Lightroom 3.3 Performance Feedback

Report · Dec 02, 2010

Please use this discussion topic for your feedback on Lightroom 3.3 RC and the final Lightroom 3.3 release when it becomes available. The Lightroom team has tried very hard to extract useful feedback from the following discussion topic but due to the length and amount of chatter we need to start a new, more focused thread. Please post specifics about your experience and be sure to include information about your hardware configuration.

Regards,

Tom Hogarty

Lightroom Product Manager

Report · Mar 22, 2011

areohbee wrote:
It would require extensive re-design of Lightroom.

I don't think so. IMHO, it would just require removing inefficiencies and adding some optimisation.

Wasn't the purpose of LR3 to re-design LR so that it becomes faster?

areohbee wrote:
We all know that lots of stuff is possible parametrically - look at Nx2, Aperture, and Bibble.

We "all" know? I can think of an exception...

areohbee wrote:
PS - My apologies for continuing the off-topic discussion.

Maybe we would have less "off-topic" discussions if we felt that the "on-topic" discussions had impact.

Report · Mar 22, 2011

TK2142 wrote:
Maybe we would have less "off-topic" discussions if we felt that the "on-topic" discussions had impact.

Oh, please.

This thread was started by Tom Hogarty, LR product manager.

As a result of some of the reports in this thread, Dan Tull, LR engineer has found and killed a bug that was causing major stalls for some people. In part to test this fix the team has offered a release-candidate in hope of receiving feedback on topics such as this one.

This would seem to demonstrate:

- An interest by the team in getting direct feedback

- An interest by the team in fixing problems experienced by some users

- An ability of the team to fix difficult bugs they can reproduce

- A willingness to get feedback from the community on these fixes

Some things are easy for the team to reproduce, some are not. If they can't reproduce the problem, it's really hard, bordering on impossible for them to fix it.

I know exactly how frustrating it is to have a bug you can reproduce at will that the team can't reproduce at all, but giving up finding the key element never solved the problem for me, nor did it solve the problem in the application.

Report · Mar 22, 2011

Lee Jay wrote:
Oh, please.

Lee Jay, I apologise if my comment could be perceived as being unfair. I'm certainly not saying that there is "no progress" or "no point in posting to this forum". However, I think it is fair to say that many are disappointed by the progress and Adobe's bug fixing policy. I also think it is fair to say that many are not overly happy of how their attempts to provide feedback are received. My comment was simply meant to offer an explanation for some off-topic discussions, not as a statement that all threads are useless.

Hope that clarifies it.

P.S.: Now that 3.4 RC is out, is this 3.3 thread still needed? I don't have too bad of a conscience making off-topic posts because I'm assuming this thread has outlived its purpose. Happy to be told I'm wrong.

Report · Mar 22, 2011

I keep waiting for someone "in authority" to start a new thread. So far no one has ventured to do so; certainly no such change has been noted here. Though there's nothing technically preventing me from starting such a thread, I suspect not so many people would move over there if I did so. Rob could do it, or Seán: I think people would follow their lead. For whatever reason, any Adobe staff following this thread (if any still are) haven't felt the need to do it. Either they find the discussion here sufficient for their purposes with 3.4 RC, or they've given up on us entirely, focussing instead (we can hope) on the bug reports they get through the proper channels.

On the subject of what should or should not be added to Lightroom, I think they nearly broke its back with the last round of "improvements." All the touted performance enhancements were more than offset by the new image processing features. Personally, therefore, I hope the engineers are spending their time optimizing what we already have and not on adding more bells and whistles. While it may not be hard to think of new things we'd like Lightroom to be able to do, it should be equally easy to imagine what such additions might do to the program's already questionable performance. Unrestrained feature bloat is the last thing we need - or should wish for.

There are some folks, like TK2142, who resent and resist the need to use Photoshop with Lightroom. Naturally, they would like to see Lightroom do more. However, I think Adobe envisioned the two applications working in tandem almost from the beginning. Which is why, as version one came out of beta they changed the name from plain old Adobe Lightroom to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I don't think this was a real problem until Lightroom 3 and Photoshop (and Bridge) CS5. Between them, though, they overtax many otherwise capable computers. And, as some reports here attest, even heavy iron has trouble with Lightroom in some cases. Ironically, at the same time both programs became serious resource hogs, their integration was improved significantly. Whereas using Lightroom and Photoshop in an integrated workflow was a real challenge before, with Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5 this integration became all but seamless. Which is another compelling indication of Adobe's intentions for their use.

While the resources necessary to run Lightroom are laid out in the system requirements, what such requirements never explain is what is necessary to run Lightroom with other programs, like Photoshop and Bridge. This is truly a case of caveat emptor. I feel confident in saying the minimum requirements for using both LR and PS are at least a quad core CPU and at least 4GB of RAM. More of both are even better. This is, of course, in an ideal world without software bugs.

