Lightroom RAM usage climbs suddenly to over 15GB causing PC to lag and freeze

[steveisa054]

(UPDATE: Please also read my comment below as a reply. I have identified when this extensive memory consumption occurs).

The problem has started to occur, or at least be noticeable, in the last few days. When working in the Development module on an image, Lightroom's use of motherboard memory surges to over 15 GB. I have 32 GB on my Windows 10 stationary PC. But this grab of over 15 GB causes the PC to not respond anymore. I have to wait until I get control of my mouse again and then shut down Lightroom and restart it.

This must be a bug. Today, just now, this happened when working on an image from a Nikon D810 with a dng file size of around 45 megabytes. I ran the Lightroom denoise, and was editing a few masks (subject and background selections with a few adds and subtracts using a brush mask) when the PC stopped responding. Looking in Task Manager, I saw that Lightroom's memory usage was over 15 GB. After restart of Lightroom and continuing to edit, I see that Lightroom memory consumption is currently only 3 GB.

Background information: My Lightroom Classic is updated to the newest version now, but this problem also occurred before I performed the last Lightroom Classic update. I installed a new graphic card a few days ago, going from a GTX 1660 Super to an RTX 3060. Graphic card driver is fully updated with the Studio driver version from Nvidia. This freezing of the PC caused by high Lightroom memory consumption seems to have started after putting in the new graphic card, but I do not see why that should be. Lightroom performance tab is telling me my system is capable of full GPU utilization (it was listed as limited only with the GTX 1660). I have the setting here on "auto".

This must be a bug. It is happening consistently and often, and I have to shut down Lightroom very often to clear out the memory usage. Today's episode shows clearly something is wrong, because it happened while working on the very first photo, it happened quite suddenly (while working with a few masks), and the memory usage is now down again after a Lightroom restart.

App version: Lightroom Classic version 13.0.2, Camera Raw version 16.0

OS version: Windows 10, fully updated, stationary PC with 32 GB RAM and a 12GB graphic card (RTX 3060)

To reproduce: I just work in the Develop module for a while. I am not sure if this is happening only or because of working with masks.

Expected result and actual result: Using over 8 or 9 GB RAM becomes too much for my PC and certainly for many others. Using 15 GB or more RAM creates a show-stopper situation. There should be no need to take a hold of so much RAM. Expected result therefore is better memory management in Lightroom Classic.

[DdeGannes]

Please advise the following information, 

The full capacity of your C: drive

Free capacity of your C:

[steveisa054]

Hi! My C: drive is a 1TB SSD internal drive. Currently 474 GB is used, the rest is free. That means, it is about 50% utilized with plenty of space.

[DdeGannes]

Ok, make sure you GPU driver is up to date with the latest Studio Driver, download from the manufacture's website.

[steveisa054]

It is. It always has been, first thing I did when I put in the new graphic card was update the driver with the latest "Studio" driver.

[steveisa054]

I have now identified when the exploding memory usage problem occurs. It just happened to me now once again. While editing an image, my PC froze. When I finally got some control over it again, and opened Task Manager, I could see that Lightroom was taking up over 14 GB of memory. This happened, when I did the following:

1) I added an inverted radial gradient map to darken the background towards the outer regions of my image.

2) I then subtracted the subject from the radial gradient map.

3) The subject selection was not perfect. It did not select one arm of my subject, and it also selected something from the background. To fix this in my combined radial gradient minus subject mask, I Added a brush, and brushed in the part of the background which should have been selected by the combined mask (meaning, it should not have been selected by the subtracted subject mask). I then Subtracted a brush, to include the arm of the subject which had not been selected by the subtracted subject mask. As soon as I brushed in this arm, bingo! My PC froze.

This experience is consistent with my experiences on the previous times that Lightroom grabbed too much memory and froze my PC. It seems that adding and subtracting to masks using the Brush mask is killing memory performance by using up too much memory.

Adobe, PLEASE help with this!

UPDATE: On restarting Lightroom, and continuing to edit the image I had been working on, I could see that my combined mask (inverted radial gradient, subtracted subject, added brush, subtracted brush) was there, all intact. And the total memory usage of Lightroom according to Task Manager was around 3 GB. So, the presence of the complicated mask is not what is hogging memory. The memory is being devoured during the operations of adding the various components of this combined mask (e.g. adding a brush, subtracting a brush).

[DdeGannes]

Just a thought to assist other users check to see if they can observe what you are experiencing, please indicate if you have, "Automatically write metadata into XMP" selected in your Catalog settings?

[steveisa054]

Hi! Here is what I currently have. I never messed with this, actually. But to answer your question, I do not have this setting selected.

[DdeGannes]

Ok, I have seen users indicating they experience delays when that option is selected.

[steveisa054]

I have just had another episode of the sudden cliimb of motherboard memory usage from 9 GB to over 15 GB, causing freeze and lag. I was this time not editing masks at all. I did have the mask window active, as I had just added a single subject mask. With this mask window active, I started to hover over a few of my presets to decide on what I wanted to use for this image. It was here that the memory usage exploded. See image.

[GoldingD]

In LrC

/preferences/performance/

What do you have set for Camera RAW CACHE/

[steveisa054]

It is set to 40 GB but what it is set to should be irrelevant to the issue I am facing. Just to point out, what I am dealing with is a sudden surge of motherboard RAM usage to up over 15 GB while editing one image in the Developer module (and it seems this happens while adding or subtracting the "Brush" masks from other masks). This places my PC in a non-responsive state, as everything that is running on the machine needs to be constantly paging due to lack of RAM.

[GoldingD]

I asked because some members have that at the default 5GB, and when it is that small, it matters. 

[steveisa054]

You could be right, that could hurt performance, but I think I am facing another problem here. Thanks!

