Lightroom Classic CC seems slower than previous Lightroom version it replaced

[brente978]

Lightroom Classic CC seems slower than previous Lightroom version it replaced.  To test the performance of the new classic update, I imported some raw pictures taken with a Nikon D810/D850 and am noticing that moving from one image to another (all with 1:1 previews) in the Develop module takes 4 seconds before the image is displayed after pressing an arrow key to move (or using the mouse to select an image).  When you move to another image, the UI is repainted first (and, i assume, the histogram calculated, etc.), and then the image is displayed on the screen.  Moving between the Library and Develop modules also results in about a 4 second delay before the image is displayed.  Moving between pictures in the Library module is almost instantaneous. 

This level of performance is unacceptable.  Doing a copy/paste of settings from one image to another takes longer in the latest Lightroom than in the previous one as the time needed to display the image seems to slow everything down, thus slowing down the entire workflow process.

Another quick test was to press the right arrow key 10 times in succession in the Develop module to move between images.  It took Lightroom Classic CC 20 seconds before the UI finally caught up and displayed the desired image.  Doing the same in the Library module takes about 3 seconds.

Or, is this just the level of performance to be expected?  Was this not tested during the beta process, or just deemed satisfactory by Adobe? 

What's the best way to get feedback directly to Adobe on this?

[Jao vdL]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/James+Mayl  wrote

All these made incremental improvements - however the biggest change was to exclude the following from my Anti Virus utility:

• Lightroom Catalog
• Lightroom Cache Folder
• Lightroom Previews Folder
• RAW files

Thanks for reiterating that James. I noted this at the start of this thread and it bears constant repeating as I am fairly convinced it is the main cause for slow Lightroom. A lot of people report seeing massive changes if they exclude these exact locations from their AV software or disable AV.

[pixellatious]

I took your advice and excluded my Lightroom catalog and cache folders from my AV and LR became usable again, especially the local adjustments no longer cause the program to grind to a halt and blank the screen for often 10s. However, I don’t understand this at all, as I’ve never had to worry about this in the past for LR or any other program. Whas suddenly would AV software affect LR performance.

Coupek, of things import has always been pretty fast even on this version, but now my exports are fast too.

I still have one weird issue, why the performance when processing Canon 5D4 files is much slower than my other camera’s files even the 5DsR which has much larger files.

[davidn28273510]

The performance is truly unacceptable. It only runs decently after a fresh boot of the program but quickly bogs down after taking a few actions. It doesn't even seem to matter what those actions are. Simply sifting through images in the Library will bog it down after some time and things become unusable. Multiple seconds to switch between images in the Library (worse in Develop module), with the viewing area turning black for multiple seconds frequently as well.

I've had problems with the program since last year. I forgot exactly when, but it was definitely terrible by summer. I even upgraded to a Ryzen 1700 @ 3.8 GHZ (8 cores, 16 threads), 32GB DDR4 3000 Mhz RAM, and a Radeon RX Vega 64 GPU on an SSD and it barely helped other than exporting times.

The only thing that seemed to change from CC 2015 to Lightroom Classic is that adjusting the sliders no longer cause "choppiness." Before, when I would adjust shadows or exposure after the program began to bog down, the changes would not happen in real time and the app would lock up until the changes were reflected, causing a very choppy experience. Now, adjusting the sliders no longer cause the app to lock up, but they still take the same amount of time (or perhaps even more) to reflect on the image.

It's just a terrible user experience overall. I like Lightroom's interface and capabilities, but it's non-stop frustration to use. I've decided to to give Capture One a try and see if I can't adjust to it. Hopefully Adobe gets their act together and finds a way to get Lightroom to perform at least as well as all of the other competitors out there.

[Art M.]

IMPORTANT:  If you want to do fast culling, select the option for using "embedded" preview - that is, the preview embedded the RAW.

Now suppose that you do that.   There is another option - which I suspect is checked by default - where Lightroom creates new previews in the background while you are doing other work.   That hogs CPU.

This might account for:

a. apparent slowdown, as well as ....

b. why some people experience the slowdown and others do not.

[Colonel Blip]

System is Windows 10 Pro 64-bit, i7 6700k cpu, 32gb ram and SSD drive. Using 7.01 version of LR CC.

I have just imported my first photos with this version of LR. What a shock. I imported a 200 jpgs (~7megs each) and it took a half and hour to import!!

I then imported 8 XT2 raw files (30 meg each) and it took 15 minutes.

This is absolutely unacceptable - no way to use LR in this condition. Anyone hear of a pending solution?

[Just Shoot Me]

Are you connecting the camera directly to the computer or using a card reader?

If a card reader is it a USB3 type?

