conditions. Here is where I left it:

I now have LR3.6 and LR4 in side-by-side installs with completely seperate libraries and referencing duplicate data on the same partition. Without a doubt, LR4 is much, much more slugish than Lr3. Here is the kicker: I created a 12Gb ram disk and copied one of my folders with RAW images in it. When reading these images, LR4 does move more quickly than when reading identical files off the RAID 0 photos drive. However, the improvement is nominal and remails, very obvioudly slugish. In comparision, LR3 reading the same files from the Ram disk is much faster - tiny bit of lag.

The problems cannot have anything to do with hardware limitations or file sizes. There is something about LR4 that is grinding down its responsiveness.

How could they not have noticed this?

Kirk

PS. Once an image is cached, LR4 much more responsive - still slower than Lr3, but usable.

[Robbie2006]

I ended up uninstalling LR4, I was unable to work with it it was so slow, tryed zooming and it toke about 4 seconds to update..............was so looking forward to upgrading.

[bcormier]

After using it a bit I have noticed that the initial switch from the library to develop is slow, but consequence switches are actually fairly normal. The develop module is still not as snappy as Lightroom 3.6 though. The brushes and sliders seem to work fairly fast for me. Would still like to see a speed improvement.

[sparksdjs]

I tried the route of virgin install after uninstalling the original LR4-over-Beta install, deleting all files and cache and  I restarted with a new, empty library.  I imported a few Canon RAW files and gave it a go - I see very little, if any, performance change.  I processed one of the same RAW files in 3.6 and it was very responsive with low latency.  Using similar edits, the export of the finished JPEG took about 16 secs in LR4, 8 in 3.6. 

I'm going back to 3.6 until Adobe comes up with a solution.  I do this as a hobby for fun and LR4 is so irritating right now that it ain't fun at all.

Dave

[Kirk Kelln]

I just did fresh install of LR4 and LR3.6. I created two entirely new catalogs for each but importing the same 300 RAW images. LR4 is a little faster than before, but it is still much more slugish than LR3.6 in side-by-side comparison.

[naestyoh]

I'm also experiencing a sluggish interface. I'm using a 2010 6-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro with 24GB of ram and a 240GB SSD. LR4 is currently using about 3GB RAM. Slider movements take 1-2 seconds to show up on the 12MP Nikon D3s RAW preview in the Develope module. Even more curious, moving files within LR is extremely slow even when I'm not in the folder sending/receiving the files which would require a screen redraw for each move... but it acts that way... About one file per second moves between source and destination. 

[freemind42]

I have a Mac Pro eight-core and find it way to slow also.

[A_C_G]

If you look at the last three messages you will see the first (of the three)  removed all traces of the beta and now has a useable LR4.

The next two messagers do not tell us whether they have upgraded from the beta or from LR3.

I am sorry to labour this point but, to me anyway, it seems important.

It really would help if future posters not only tell us about their slow LR4 but also about whether they migrated from the beta and/or LR3.

Tony

[j. scriba]

Ok, to sum up my experience:

User of LR3, never installed a beta, installed LR4 as trial.

High-end MacPro (8-core 3GHz, 24GB RAM, OS 10.7.3) 3 displays

LR4 is sluggish and unresponsive to slider movements in develop module, activity monitor shows maximum CPU load on all cores.

Fix: Create new catalogue, re-import same pictures. This brings down CPU load to comfortable levels, UI-snappiness similar to LR3.

As others have pointed out, it will be difficult to compare user experiences such as sluggishness.

LR seems to be somewhat resource-hungry anyway, so users with less powerful machines may be used to a certain lag in response and not notice too much of a difference (which is in no way meant to blame them for having a "bad" computer!).

I suggest observing the activity monitor (on the Mac) as a gauge for system load caused by the program.

I use the "clarity"-slider as a reference point and find that LR3 and a "well-behaved" LR4 leaves some headroom on the CPUs while a a sluggish LR4 drives all cores to the max for 2-3 seconds making the interaction jumpy to the point where it is hardly usable.

If you look at the last three messages you will see the first (of the three) removed all traces of the beta and now has a useable LR4.

The next two messagers do not tell us whether they have upgraded from the beta or from LR3.

I am sorry to labour this point but, to me anyway, it seems important.

[Vit-none]

Macbook pro, LR3, LR4 Beta (beta was super slow).  For what its worth, I had a slow experience with LR4.  Used a new catalog, tried some of the suggestions here, did an archive install of Lion.  No success.  Adobe customer support said I may have had an issue with a corrupt user profile (i was missing the adobe plist files).  Created a new profile, and wow, just like that, night and day difference. Makes the program usable, even downright snappy.  YMMV. 

[Rodrigo Gomez]

And how do you check if the user profile is corrupt, and how to fix it? For me the thing that makes the most difference is enabling the second monitor, but I want to certainly see if this can be fixed or improved by some other means.

Thanks!

[Vit-none]

Not sure how to check, honestly. I created a new user profile, and ran lr4

under that instead, and it works great (so far).

[A_C_G]

Is the User Profile a Windows feature or something within Lightroom?