I think it's reasonable to suggest, therefore, that anyone who doesn't have at least the minimum system recommended above, should not upgrade to CS5 or Lightroom 3. Naturally you won't see Adobe saying as much. But someone should. I get by with a four year old 3GHz quad core Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM. The CPUs are up to the job but I wish I could afford more RAM. Fortunately the Mac Pro can handle it, when and if I ever get the scratch together to buy some.

Report · Mar 22, 2011

Apologies for not jumping in and responding sooner. The original purpose of this thread was to continue to extract more specifics about performance issues experienced by Lightroom 3 customers including details regarding hardware configurations. The thread has recently drifted to speculation about business priorities and technology limitations. However, I want to keep this discussion focused on what the Lightroom 3.4 Release Candidate did and did not fix for those who have been experiencing issues.(Or, in some cases, if the most recent update introduced new problems) The recent spate of speculative posts makes it difficult for the team to follow or gather relavent details. (My goal in participating in these forums is to find solutions not to convince you of Adobe's intention to find solutions.)

The team has already demonstrated a focus on fixing numerous reported bugs with each dot release of Lightroom 3. The non-specific chatter in this thread is an obstacle to finding additional improvements.

Regards,

Tom Hogarty

Lightroom Product Manager

thogarty adobe com

Report · Mar 22, 2011

Tom,

Regarding 3.4RC

Things fixed (performance-wise):

-----------------------------------------

- None that I know of. But, between a hardware upgrade and the succession of bug fixes since Lr3.0, its now performing very well for me, for the most part.

Things not fixed (performance-wise):

----------------------------------------------

- ACR Cache is either ineffective, or broken - dunno which. It would be awesome if Adobe could release an app-note on the ACR-cache...

- All plugins that I've tried (a half-dozen maybe) that use FTP, crash Lightroom.

Jury still out...

----------------

- I've been exercising the DSR tool a bunch and haven't seen any "mis-targeting" nor freeze-ups since 3.4RC, but these things didn't happen that often in Lr3.3 so...

Primary System:

--------------------

Lightroom version: 3.4 RC [733717]
Operating system: Windows 7 Ultimate Edition
Version: 6.1 [7601]
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Physical processor count: 4
Processor speed: 3.4 GHz
Built-in memory: 7934.1 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 7934.1 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 2516.8 MB (31.7%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 3037.7 MB
Memory cache size: 1269.1 MB
System DPI setting: 96 DPI
Desktop composition enabled: Yes
Displays: 1) 1920x1200, 2) 1920x1200

Rob

Report · Mar 22, 2011

Tom Hogarty wrote:
However, I want to keep this discussion focused on what the Lightroom 3.4 Release Candidate did and did not fix for those who have been experiencing issues.

Wouldn't it make sense to start a new thread for this particular purpose?

As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I've seen it already.

Tom Hogarty wrote:
The recent spate of speculative posts makes it difficult for the team to follow or gather relavent details.

OK, I will then stop to contribute to the "chatter". Maybe the posters that contributed to the "chatter" can be forgiven to do so because typically when they ask for participation from Adobe they are told that this is a "user to user" forum and that bug reports should be used to communicate with Adobe. It is good to know that this isn't entirely true.

Tom Hogarty wrote:
(My goal in participating in these forums is to find solutions not to convince you of Adobe's intention to find solutions.)

Maybe there would be a point in trying to attempt the latter as well, in order to keep the user base's faith. If even loyal Adobe fans like tgutgu start threads complaining about Adobe's bug fixing policy, then I'd do the occasional attempt to convince people that Adobe is still trying to do the right thing.

A final suggestion: It would be good if even release candidates were better tested. I'm sure you are missing out on a lot of feedback because people are not prepared to deal with new bugs and hence rather wait till the final dot release becomes available.

Report · Mar 22, 2011

responding to Toms message from a few moments ago

There are several issues I am currently having with LR3.3

Due to the noise about LR3.4 RC, I'm not going near that, and Rob C"s comment about cache still 'broke reflects my observations below

Grid view does NOT display the most up to date image -
1. I upload all my photos, with a development preset
2. then adjust 1 or 2 or many images, syncing in library mode,
3. Then to see these edits, I need to go into develop mode...... boring
After an hour or so of working on 500 images,
1. sorting into stacks (bracked exposured images, so all "identical"
2. library view working on those identical stacked images
3. batch exporting those stacked images
4. re importing them as 16bit TIFFS
5. processing / straightening / correcting
6. re exporting as watermarked images for clients to select from etc
  I find that LR really slows down and I have to purge the cache and then restart LR. This works for another while and then slows again
Develop adjustments are slow
1. adjustment brushes are slow up and down arrows take 1 - 4 seconds to respond
2. spot healing is slow, spinning umbrella etc if you try to place a second spot healing until the previous has finished updating the image
3. the vertical / horizontal etc lens transformations often get slower and slower - 1 - 5 seconds to adjust, especially in 100% mode, when I am trying to align a vertical with more precision
  However part 3 above does seem to be quicker on smaller images, ie imported smaller sRAW in Canon 5Dmk2 etc
General speed is tedious, I've given up shooting full sized RAW with my 5Dmk2 unless its really necessary as 25MB dngs are painful to work with