I just took 22 uncompressed RAW shots and had 8 on the card from Thursday, 48+ MBs, on my X-T2 and to import them into 2 different folders, by date, and build standard preview took all of 31.32 seconds. This was with a small IOGEAR SD/Micro SD USB3 card reader model # GFR304SD. This was on a 6+ year old i7 PC running Win 7 Pro and the image files were copied to a rotating HDD (I use a SSD for OS, program and catalog storage).

So if you are using a card reader get a better one.

If you are connecting the camera to the computer get a card reader.

[Colonel Blip]

Here is what I did which seems to have solved my problem. I did all three at the same time so I'm not sure which was the biggest contributor.

1. I paused syncing via dropbox where I keep my catalog file.
2. I deleted and recreated the preferences file
3. I used my recently purchased (to use on the road with the LT, not at home with the desktop) Startech card reader

Doing these 3 things resulted is 'fast' imports. Happy camper now.

Thanks.

[Colonel Blip]

As a followup, since deleting the preferences file things seem to be better all around. The machine in question is a new 8th gen i7 HP Spectre 360x 2 in 1. It has a built in card reader, USB-C and 3.1 ports, among others. I ran a time test with 88 XT2 raw files using the built in reader, a Startech USB card reader in the built in 3.0 port and a card reader built into a LETSCOM USB-c hub. All 3 imports were within seconds of one another at ~3.5 minutes. All of these were importing using copy as DNG. I do not know if the conversion is run in parallel, which might slow things down. I do know it takes another 5 minutes to convert all 88.

As far as speed of LR in my setup, it seems to be very responsive. As an aside, I purchased an active pen (wacom bamboo) and I may do most of the editing on my laptop before the last bit on the desktop, I like it so much.

[skyrunr]

I'm just not buying any of the preferences or Antivirus fixes as I just tried them. 

Here's something to test.  After a few minutes of working in a catalog go to the Develop view.  Arrow through 10-20 images.  Even after letting each image one at a time slowly, going back to arrow through them is delayed and image loads are abysmal.  I have Lightroom 2015 installed and went back and forth between them.  There is a night and day difference.  I've recreated this issue on my laptop and a clean Windows setup on a screaming system.  I've even compared RAW, JPG, and small JPG's and they all lag.

I'd be okay with going back to 2015, but it doesn't have all of the lens profiles I need.

[Colonel Blip]

I'm not suggesting my Koolaid is yours. All I am doing is reporting what seems to have contributed substantially to eliminating my issue.

For the fun of it I tried your test. I did not see what you reported, although "image loads are abysmal" is subjective. Maybe mine are abysmal also, but speed of loading certainly sufficient to avoid delay in my workflow.

No matter the cause, it is clear from all of the comments that Adobe has some work to do to speed up LR across the board. I, for one, would love it to be instantaneous!. Hope you get some relief on your issue.

[Colonel Blip]

As I mentioned earlier, trying the test you mentioned didn't seem to indicate slowdown of LR Classic for me, HOWEVER, I have experienced since writing my note what you (likely) and many others have - after 10-20 minutes of editing photos LR slows to a crawl. Totally unacceptable performance. Only relief is to S/D and restart.

[knackers_au01]

Update.....Abobe Tech Support in India contacted me and they have been able to reproduce the issues Ive been experiencing and its now back with Product Engineering who are trying to work out a fix .

Basically tech support 2 level got same model macbook pro and again reloaded the test catalogue I had prepared for them some time back and 100% confirmed they could reproduce the slowdown. Basically bad  brush lagging and huge cpu overload as reported by OSX activity monitor( cpu usage went as high as 350% of resources when brush tool chosen ). As I mentioned earlier this was then forwarded to Product Engineering and Tech Support got confirmtion aslo the Engineering could reproduce exactly same issues as both tech support and I had. Thats now 3 seperate people able to reproduce severe slowdowns on a  Macbook Pro 15" mid 2015 model with below specs. Given there must be 100's of thousands of these Macbook Pro's produced and many currently being used by lightroom customers says to me Adobe have a very serious problem with this lightroom upgrade.

Adobe tech support also mentioned they were aware of the multitude of posts in this respect and that these issues are not restricted to a few isolated instances . What I find incredible is if they are so aware of these issues why they didnt provide feedback to customers earlier instead of waiting this long!....Surely product engineering would have tested for these  slowdown issues on various Apple models before releasing. The fact that unlike the many Windows equipment configs that Adobe would need to test on they have relatively few  to test re Apple  machines thus its pretty evident that someone must have been asleep at the wheel  in the Adobe Engineering testing dept to let this update get out in the state it was released in!

[skyrunr]

Thank you for your efforts on this!  Is there a ticket or issue number we can call and help "motivate" them?  This is by no means an operating system specific issue, and we should make sure they are aware of this.