[David24583147fm9k]

I have been having the same problem and it is infuriating. Sometimes rebooting my laptop helps.

Typically I can work for an hour or two, then BLAM. Nothing. I have to shut down everything and reboot. Unfortunately, this didn't help the last time it happened so now I'm twiddling my thumbs.

I am running Build [202312111226-41a494e8]

[David24583147fm9k]

I should also add that when Lightroom becomes unusable, if I'm trying to update a mask with the brush, when the system finally catches up, I will see brush strokes criss-crossing the image where I moved the mouse WITHOUT pressing any of the mouse buttons. 

[steveisa054]

Sounds like you have similar to what I am seeing. The criss-crossing you see is most likely your machine catching up with mouse move commands that were made and buffered while your system was in a frozen state waiting for memory to free up. I have found no solution to this yet, but since thousands of users are not complaining about the same situation, I assume my problem is due to a needed BIOS upgrade, or perhaps just an upgrade of my older motherboard/chipset/CPU to something more compatible with the technology of my newer graphic card.

[steveisa054]

I have nothing so much new to report on this, no solution has been found. Reducing the size of my catalog drastically has not helped this particular situation, the memory surges still occur. Usually they occur while I am somehow doing something with the advanced masking. Last night I reached a new record in Lightroom memory usage: over 18 GB was noted in Task Manager.

Currently I have all the parts for a new PC (except for the DDR5 ram which is back ordered and will take a while) lying around on the floor like an Ikea furniture waiting to be assembled. Hopefully this problem with memory surges will go away when I migrate to the new motherboard/chipset/CPU. If not I will need to get in touch with Adobe support, as this should not be happening with an updated PC.

Because of the way Topaz apps are failing sometimes when Lightroom is opened (even when Lightroom memory usage is down to around 6-8 GB), I am thinking that ram (GPU or CPU or both) is not being released correctly in my older Windows 10 PC. Or maybe LR has some background tasks that are occasionally starting up and using GPU memory suddenly, causing Topaz to fail while Topaz is trying to use the GPU ram. I don't know. I am just going to wait and see with the new PC once it gets built and operating.

[David24583147fm9k]

I'm running Windows 11 and my system is current on all updates. To me, this seems like a memory leak problem, or something similar, in Lightroom. I can open Lightroom and watch the memory usage climb in Task Manager even while I do nothing in Lightroom.

[D Fosse]

Post the GPU and Memory usage curves from Task Manager, these two:

[steveisa054]

I am still waiting to get my new PC built (currently the DDR5 ram is hard to get and is on back order) to see if this problem with Lightroom memory use surges goes away. But I am really curious how Adobe is managing even to handle the new AI based masking. Prior to this, all of the various settings, both global and non global, could be described by a small number of integers, and reconstructing the current edit state of a photo from these would not be very time consuming. Even something like a radial gradient mask could be described by relatively few numbers (center, angle, length, width, feather plus all the various slider settings). But how is Lightroom managing to handle the new masks which require more information on a pixel level? Brushes, subject, background, sky, etc? Lightroom obviously is not recalculating these each time one returns to view or edit an image containing these masks. So all this information, on a pixel level I imagine, must be stored somewhere, in the dng file or a sidecar file, and I can only imagine that this is a lot of data to need to carry around. I am still guessing that my memory surges are due to an inability of my older PC to correctly reallocate memory after Lightroom has used it.

Just an interesting observation. I occasionally use Topaz Studio 2, which is an older program in the Topaz series and no longer maintained. Studio 2 uses the GPU. Very often, when I have Lightroom opened, even if Lightroom is only laying claim to around 7 GB ram according to task manager, Studio 2 is either extremely slow, or is slow and freezes and then crashes. When this happens, if I close down Lightroom and open Studio 2 again, Studio 2 renders extremely quickly, both for the actual image as well as all of the "looks" previews. During the time I am working with Studio 2 and have Lightroom still open (it is cumbersome to have to close down Lightroom each time), Lightroom is idle, I am not requesting Lightroom to be doing anything at all. Yet, Lightroom is definitely interfering with Studio 2's ability to make use of my GPU.

[David24583147fm9k]

Perhaps I should note that I am editing JPG images, not RAW.

[David24583147fm9k]

Here is what happens when I "Develop" two pictures in Lightroom:

For each picture I did nothing more than open the picture in Develop mode. The first picture is 5.16 MB in size, is 4608x2592 px, and has one mask. The second picture is 3.58 MB in size, is 4608x2592 px, and has two masks.

[D Fosse]

I think this illustrates the problem with integrated graphics: it uses shared system memory, it doesn't have its own dedicated memory.

I don't think there's anything particularly abnormal about these memory usage curves by themselves. I see something similar (although I normally work with much bigger files). The problem is that they seem to conflict - each takes more than its share without leaving enough for the other.

Normally, the OS and GPU driver should handle and allocate this. But laptops are usually so heavily modified that native OS and driver behaviors are to a large extent overridden by vendor customizations. Unfortunately, these customizations are rarely done with high performance professional applications in mind.

The best thing I can suggest at this point is to update the Intel driver. And with all that said, it should also be clear that an integrated Intel GPU is really not up to the performance level required by Lightroom Classic.  You should really have a Nvidia RTX-series or similar.

[CDPHOTO82]

Experiencing similar slowdowns in lightroom but with Ram capping off around 11GB on a very high specced laptop despite so much system resources available. 

Laptop is HP Zbook 17 G6 i9-9885H Dreamcolor 4K, 64GBDDR4 RAM, Quadro RTX 16GB, 1TB + 2TB  nvme drives running Windows 11 

Laptop was factory restored and everything freshly installed and optimised 3 months ago.