Lightroom Incredibly Slow on Mac

[Emma_kins]

Hey All! For the last 6+ months, my Lightroom Classic has been performing incredibly slowly and only gets slower as time goes on. I cannot perform any actions while editing that aren't severely delayed. I could barely change the white balance and it takes 15 seconds at least to actually make the change. This is severely impacting my abilty to work efficiently and I have no idea what to do. 

I cannot tell if it's Lightroom, my computer (everything else on my computer performs at normal speeds), the harddrive I'm working off of. I cannot figure it out.

To Note:

• I am on the latest version of Lightroom Classic - 11.4.1
• I have a 15 inch MacBook Pro 2016
• Software is version 12.4 Monterey
• It seems I have plenty of storage on here
• Working off of a WD My Passport for Mac with plenty of storage

Any ideas what could be going on here? SOS!

[JohanElzenga]

Free storage won't be the main issue, RAM might be. An incompatible GPU might be another bottleneck. Your computer is not the newest. How much RAM does it have and does Lightroom Classic show in Preferences - Performance that it's using the GPU? And where is your catalog located? Also on that external disk?

[miam30009599]

Have you tried turning off Lightroom Classic and backing it up on turnoff?  I have experienced what you describe and backing up the sidecars of LRC seemed to help quite a bit.