[matthieum37472479]

I'm moving to CaptureOne. Just tested yesterday. OMG it's so fast while in LR it takes 10 minutes to take the brush, to swith images, to.... do anything.

i9 7960X

SSD 1To

Nvidia GTX 1070 8Go

64Go RAM

Pro photographer.

Bye LR and Hello C1. I will see.

[markmicallef]

I was having a lot of trouble with Lightroom running very slow "Not Responding". After reading a post in this thread about excluding the Catalog and Raw files from the Antivirus, I remembered I had recently installed a new AV (Bit Defender Free) instead of using Windows Defender. I un-installed it and went back to the included AV in Windows. That solved the problem, Lightroom is running at a decent speed.

[scottr27314199]

Lightroom is slow so that I have to stop using it. It is painful and frustrating to try and do anything since the last update. What can you use an alternative to lightroom???

[astrosven]

still not usable for me. 350% CPU load, incredibly slow develop module. Letting LR stay open over night (was always possible before upgrading) lets LR become so slow that even menu scrolling is impossibly slow. Bad SW. Promoted as performance upgrade. Incredible. You can work at max 30 min before you have to restart to get a bad, but almost usable SW. It gets slower and slower. CPU load incredible. Switching on image text takes many many seconds, switching images in dev. module takes longer and longer.

Working in iMac late 2013, 3.2GHz, 24 Gig RAM, i5. GeForce GT 755M. No Antivirus SW.

The problems are now known since weeks. Where are the fixes, Adobe ???

[janmalycz]

Hi,

just one nice example of how really slow is my LR Classic CC on iMac 5k - i5, 16GB, 512BG NVMe SSD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHJlAMrlKks

On 5K display - scrolling 0-5FPS and on Cinema Display (nonRetina) - +25FPS.

My guess is that LR cannot handle super high resolutions screens.

And also there is no GPU load show in my iStats while scrolling or exporting in LR. So what exactly is GPU powered in LR, Adobe??!

Really tired of this! 

[alanterra]

Hi janmalycz

I haven't been entering this conversation because I thought it was mostly about response in the Development panel, which I'm currently not currently using. But I see you are scrolling in Grid view. All I can say is that I have a similar setup, a little more high-end on the computational hardware (iMac 5K with 4 GHz Core i7 & 32 GB of RAM & 2 GB of video RAM), but with a Fusion drive and catalog and photos on an external 4-disk RAID 5 (which might be slower than your setup). I have my main screen in high resolution (3200 x 1800 pixels), which tends to slow down Lightroom and have a 2° Cinema display. I have done nothing to optimize Lightroom (e.g., I am not maintaining full resolution previews).

My sense is that scrolling on my machine is 4-5x faster than on yours. I get a lot of "greeking" (pixelation) when I scroll, but upon stopping scrolling, the Grid images update in about 1 second. I know that this doesn't identify the source of the difference between our machines, but I think that you should be able to speed yours up, somehow.

[bob frost]

"And also there is no GPU load show in my iStats while scrolling or exporting in LR. So what exactly is GPU powered in LR, Adobe??!"

Only some sliders in Develop are using the GPU to speed up their showing on 4/5K monitors. Nothing else is supposed to be speeded up by the GPU. So no point in shouting at Adobe unless it makes you feel better! 

Bob frost

[Jlevineah]

I have a six core processor @ 3.5ghz, 64gb of ram, 4 raid 0 ssd's, and nvidia 1080. I have set aside 100gb of camera raw cache, done all the recommended steps to improve performance (generating previews, increasing cache size, optimizing uncatalogued, etc...) but still LR Classic Slows to a halt after 20min of work. Not sure what more I can do at this point to make LR more responsive.

Adobe, I thought LR Classic was supposed to be faster!

[Colonel Blip]

Maybe my performance has appeared to be good because all of my testing has been short term. Having just gotten back from a trip to Virginia I have a bunch of edits to do so I'll exceed the 20 minutes in working on these. A question - when you run into the slowdown, does shutting down LR and restarting give you another 20 minutes before it halts?

[Jlevineah]

When I restart lightroom the performance is great. However after 20min or so it slows to a halt.

[janmalycz]

I've just spent some time on chat with Adobe Support.

Adobe is aware of LR Classic performence problem on 5K displays. I really hope fix will arrive ASAP! This is real pain.

[astrosven]

Adobe LIED to us! Speed issues in Lightroom Classic CC - YouTube

It is not a 5K issue. Why does Adobe now release new features in CC instead of fixing performance issues ? Do they still listen ?? I have not seen any official response yet accepting that users have severe performance issues and promising that they will fix ist.