My spec

LR 3.3

iMAC ± 3,5 years old

OSX 10.6.6 ( 10.6.7 downloaded but not installed yet)

2.4 Ghz intel core duo with 4 Mb of 667Mhz DDR SDRAM

320 Gb internal drive

connected to a network server with 2x 2Tb of storage space

2Tb (1.6 TB + 400Gb) firewire 800 with main library partition 1 & exact copy of iMac ( partition 2)

500 Gb USB2 Time Machine

500 GB USB2 for other stuff & music

only one screen due to fault - graphics card / monitor

25Gb LR cache on the internal drive that is not affected by time machine / super duper backup etc

No SSD drives, no dedicated drives for cache, for the library etc, as only one firewire 800 port and 3 USB ports on imac

Tom asked for issues with LR3.3 performance feedback - this thread was prior to LR3.4 RC, so I'm doing just that

I have no intention on being a guinea pig for LR3.4 RC as the reviews indicated that most the dot fixes were for new cameras - not any relevance to me and I was burned with a previous dot release making a mess....

If this is the same as no vote no voice, then so be it.

But there are real issues with LR performance, database / keywording layers / parametric editing etc and I wonder if, like the Hyena - LR has / is evolving down a path which leads towards extinction

Report · Mar 23, 2011

Tom Hogarty wrote:
Apologies for not jumping in and responding sooner.

I think a little more participation on Adobe's part in these forums and/or via other mechanisms, would go a long way...

We pour our hearts & brains out in this forum, and yet often feel like its falling on deaf ears. This forum is presently serving two purposes - a "user to user forum", and (ostensibly) a primary vehicle for communication between users and Adobe. But, users often feel like they're being kept in the dark. The occasional posts by Dan Tull and others, whilst appreciated, are just not enough...

PS - Same goes for the SDK forum, where there has been zero communication from Adobe lately.

PPS - Have you considered a non-forum path for communication? I mean, I would not want to be you/Adobe on these forums - users can be petulant&selfish&whiny&unempathetic&punitive&merciless... Why not set up a site for "Prevailng Issues" where you can post status and such, and solicit input anonymously? Then maybe you could leave the forum for the animals to kill each other, oops - I meant so the users could help each other...

"Tough love",

Rob

Report · Mar 24, 2011

Good idea, Rob.

For me, I know what it's like as the developer. But, that said, I'm the customer here, and I expected better from Adobe wrt the quality of LR3 (ha - even after going thru 2.0 ...)

I love LR, and am seen as the 'champion' of LR at my club - at our last clubnight where LR3 was demo'd, *over* 3/4 of the members said they had a version of LR already ... !!!

OK, to the point. I am a techie and I love computers and photography. I'll put inordinate amounts of time into my system to get a smoother and more effective workflow. And, I love to know all of the available features of any s/w so that I'm comfortable with all of the possibilities it offers. So, when I come across a glitch in LR, I have a choice ... do I just reboot LR and retry (often works) else work around the problem, or do I try to help Adobe get it fixed?

Point One:

Well, if I'm to try to help Adobe, that'll be a lot of my time, as I'll try to produce a relevant and carefully thought-out report of what, why & where etc. But what stops me is the doubt that maybe someone's already done this, that Adobe already knows about it, and that maybe they know what needs to be fixed (and that's their decision as to whether / when). There's no way I'll commit myself to that kind of effort if it's a waste of time!

Without any kind of info from their Issue Tracking System, I'm not going to potentially waste lots of my time. With no feedback whatsoever from bug reports or feature requests, sketchy lists of issues fixed in releases and ongoing unfixed issues that must be trapping loads of people into submitting endless duplicate bug reports, it's too one-sided.

Point Two:

I noted with interest the earlier post wrt debugging, and have to hope that the lack of it was a well-considered choice by Adobe, rather than a glaring omission! However, with the amazing free tools available to everyday users on Windows from Sysinternals, I would love it if Adobe would define a list of the useful stats that users could send in, to let them see all of the goings-on in our systems when things go pear-shaped.for us - e.g. action on the registry, from what address, what's loaded at that address, where LR and our DLLs are in memory, the timings of the i/os etc etc etc - all things that easily available via these free tools. Surely that'd be useful to them?

I'd gladly run a rake of free tools to help Adobe get meaningful data, although my current problems are more about disk access / housekeeping than performance. But if there was standardised things to run, especially started by a script that anyone could run, surely that'd help?

