Lightroom 4.2 seems reasonably fast when I work with it, whether it's browsing photos or adjusting sliders, although it takes several seconds to go into develop mode after launching it for the first time.
But now I'm exporting 1498 photos that are 5184 by 3456 and it's taking quite a while, I would say about an hour or more. This is on a brand new system I just assembled consisting of an i7 3930k with 32 GB of RAM that flies with every other program. While exporting this batch I opened Task Manager and I noticed that CPU usage never goes to 100%, not even close. There are peaks of 50%, but on average it must be in the 20s:
This is very disappointing on a CPU that has 6 physical cores and 12 logical cores with hyperthreading at 3.2 with turbo at 3.8 Ghz. The batch is exporting these photos from one SATA 6 drive to another SATA 6 drive, and the HD LED barely lights up, so I know the hard drives are not the bottleneck. So I'm wondering, is Lightroom 4.2 really that bad when it comes to taking advantage of the CPU cores? Is there anything I can do to make it use the CPU more?
Thanks,
Sebastian
105
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Victoria Bampton wrote:
Some people are finding that turning off hyperthreading is helping, so I'd be interested to know if that makes a difference for you.
I would also split the export into 2 or 3 exports, which can run concurrently, which should max out your CPU. They don't max it out by default in order to let you carry on working while the export runs in the background.
I would prefer not to turn off hyperthreading, since part of the reason I spent $1300 in a system upgrade was to get that feature and it's not practical. Even if it worked, I would have to reboot every time I need to do a long export, go into the BIOS, turn off HT, do the export, reboot, turn it back on. Too much trouble.
As for running parallel exports, it doesn't really help much. I tried cutting this export roughly in half and export at the same time. Here you can see the result:
At times it went up to 60% or so, but the gain in time is negligible. I ran the two exports more or less at the same time, the second one several seconds later because I had to select the rest of the photos, open the export dialog, click OK and then wait for the "Prepare for export" progress dialog to finish, after which it started exporting. So that export took 31 mins. And this is because I went into the Asus software that comes with the motherboard and set it to do an automatic overclock, which took quite a while but it sped up the system considerably. Before doing that it was taking close to an hour.
After that, I shift deleted all the exported files, went into Lightroom, selected all the pictures in the folder and exported using exactly the same settings, jpeg, convert to sRGB, no resize and limit of 7000kb. So the gain from doing a parallel export is only 3 minutes. Evidently, Lightroom is not well designed to take advantage of all the hardware at its disposal, even if it is a superb photo processing program.
My LR4.2 Windows 7 64 bit i7-860 quad core processor system peaks at 100% on all eight threads running a single export with JPEG, convert to sRGB, and limit of 7000KB. The below screenshot is with Canon T3i CR2 files same 5,184 x 3,456 resolution as yours. It took 25 secs. to export five images. Your i7-3930k has more than 2x the performance of my CPU, so it should be less than 5.0 sec per file export.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
Try unchecking 'Limit File Size' and use the 'Quality' setting to control the file's size.
Message was edited by: trshaner Corrected camera model.
Another problem when comparing export timings is getting to an apples vs apples comparison. CPU power is but one factor, other factors include:
1. Size of input file, obviously....the bigger the file, the longer it's likely to take to export.
2. The size of the output file, specifically the pixel dimensions. Reducing the pixel size of the export file is initially likely to see a speedier export, but there comes a point whereby really small export file sizes start to take longer to export than full-size exports.
3. The export quality setting (assuming a Jpeg export), a reduced quality has some small beneficial effect at full-size, but that disappears as you reduce the output size.
4. Develop edits.....the number and type of develop edits can also significantly increase export time. Some have little effect (white balance, exposure, contrast, saturation), whereas others (vibrance, clarity etc.) require a bit more work.
5. The I/O sub-system....goes without saying a really fast sub-system is needed to keep all those CPU cores busy. On my system that's certainly my bottleneck, exports of standard unedited 21mp files from the 5dII take about 4 secs each. Never thought of that as being slow, though no doubt I could improve a little with SSDs.
Here's a graph of some export timings I did last year using LR3. Used 35 unedited files for most of the tests, but also ran one test on 35 edited files, the difference is apparent.
Whatever settings you were using, I personally would be very happy with a 2 seconds per image export time.....the vast majority of Lightroom users would be very, very envious.
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