Lightroom 10.1 very slow with macOS Big Sur

[ellonbluepigs]

Develop module very slow now.  On 2014 27" iMac. 

[Nirhu]

I just came looking for the issues after discussing the issues. Working on euro athletics this weekend with new Macbook air M1 that replaced my old Macbook Air Mid2012 version, hoping to improve the performance and improve my turnover time of photos, oh boy was I wrong ... I am on the same speed where I was before. Other iMac was waiting 20+sec to show photo in develop module and simple crop was hanging and lagging 5sec each time I moved the grid around ...

Like previous posters noted, develop module slow, 2sec+ to show the photo after hitting "R" to crop. Impossible to scroll trough photos in develop module.

I disabled GPU acceleration (Air has only 8GB RAM for refference), will update the thread after the next day ...

[DdeGannes]

Revert to LrC 10.0

[Jao vdL]

digitaldog already mentioned this above but there is a well known bug in classic 10.1 that is still not fixed that makes Big Sur macs that use GPU accelaration AND calibrate using a certain subset of calibration hardware EXTREMELY slow in Classic. The fix is to go into system preferences and just select "Color LCD" in Displays->Color. If that helps you have the bug. If your Mac is still slow (10 second load times of the next image is EXTREMELY slow and not normal) you have a different issue. Typical culprits are:

Antivirus software (make sure that if you install any that you exclude the catalog files from scanning)

Overflowing hard disk. The main SSD drive should have at least 25% free. Anything less and the system will bog down tremendously. This is a common culprit of slow Classic performance.

Some third party system utility. Be wary of anything that is supposed to speed up or clean your mac. Most contain malware and many only do more harm than good. They are also often a disaster to try to remove. Stay away from tthese.

Some system or other process gone haywire. Check activity monitor for anything that takes more than 50% CPU other than Classic. If you see any, you might need to reboot or simply kill the process. Rebooting is usually the safe option.

Too many other apps open. You laugh but I see this a lot with students when I teach Lightroom classes (hasn't happened in person in a long time). They have for example Chrome with 1000 tabs running in the background. Chrome is a well-known extreme memory hog and does not play nice with anything else that uses a lot of memory.

A bunch of legacy products hanging on a USB port or hub. This can slow down disk access when switching or can even block the machine for a few seconds if there is an external hard drive that needs to spin up. Wacom tablets were notorious for crashing or slowing down Classic. I believe its beetter now but it can still lead to very slow performance to have one of those tablets as the way they record traces generates extreme amounts of data to interpret for Classic. Way more than doing it with a mouse.

There are a bunch of other things that might be problems but these are the first ones to look out for.

[MarijnB82C]

I have the same issues with Catalina, latest version of lightroom classic in develop mode is very slow, needs to think after and during every slider move. 2014 27" iMac 5k with 4.0Ghz I7. My 2013 basic macbook air has same speed with similar files...

[DdeGannes]

If you are using LrC version 10.1 or 10.1.1 try reverting to Version 10.0.

[defaults8dbuqpa6ri0]

I updated my computer today to Big Sur and my Lightroom program is so slow as to be almost unusable. This is completely unacceptable. Is Apple working on a fix for this? I am a professional photographer and need to use my lightroom program on or near daily basis.I am not sure how to proceed. Thanks for any advice

[Ian Lyons]

This forum is provided by Adobe for their 'customer community'. So, it's highly unlikley that folk using the forum will be in a postion to indicate whether Adobe or Apple are working on a fix.  Additionaly, the issue discussed in this thread was largely addressed by LrC 10.2 release in mid March. Have you undated to 10.2 yet? If not, then it would be a good place to start. If yes, then it would be useful if you could copy the first 20 lines of the 'Sysytem Info' file, which can be accessed from the LrC Help menu.

BTW, another culprit for causing poor Lightroom performance is the Logitech plugin- If you're using same, then try disbling to see whether doing so helps.