What frustrates me is the *apparent* lack of interest and committment by Adobe. I understand that this is only my *perception* of what is or isn't happening, but I'm confused that so little *seems* to be happening, and that we users are so left out of the loop - but asked to 'believe' that things'll get better seemingly without any proof. We are asked to have faith, and keep paying money for the next version of LR, in the *hope* that some of our pet-hate bugs will be resolved ...

Please. Help us to help you - to help us 😉

Gary

Report · Mar 24, 2011

Perfectly put Gary,

I dont know what else to say, except I hope Tom not only listens, but takes the intitiative to rectify what I consider to be a very real problem for Adobe/Lightroom & users.

R

Report · Mar 24, 2011

areohbee wrote:
Tom Hogarty wrote:
Apologies for not jumping in and responding sooner.
I think a little more participation on Adobe's part in these forums and/or via other mechanisms, would go a long way...
We pour our hearts & brains out in this forum, and yet often feel like its falling on deaf ears. This forum is presently serving two purposes - a "user to user forum", and (ostensibly) a primary vehicle for communication between users and Adobe. But, users often feel like they're being kept in the dark. The occasional posts by Dan Tull and others, whilst appreciated, are just not enough...
PS - Same goes for the SDK forum, where there has been zero communication from Adobe lately.
PPS - Have you considered a non-forum path for communication? I mean, I would not want to be you/Adobe on these forums - users can be petulant&selfish&whiny&unempathetic&punitive&merciless... Why not set up a site for "Prevailng Issues" where you can post status and such, and solicit input anonymously? Then maybe you could leave the forum for the animals to kill each other, oops - I meant so the users could help each other...
"Tough love",
Rob

+1 Rob... I had an eerily similar reply to Tom that I wrote (I really did) that went off into the ether when my session on the forum timed out.

Tom.. I absolutely agree that these threads, in many cases, have drifted far off base. I know there are folks like Melissa (in the past), Dan, and others that come in from time to time and I've been the receipient of help from them. I have to also agree with Rob though, the flow of, lacking any other term, "official" information as to status of problems, critical ones Adobe is working on, issues that need more information (e.g. Can users send us the following:"), etc. is just not there. The pipeline is primarily one way and the only time we see if something was worked on is when a RC or point release comes out... and that isn't always 100% accurate. There were items fixed in 3.4RC that didn't make the items fixes list.

The team may VERY well be working on some of the issues affecting people's performance, but lacking any other evidence of it, can only go by what they see. If they don't see "their" issue after 4 points releases, then they can only assume it didn't make the attention of Adobe, despite reporting it (since there isn't any real feedback mechanism for items reported).

The point is that most all the folks here are passionate about seeing LR succeed and become even more powerful. They want to help, but they also need to see that their efforts are both being heard and are being taken seriously. I know there is a certain amount of marketing, trust, interface with the CS team, etc. that enters into this. That is Adobe's internal issue to resolve, but know that the people here are ready and willing to help.. but at times, the silence is truly deafening.

Jay S.

Report · Mar 24, 2011

I was with you Rob till you went postal on the rest of us. Hoping that was tongue in cheek.

It's true, though, that we feel hung out to dry here. I have no doubt that this sense of abandonment is a major cause of much of the ennui and animus you see on this forum. Telling us that our expressions of frustration are a waste of time doesn't address the underlying cause of these feelings and, if fact, only adds fuel to the fire, indicating a distinct lack of respect for the difficulties we are going through with Lightroom and our efforts to inform Adobe of our problems with the product. Effective communication is a two-way street, which this, for the most part, has not been. We have no way of knowing if our bug reports have made it onto Adobe's to-do list or into the round file. Without feedback we're likely to conclude it's the later. And, though Tom insists that they have resolved a lot of issues in the dot-updates, the last one, 3.4 RC, belies that claim, especially considering that one of their supposed fixes apparently broke more than it fixed. If Adobe wants the benefit of our detailed feedback on the problems we encounter and wants to cut down on the seemingly useless editorializing and speculation, they need to give us enough feedback to see that our efforts are taken seriously. This is not a religious experience. Faith is not enough to sustain us.

And, frankly, if even an experienced hand like Rob is feeling out of the loop, there is clearly a problem here - that only Adobe can address. How they choose to do that is, of course, up to them. But they are at least partially responsible for this forum's lack of productivity. To get more, they'll have to give more. The way they're handling it now is just not working, nor for them and not for us.

Report · Mar 24, 2011

Now that's a refreshing bit of honesty, even if it confirms our most cynical suspicions that Adobe staff have been tasked with developing new features for Lightroom at the expense of solving current problems. This reflects the popular opinion about Adobe policy in respect to other well known buggy products which shall go unnamed here. And it suggests that even our most honest and straightforward efforts to report bugs and explain performance issues on this forum are, indeed, in vain. Thanks Dan for the truth, painful as it is for us to hear. I don't blame the engineers; after all, for the most part they don't get to choose the projects they work on. Those decisions are made further up the food chain in the executive suites, where the high altitude and low oxygen levels seem to have a negative impact on cognitive ability.