Tony

[Vit-none]

Worked on my mac. No clue for windows, slightly more of a clue with osx.

Sorry, I don't have the silver bullet.

[gbdid]

Probably windows. Control panel /user accounts.Create a new user.

[A_C_G]

creating a new user is a pretty serious change to make to use Lightroom.

I cannot believe anyone would want to do that.

Tony

[hamish niven]

Ok

My feelings based on a Lapbook pro 15inch 2.2 Ghz Intel Core i7 with 8Gb 1333 MHz DDR3 750 ( 40 Gb free from 750 Gb internal hard drive) running OSX 10.7.3 with the high definition screen 1680 by1050.

Working on an 8 bit TIF from a Canon 5D11 (5340 by 3560)

I've just had a selection of images provided from a client for me to edit.

1. I've saved the meta data to the photos
2. exported the 18 images as a LR3.5 catalog, leaving the 18 images on my firewire drive
3. zipped up my LR4 beta app  so I could use both
4. installed the LR4 final
5. right clicked the catalog in a folder on my desktop - Open with LR4.0
6. it wanted to convert so I let it do so
7. and LR4.0 started with the new catalog
8. I had to update the film strip of images to PV2012.
9. The controls are fast, way faster than LR3.5 which I currently use
10. I'm currently updating iTunes to 10.6
11. I have 1.31 Gb of memory available - from Activity monitor - LR4.0 using 1.66 Gb
12. 
    I've already used the transform tool to adjust
    1. vertical
    2. rotation

     I've got several dust spots already removed

     I've not got any profile adjustments applied as I'm using a tiff made from combining 3 DNG files that had the profiles applied.

1. zooming to 100% - under 1 second dragging at 100% around the screen  - instantaneous
2. painting adjustment marks - instantaneous - at 100% and fit
3. adjustment of the verticals and horizontal using the manual corrections
   1. whether by using the ALT(±1( / CTRL(±5) / SHIFT(±20) keys at fit - instantaneous
   2. whether by using the ALT(±1( / CTRL(±5) / SHIFT(±20) keys at 100% - instantaneous, zooming back out to fit after a +20 change  is just short of instantaneous.
4. From Grid mode, opening a new photo fit and
   1. Module change to Develop - 1 second
   2. loading image ± 2 seconds
   3. zoom to 100% ± 1 sec
5. Q - spot in healing mode cleaning mark and select area and time to update ±1 second
6. Dragging the spot marker to align a vertical edge, ie I've got a spot over an edge, so I need to move the "From" spot so that the "To" spot perfectly lines up, refresh as I drag the spot suffers from a lag of under 0.25 sec, faster than LR3.5 - Remember I have manual lens corrections AND adjustment masks on this image, but the adsjustment mask is not over this Q spot.

This conflicts with many peoples experiences, I'm finding it very snappy, and the only reason I downloaded the LR4Beta2 er LR4.0 was because I wanted to import a catalog of a few images into LR4 and reference them from my main drive, rather than export the images and use LR4 Beta to read the images from a new location as I've been doing with other finishing edits.

I will comment on DNG edits below

1. Auto applied Canon profile
   1. loading a dng at 100% from the film strip ±4 seconds
   2. flicking around an image @ 100% - is jerky and sticky
   3. Zoom in and out of 100% ±1 second
   4. manual transformations - slower than for above, but still under 0.2 sec, ie click (quick sniff) done - not very scientific, but I can't operate a timer at the same time
   5. Turning on and off the detail really slows things up until I've zoomed around the image at 100%, also the CPU started burning 400% for a while, and then dropped again.
   6. Q healing is a little slower, the updating the spots when you need to accurately align vertical is significantly slower, maybe 1 second, but this is with the auto profile on and manual transforms. With the auto profile turned off, its almost as fast as with the TIF above.

I am finding that the DNG is a little slower, but its definitely no slower than LR3.5 was for me

I've tried to be as accurate as possible, but based on a catalog imported from LR3.5, with 3.5 installed, and develop settings  from LR3.5 newly updated develop setting specific to LR4 beta, I'm very pleased with the speeds on my laptop.

hamish NIVEN Photography

[nitram]

Maybe the people who experience a slow Lightroom have the lens correction feature active for all of their pictures.

I really wondered about the slow speed in LR3 already. Yes, in LR3! The reason is, I use LR for my complete workflow, even retouching and the more you add spots and gradients to a picture, the slower it gets on my computer, but... ONLY if the lens correction is active.

I experienced, that the lens correction feature is slowing LR3 massively. You get a response time of some seconds for your clicks if lens correction is active. If you deselect it, everything works smooth.

In LR4 everything maybe a little bit slower, but I don't see the difference to LR3. Other bugs are more obvious (tone curves) and critical. But I really think (or hope) Adobe is on it.

I would appreciate it if Adobe would be more present even in this user forum to inform people about coming changes, hotfixes and bugfixes, because it seems to me, that everyone is complaining, but there are no solutions or hints that could help.

[sparksdjs]

I experimented with different actions to see if doing/not doing some of them made a performance difference but found that any difference was not detectable - performance remained poor.

Dave