Equipment/Setup:
Lightroom Classic 14.0.1
Windows 11 Pro for Workstations 24H2
HP Z6 G4 Workstation
Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6226R Processors
384GB DDR4 Memory
NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000
2TB NVMe RAID (System Drive, Lightroom, Catalog, Previews)
16TB SATA SSD Array (Media Drive, RAW Files)
HP DreamColor Z31x Studio Cinema 4K Display
AFT Thunderbolt 3 Dock / SD Reader
OM System OM-1 Mark II (.ORF RAW Files)
Details:
My workflow for years has been to import photos directly into Lightroom from SD card(s) to the SATA SSD array and have standard previews generated during the processs. In previous versions of the Lightroom (13 and prior), the transfer process would take a minute or less and previews would complete over the next 20-30 minutes (for 500-1000 20MP RAW photos). This was still slow, as the preview generation process seemed to only use a single CPU core. While annoying, it wasn't a huge deal because I could still review and cull photos while this was running in the background. Lightroom would just be a bit slow and laggy. I recently updated to version 14, and it's borderline unusable. I imported photos from an SD card last night, and it took about 1-2 hours to import, and in excess of 4 hours to generate previews. During this process, Lightroom was almost totally locked up, with part of the Window turning white, and task manager occasionally showing it as "not responding".
Observations:
1. Actual transfer process from SD card to SSD still takes a minute or less, but lightroom still shows a progress bar, with photos slowly populating the library window, and not ejecting the card until a couple hours later.
2. Lightroom's memory usage increases to 35-37GB.
3. Lightroom's CPU usage is 1.5-2%
4. GPU usage is 0-1%.
4. The operating system and other applications are unaffected while this is happening.
5. Enabling/disabling graphics acceleration seems to have no effect.
6. Disabling "generate previews in parallel" seems to improve preview generation speed slightly.
Lightroom has never made use of anywhere near the amount of resources available to it. Now it's worse than ever. This is the experience I'd expect with a $200 laptop, not a high-end Adobe ISV certified workstation. I'm not sure if this is a bug or just poor software optimization. Other Adobe suite apps (Premiere, After Affects, etc) will happliy gobble up every CPU core and gigabyte of RAM if allowed. I've tried to include every detail I can. If there's any other helpful information I can provide, let me know. TIA.
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