I hope Dan doesn't get any unpleasant blowback in-house for finally coming clean with us. Such courage and integrity are rare and precious virtues.

If Dan's revelations don't kill this forum thread, nothing will. I know, some will say that just because Dan has little or no time for troubleshoot Lightroom, that doesn't mean others aren't dedicated to the task. But he didn't say that they are, only that they were; supposing otherwise is putting words in his mouth and is self-indulgent wishful thinking - in my opinion. I would be pleased if Dan replies, telling me I'm wrong, that there are indeed people at Adobe diligently debugging Lightroom, even if he no longer has time for such work. If that's the case, however, why is it he rather than they responding to our urgent requests for enlightenment?

Addendum: The "chatter" on this thread of which Dan speaks is in large part due to the absence of the kind of honest and informative feedback that he just gave us - at long last. Now that we know he doesn't have time to work on the problems we've already reported, the distinction between chatter and "good leads on important bugs" is moot.

Report · Mar 24, 2011

thewhitedog wrote:
Now that's a refreshing bit of honesty, even if it confirms our most cynical suspicions that Adobe staff have been tasked with developing new features for Lightroom at the expense of solving current problems. This reflects the popular opinion about Adobe policy in respect to other well known buggy products which shall go unnamed here. And it suggests that even our most honest and straightforward efforts to report bugs and explain performance issues on this forum are, indeed, in vain. Thanks Dan for the truth, painful as it is for us to hear. I don't blame the engineers; after all, for the most part they don't get to choose the projects they work on. Those decisions are made further up the food chain in the executive suites, where the high altitude and low oxygen levels seem to have a negative impact on cognitive ability.
I hope Dan doesn't get any unpleasant blowback in-house for finally coming clean with us. Such courage and integrity are rare and precious virtues.
If Dan's revelations don't kill this forum thread, nothing will. I know, some will say that just because Dan has little or no time for troubleshoot Lightroom, that doesn't mean others aren't dedicated to the task. But he didn't say that they are, only that they were; supposing otherwise is putting words in his mouth and is self-indulgent wishful thinking - in my opinion. I would be pleased if Dan replies, telling me I'm wrong, that there are indeed people at Adobe diligently debugging Lightroom, even if he no longer has time for such work. If that's the case, however, why is it he rather than they responding to our urgent requests for enlightenment?
Addendum: The "chatter" on this thread of which Dan speaks is in large part due to the absence of the kind of honest and informative feedback that he just gave us - at long last. Now that we know he doesn't have time to work on the problems we've already reported, the distinction between chatter and "good leads on important bugs" is moot.

Sorry, whitedog, but I would not be surprised that after your post some of the Adobe staff will be even more reluctant to post here. I am pretty sure that Dan doesn't do anything here in the forum that isn't backed. But your interpretation of his remarks isn't really appropriate. In the software business it is not unusual that you have to find the balance between development and issue fixing, sometimes both work together. Your interpretation that after Dan's notes bug reporting and discussion here in the forum is in vain, is ridiculous, because things have been done, based on information given in threads like this. He explains what he does, so that he needs less time in the future to do the things, you want him to do (finding the causes for difficult to reproduce bugs). Dan also indicated that some stuff wasn't even related to Lightroom code.

I have no idea, why you think that the Lightroom user community ("we") has in general more interest in bug fixing than in further development of the product and that devoting resources to development while some bugs are still open, is somewhat cynical. In all this thread we are talking about hard to track down, time consuming to find, difficult to reproduce issues, which some of the users have - but probably not the majority. If the LR-team would halt development until all this is fixed, the product would be doomed. Some of the performance issues might even only possible to fix with larger refactorings, which can only be done in major versions. If they work on LR 4 intensely now, that may even help that your issues are fixed. Should the development team have postponed 2010 process version, if they had known that on a small percentage of user environments some performance bottlenecks might occur? I don't think so.

You can be sure that once LR 4 is out, there will be another group of unfortunate, who has environments, where Lightroom will no meet the expectations, and where it will be too time consuming to track the last bit of issues down, instead of moving on with the product. (At the end each upgrader spends only a 100 €).

So, I have full sympathy, that LR is further developed quickly and that we get what we need as soon as it is possible. What puzzles me a bit is that Adobe does not assign more ressources to the team so that issue resolving and development can be done to a greater extent in parallel. My post about bug fixing policy was not so much about that things weren't get fixed, but to learn when they will be addressed (if at all). What can we expect still in LR 3?

Lightroom is a business endeavor and not a fun project. Revenue will only come from new customers or from upgraders. The latter you can only convince to spend money, if a new version has enough improvements to justify the purchase (unless your new camera is only supported in the new release). Do you think, that I would spend 99 € again for an upcoming LR 4, if it doesn't have soft proofing? No, I probably wouldn't.

