lightroom very slow and sluggish :-(

Adobe and dj_paige will never admitt Lr is broken item that will never work good again, regardless of computer you have. In fact the more old hardwarew you have the greatest chances you have it will work smooth. 1st you need to disable all GPU acceleration, for brushes to work usabel. But than panning and zooming will be jerky. 2nd you might diable all but two processor cores (in affinity), to gain smoothenss of operation. But than you will loose prevew and export rendering speed.

They repeat the suggested optiomisation for years, like a broken record. Those optimisation were relevant in 2014 era. I allowed 99GB cache on dedicated separate SSD, for instance. Had 32GB ram 4 years ago... top GPU awailable at the time. Adobe will always say my PC is not good enough. It's never good enough, the easier to say to someone with middle model. 

I was going through a sluggish period too. I am writing to let people know what fixed mine. I was convinced LR Classic was bogging down, but was proven wrong. I work on a workstation laptop (Intel Core i7-7820@2.90Ghz, 16MB RAM, SSD C: drive with a 7200RPM D: data drive. Initial run through of pictures (rating, deleting bad pictures right after import) was never stellar and always frustrated me a bit. Then things got REALLY bad, for instance when I was cropping, the crop line would not keep up with the cursor. loading pictures really slowed down. This is what lead me to discussions like this.

Turns out there were two issues.

1) When I was on battery power, the laptop would slow down to conserve power. I found the setting for this and when I work on pictures, I set it to straight performance (killing by battery life, but photography is the priority).

2) My external power supply was bad. Because of this the computer could not tell how powerful the supply was, it was choking my processor speed to .78GHz! After I got a new supply it runs at 3.66 GHz! Needless to say this increased the programs speed significantly.  I didn't really notice with other programs because they don't need the power. To check your processor speed type Windows+x (windows 10), open Task Manger>Performance, It will show what your processor is running.

3) During this process, I decided to spring for a 2TB SSD data drive. All due respect to dj, this significantly sped up the loading of images, so it is especially helpful on import.

thank you. this was helpful.

I do have other questions on how to seamlessly work between the two laptops, but will have to continue this another time.  :-)

thanks for the quick response.. :-)

I shoot Medium Raw images, roughly 5760 pix x 3820 pix.

I am not complete certain of the monitor pix, but the specs online show "15.6" diagonal FHD IPS UWVA edge-to-edge glass (1920 x 1080) Touchscreen (for HD Camera)".

In LR, I don't do much brushing or spot healing - I do majority of touch ups in PS. In LR, I apply some basic presets - lens profile, shadows, highlights, verticals. etc.

Your comment about the processor being too slow for LR/PS is the first time anyone has mentioned that, which now makes sense. My older 17" HP (about 3 yrs old) has a 2.5 ghz (i7-47100HQ CPU @2.50 GHZ) 12 gig ram, 1TB drive and again, all photos kept on external drive. That machine has never had any issues when working in LR or PS.

So, onto a fourth machine? -- When I looked online for the best specs to run the Adobe Suite, no one I spoke to mentioned anything about processor speed... everything says Ram ... you gotta have RAM! ---

What is your opinion of "relatively fast CPU"? Stick to 2.5 ghz or more?

I really appreciate your feedback!!  :-)

I also have sluggish response in LR.  I followed the suggestions given so far and hope adjusting the power setting will help.

Since January, i have purchased three new laptops hoping one of them will be sufficient to run LR and PS. I am  currently on an HP, 8th gen i7-855OU CPU @ 1.80ghz 1.99 ghz 16 gig ram, 1tb dirve with nothing on it. all photos kept on a brand new 4TB external drive. when i am half-way through an editing project, (roughly 190 images , Medium slze Raw files) the screen with go black, only the white file info visible in the top left. this will happen if a zoom in on an image, or when i select the image after it comes back into LR from PS -  - same in PS - i will export 3-5 images into PS as Layers. Aligning is quick, but doing basic brush stokes on a mask takes forever.

a project that takes 1.5 hours on my older HP, (5th gen i7, 12 gig ram, 1 tb drive, all images on external drive) took me 3.5 hours yesterday. -

It's more than likely something to do with the power options settings. The system is probably set to balanced or Power saver. Set it to High performance.

djmattyz  wrote im not sure why lightroom gets so slow for me when im using it my computer is a proteus IV laptop, 32GB Ram, Nvidia 1060GTX 6gb, i have a 2TB hybrid drive (with the photos on it) and a 512 SSD C drive and 4.1 Ghz processor (when overclocked) the native GHZ is 3. something. i think its fast enough

Obviously not.

Please state the exact make and model of your CPU.

when im editing photos , after a certain while it begins to slow down and get unbearably slow, to the point where its taking like 5 or even 10 seconds to update when i apply a setting,   this begins to feel discouraging after a while and i start to get frustrated and my work suffers. currently im editing 300 photos that i took last night on 3 different jobs

Are you doing lots of brushing and/or lots of spot healing on each photo?