In my opinion, the participation of Adobe staff in this forum isn't as bad as you indicate. If they don't have a solution to your issues in your environment at the moment, what should they say here? I would rather dedicate my bug fixing time to issues, which are clearly reproducible in large amount of constellations, instead of hunting after "foggy" phenomenons with unclear reasons.

I would not have added again to the "chatter" with this post, if your post would not have embarassed me so (however, we should not take this conversation personally).

Kind regards

Thomas

Report · Mar 24, 2011

Hmm. Well, there certainly are various people that also do some investigation of issues from the forums. I honestly don't know what percentage of their time is allocated to Lightroom in general, Lightroom 3 in particular, etc.

I've actually expressed on more than one occasion that it's challenging at times to balance work on existing and newer versions, so I didn't really think of the post as revelatory. It didn't kill the previous thread, so I don't guess it'll kill this one.

Report · Mar 24, 2011

Now that we know he doesn't have time to work on the problems we've already reported, the distinction between chatter and "good leads on important bugs" is moot.

Ok, I have to respond here. In doing so, I'm contributing to the chatter problem, but this needs saying.

Hypothetically, let's say I get an hour here and there or maybe a half day once in a while. If a thread titled "Lightroom 3.3 Performance Feedback" is a mix of rants about how Adobe doesn't care, isn't doing software development right, should assign more resources, etc, instead notes about performance issues, the amount of time it takes me to scan through and look for the patterns and find the names of the people with specific issues that seem like good ones to contact to sort things out.

So now, the first 35 minutes of the hour I get are looking for the needles in the haystack. The next 15 are spent composing a few replies to try to help clarify the situation, soothe some ruffled feathers and get focus back on the specific issues, and only the last 10 are actually spent taking the info gleaned and using it to help hunt down the problems.

Moot, indeed. No small part of the reason these are hard to hunt is the signal to noise ratio issues. People are frustrated, I get that and I do want to help, but mixing venting, speculating, or arguing here is actively counter productive. Make a new thread, call it "Rant with Me" or "The Mosh Pit" or "Drowning our Sorrows" or "Ur Doin' it Wrong" or so I know to just skip it.

Oops. Time's up. Dang.

Thanks -- DT

Report · Mar 25, 2011

+ 1000

Full agreement and support from me!

Ok, who's opening a new thread and leaves this one for ranting and chatting?

DanTull wrote:
Now that we know he doesn't have time to work on the problems we've already reported, the distinction between chatter and "good leads on important bugs" is moot.
Ok, I have to respond here. In doing so, I'm contributing to the chatter problem, but this needs saying.
Hypothetically, let's say I get an hour here and there or maybe a half day once in a while. If a thread titled "Lightroom 3.3 Performance Feedback" is a mix of rants about how Adobe doesn't care, isn't doing software development right, should assign more resources, etc, instead notes about performance issues, the amount of time it takes me to scan through and look for the patterns and find the names of the people with specific issues that seem like good ones to contact to sort things out.
So now, the first 35 minutes of the hour I get are looking for the needles in the haystack. The next 15 are spent composing a few replies to try to help clarify the situation, soothe some ruffled feathers and get focus back on the specific issues, and only the last 10 are actually spent taking the info gleaned and using it to help hunt down the problems.
Moot, indeed. No small part of the reason these are hard to hunt is the signal to noise ratio issues. People are frustrated, I get that and I do want to help, but mixing venting, speculating, or arguing here is actively counter productive. Make a new thread, call it "Rant with Me" or "The Mosh Pit" or "Drowning our Sorrows" or "Ur Doin' it Wrong" or so I know to just skip it.
Oops. Time's up. Dang.
Thanks -- DT

Thomas

Report · Mar 25, 2011

Dan, you should have plenty of official bug reports to work with, irrespective of what does or does not come up on these forums. Most people "in the know," including me, have filed detailed reports using the form provided on the reports page. But the fact that you have to squeeze troubleshooting into your already full work schedule is precisely the problem I've been talking about. I'm not concerned that you, or your fellow engineers, don't care about quality control issues. Clearly you do. I'm concerned that the people who set your schedules are clueless and don't give you the time you need to do troubleshooting properly. Squeezing it in, as you describe, would be inefficient even without time spent sorting through "chatter" on the forums. It's all about priorities, over which you apparently have no more control than we hapless users do. We're really all in the same boat, personal differences and disputes aside. Of course you can't criticize your bosses in public. But that doesn't mean their stupidity goes unnoticed. Like ripples in a pond, you don't have to see the stone hit the water to determine approximately where and when it did so, and how large a stone it was. Certainly we all see the fruits of the work that has been done to make Lightroom a better program. But equally obvious are the problems that have not been resolved.

Report · Mar 25, 2011

thewhitedog wrote:
Dan, you should have plenty of official bug reports to work with, irrespective of what does or does not come up on these forums. Most people "in the know," including me, have filed detailed reports using the form provided on the reports page. But the fact that you have to squeeze troubleshooting into your already full work schedule is precisely the problem I've been talking about. I'm not concerned that you, or your fellow engineers, don't care about quality control issues. Clearly you do. I'm concerned that the people who set your schedules are clueless and don't give you the time you need to do troubleshooting properly. Squeezing it in, as you describe, would be inefficient even without time spent sorting through "chatter" on the forums. It's all about priorities, over which you apparently have no more control than we hapless users do. We're really all in the same boat, personal differences and disputes aside. Of course you can't criticize your bosses in public. But that doesn't mean their stupidity goes unnoticed. Like ripples in a pond, you don't have to see the stone hit the water to determine approximately where and when it did so, and how large a stone it was. Certainly we all see the fruits of the work that has been done to make Lightroom a better program. But equally obvious are the problems that have not been resolved.

If you look into the following thread (post 46)

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/803398?tstart=46

you can see that things are fixed, that the Adobe staff is concerned, that user complaints are respected, and so on. You need to understand that possibly your problems simply aren't that easy to resolve and that hunting them down is like searching for needles in a haystack. They can't analyze every individual environment, and if third party stuff is buggy, they may not have the influence to change anything about the issue. The above shows, that reproducible bugs get resolved. We have no inside into how the distribution of resources is directed by the management. But I am sure than they won't devote resources, where hours and days are necessary to find the causes of individual failures. If they would do so, the product, which we all like to use, would not be economic and the users, which do not have significant problems, won't see enough progress.

I am a manager of a software project myself, and yes, we have some issues, which have a LATER or WON'T FIX status, because we have a very demanding user group, which wants and needs new features. Releasing software means always to annoy a few and to please the many. The same thing is at work here as well. Not necessary to worry about the stupidity of management and mumble about the clueless managing people (you can be sure that they have more clues than us, understand the market better and have more inside into the product and what goes under the hood currently, than we all have).

Report · Mar 25, 2011

@ tgutgu: I started reading your thread but found nothing supporting your claims about Adobe's policy on bug reports within the first dozen or so posts. I don't have time to read the entire thread for whatever nuggets you suppose support your assertions as, apparently, neither do you, providing me with nothing specific to read in your defense. However, it does seem from what you say here that you are extrapolating from your own business experience about how Adobe runs their business, which frankly proves nothing whatsoever about Adobe. Dan has told us that he works on troubleshooting in free moments here and there but that he is tasked by Adobe with other work that prevents him from putting in any serious time on the effort. This speaks far more clearly of Adobe's priorities than your self-serving assumptions. Unlike you, Dan actually works at Adobe, on the Photoshop Lightroom project. No doubt he revealed more than he intended when he told us of how difficult it is for him to find time to work on Lightroom troubleshooting. He was trying to discourage this kind of bootless crosstalk "chatter" so that he could more easily find the meat of the issues being discussed here - if any. It's also clear from your remarks that you have not read the description I've posted here several times of the problem I'm having with Lightroom 3.4 RC. If you had, you would realize that the bug I reported showed up only in the this RC and is, thus, unlikely to be due to environmental causes; the environment in which I tested the RC is exactly the same environment in which I run Lightroom 3.3 without the bug.

It's unfortunate that, though you have posted extensively about your own issues with Lightroom, you show little sympathy for and even less understanding of other people's problems. Heretofore I have spoken in generalities in order to avoid precisely this kind of personalized dispute, but since you continue to attack me with lamea$$ arguments, I find I've run out of patience with your witless accusations. No doubt I'll catch heck for calling you out, but frankly I think you've been asking for it, so here it is. When and if you have something pertinent to say, I'll be glad to read it. Absent that, you're wasting my time and everyone else's with your defense of something you actually admitted you know nothing about.

My apologies to everyone else for this outburst. But Thomas has been relentless in repeating the same specious arguments after every post I make. I exercised as much restraint as I was able, but I've never suffered fools gladly and at this point in my life I have neither the time nor the energy to cater to his petty nonsense.

Report · Mar 25, 2011

My problem was that you have misused an open explanation of Dan for inappropriate conclusions, which happen to get disproven in the example, I have posted here. If you have discovered a bug in the 3.4 RC - fine - that is what RCs are made for and give to public testing. Just don't use it, if the bug bothers you too much. We may even agree on what Adobe's priorities are (the new version and fixing of reproducible bugs reported repeatedly by different users), but where we disagree about is, if the priorities are appropriate or not.

I have understanding for other people's problems, but not everything reported here can probably easily fixed. The problem I have with your recent posts is that you draw wrong conclusions from personal friendly remarks, that's it. If I would be a Lightroom team developer, I would be more careful now, to give insight into strategies to improve bug finding, if such post gets a response like yours.

Report · Mar 25, 2011

thewhitedog wrote:
Dan has told us that he works on troubleshooting in free moments here and there but that he is tasked by Adobe with other work that prevents him from putting in any serious time on the effort. This speaks far more clearly of Adobe's priorities than your self-serving assumptions. Unlike you, Dan actually works at Adobe, on the Photoshop Lightroom project. No doubt he revealed more than he intended when he told us of how difficult it is for him to find time to work on Lightroom troubleshooting. He was trying to discourage this kind of bootless crosstalk "chatter" so that he could more easily find the meat of the issues being discussed here - if any.

At the risk of increasing the "chatter", what Dan wrote (and may regret even getting into the fray) is what HE'S tasked at doing. He ONLY spoke about what HIS role is and what HE'S doing at the moment. Dan is not the only engineer at Adobe. And while the Lightroom engineering team isn't big, there are more than one engineer working on Lightroom. So to draw any conclusions about Adobe's priorities are based on what Dan has said he's doing is to blow things way out of proportion.

In fact there is a whole QE team that tracks bugs in the internal database. Melissa is one of those people (there are others) whole sole job it is to track bugs. How they are assigned and to whom is Adobe's business...but the odds are, every confirmed bug has been assigned to somebody for fixing. The fact that Dan doesn't get to spend as much time doing bug fixing (and laments the fact on the forums) is a testament to the passion and involvement Dan has. Rather than punish Dan for posting by concluding the Lightroom team is ignoring current bugs while "everybody" is focused on new features is doing Dan and the entire engineering and QE team a miss justice and will only serve to further separate users from engineers. Really, you don't want to be twisting Dan's words around. It will only make him even more reluctant to be as open as he has been.

And the sad thing is that NONE of this crap will do diddle squat to actually fix any bugs. So, again, while some people CLAIM to have posted bug reports (and we only have their words for that, the BEST way to help the Lightroom team fix bugs is to report them fully and in detail. What does and doesn't get fixed is out of the user's (and Dan's) hands.

Report · Mar 26, 2011

Hi,

Jeff Schewe wrote:
but the odds are, every confirmed bug has been assigned to somebody for fixing.

So I guess that many of us would like to know the exact definition of a confirmed bug. Is this necessarily a reproduced bug? When such a confirmed bug is added to the bug database, is the author of the bug report notified ? If not, shouldn't it be (this can be done automatically) ?

Report · Mar 25, 2011

Here are my observations regarding 3.4RC vs 3.3:

The Develop module seems to be snappier (previews compute more quickly and zooming in shows the final version with less delay. The latter is faster in the Develop module than it is in the Loupe mode of the Library module)
Scrolling the grid in the Library module is still stuttery (the scrollbar position is only loosely coupled to the grid display)

I might be wrong about the speed up in the Develop module but it seems like refresh strategies have changed a bit for the better. When I tried to compare this in detail I found out that I had forgotten to rename the folder of my 3.3 installation and of course it had been silently deleted by the 3.4RC install. Not sure why this has to be the case on Windows.

Unless someone asks me to, I won't install 3.3 again. At the moment it is difficult to make reliable statements about speed ups. I'm not entirely sure about the Develop module speed up. Other factors play a role here (I always test with no programs running in the background though) so my current impressions might be unrelated to 3.3 -> 3.4RC changes. If there is anything I should compare in particular, I'd be happy to reinstall 3.3 and compare.

The problem I have with scrolling the grid might be by design and may not appear to be such a problem on more powerful machines. It still puzzles me why grabbing the grid with the mouse cursor and moving it slightly up and down is smooth while moving with the scroll bar is practically always stuttery. I can also make the movement of the grid stuttery when I grab the grid with the mouse cursor and move it around a lot. The movement then stays stuttery even when I go back to small movements. I understand that larger moves (which must be anticipated by the scroll bar control) require computation of new content but it appears to me that better caching could considerably improve the experience of scrolling through the grid. It seems that the thumbnails themselves are displayed very quickly but the updating of extra information (even when the "view settings" are set to minimal) gets in the way of a smooth scrolling experience. I find it much harder to follow images that move in a jerky motion compared to smoothly moved images. Picasa's grid scrolling isn't perfect either but much smoother than LRs.

System Information:

Lightroom version: 3.4 RC [733717]
Operating system: Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (Build 2600)
Version: 5.1 [2600]
Application architecture: x86
System architecture: x86
Physical processor count: 2
Processor speed: 2.3 GHz
Built-in memory: 1999.8 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 716.8 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 243.2 MB (33.9%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 253.8 MB
Memory cache size: 0.0 MB
System DPI setting: 110 DPI
Displays: 1) 1440x900

tgutgu wrote:
...

Given the Adobe loyal you are, I'm surprised how you continually ignore the request to not add off-topic content to this thread.

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