Memory Leaks (Or what appear to be)

[defaultg2wls6l1ad25]

Lightroom Classic v13.0.1 

Appears to suffer from huge memory leaks which after a few minutes use bog the my machine down so much that I have to wait seconds at a time for the mouse to respond! 

Below is the system info as reported by Lightroom Classic just after opening and then again a few minutes later after editing some average sized photographs. (Taken as RAW on a Canon EOS 5D MKIV)

You'll see the difference in memory usage. It's just a joke!! 

The only cure I've found is to close Lightroom, wait for my machine to clear itself up and then open it again. Hardly practical when you have 300 odd photos to edit and you're having to close the application every 3 or 4 pictures...

I chatted to some disinterested 'technical support' person who's only suggestion was to uninstall and re-install Lightroom. I didn't have time then, but have done this since and guess what - it made no difference whatsoever.

I have a pretty powerful machine, 20 cores, 32GB RAM, acres of disk space and the app and catalog live on SSD.

Has aonyone else come across this issue with the most recent versions of Lightroom Classic? It's only started happening in the last couple of releases....

One other thing I notice is that on the odd occasion when I use the AI Demoise feature, sometimes it flies through in a few seconds and does (usually) a pretty good job at cleaning up noise artifacts, but other times it can take several minutes to do the same thing...? Why??? If I look at the GPU usage when the Denoise feature is active, it's maxed out at 100% regardless of whether the image is cleaned up in seconds or minutes.

Any thoughts appreciated!

Lightroom Classic version: 13.0.1 [ 202310121438-d2af310c ]
License: Creative Cloud
Language setting: en
Operating system: Windows 11 - Business Edition
Version: 11.0.22631
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Logical processor count: 20
Processor speed: 3.6GHz
SqLite Version: 3.36.0
CPU Utilisation: 0.0%
Built-in memory: 32682.0 MB
Dedicated GPU memory used by Lightroom: 1455.5MB / 8151.5MB (17%)
Real memory available to Lightroom: 32682.0 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 1321.5 MB (4.0%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 3140.0 MB
GDI objects count: 850
USER objects count: 3274
Process handles count: 3467
Memory cache size: 8.9MB
Internal Camera Raw version: 16.0 [ 1677 ]
Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 5
Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2
Camera Raw virtual memory: 82MB / 16341MB (0%)
Camera Raw real memory: 223MB / 32682MB (0%)
System DPI setting: 144 DPI (high DPI mode)
Desktop composition enabled: Yes
Standard Preview Size: 1440 pixels
Displays: 1) 3840x2160
Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: Yes, External touch: No, External pen: No, Keyboard: No

Graphics Processor Info:
DirectX: Radeon RX 5500 XT (31.0.22023.1014)
Init State: GPU for Export supported by default
User Preference: Auto

-----------------------------------------

Lightroom Classic version: 13.0.1 [ 202310121438-d2af310c ]
License: Creative Cloud
Language setting: en
Operating system: Windows 11 - Business Edition
Version: 11.0.22631
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Logical processor count: 20
Processor speed: 3.6GHz
SqLite Version: 3.36.0
CPU Utilisation: 0.0%
Built-in memory: 32682.0 MB
Dedicated GPU memory used by Lightroom: 7598.3MB / 8151.5MB (93%)
Real memory available to Lightroom: 32682.0 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 13475.8 MB (41.2%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 17425.0 MB
GDI objects count: 1342
USER objects count: 4184
Process handles count: 5225
Memory cache size: 2017.4MB
Internal Camera Raw version: 16.0 [ 1677 ]
Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 5
Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2
Camera Raw virtual memory: 2078MB / 16341MB (12%)
Camera Raw real memory: 2344MB / 32682MB (7%)
System DPI setting: 144 DPI (high DPI mode)
Desktop composition enabled: Yes
Standard Preview Size: 1440 pixels
Displays: 1) 3840x2160
Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: Yes, External touch: No, External pen: No, Keyboard: No

Graphics Processor Info:
DirectX: Radeon RX 5500 XT (31.0.22023.1014)
Init State: GPU for Export supported by default
User Preference: Auto

[kglad]

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

<"moved from cc desktop bugs">

[defaultg2wls6l1ad25]

Thanks - I think - Where did you move my post to? I can't seem to find it....

[KR Seals]

It's in the Lightroom Classic fourm:  https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/memory-leaks-or-what-appear-to-be-in-li...

[Conrad_C]

There have been many reports of this, see the link below. Not sure if Adobe has figured out where the issue is. They may have trouble reproducing it consistently, because for example I haven‘t seen it on my 32GB M1 Pro, Lightroom Classic runs great practically all the time. Yet the reports, about excessive memory use leading to a slowdown, have been rolling in for months, so it doesn’t look like just a few isolated cases:

https://www.google.com/search?q=lightroom+classic+memory+usage+mac+site%3Acommunity.adobe.com

[defaultg2wls6l1ad25]

Thanks for your reply. As someone that has worked in IT all my life and been a developer for some of that time I find it incredulous that an organisation the size of Adobe is happy to charge a subscription fee for software that clearly has issues and does not invest any effort in fixing it. It may be tricky to replicate, but thats why there are test teams and why they should be speaking to customers experiencing the issue and replicating it for themselves. It really is not accetable to publish faulty software and not address any significant bugs identified in a timely manner. 

[Marcos5EEA]

Fully agree. Same issue here, been happening for at least 6 months.

What's more, some moderators in this forum end up closing the threads as time goes on without a solution, many times blaming the OP or other users who experience the same problems.

[defaultg2wls6l1ad25]

Yep. The issue doesn't appear to have been resolved with subsequent releases.

I ABSOLUTELY HATE paying a subscription for software that isn't properly tested, or has issues the remain unresolved in a timely manner.

Do Adobe care? Not one bit!

[defaultg2wls6l1ad25]

So we're now on Lightroom Classic 13.5 and despite me spending £500 to replace the graphics card in my system with something vastly more capable (which has delivered good results) the "memory leak" issue still remains. You can be working on an image and suddenly memory usage on the machine will jump from 4GB to 19GB. When this happens my machine becomes sluggish and Lightroom itself crawls along painfully slowly until you are forced to close it and start it up again. My suspicion, like many others have noted, is that the masking tools are consuming vast amounts of memory and never releasing it.  

Adobe you are an utter joke - On what planet do you think it's acceptable to release such poor quality software, charge a subscription for it and never address the feedback from your customers? GET IT FIXED!!! 

[GoldingD]

Your System Information did not include the Library Path. This can be important IF it includes OneDrive in it.

I trust that yours does not?

[defaultg2wls6l1ad25]

Hi - Thanks for your response.

I do not even have Onedrive installed on my PC and I don't use the Adobe cloud storage either. Everything is local. The Library is on SSD. 

[RandyBoback]

I've been experiencing the same slowdown issues for almost a year now.  I seem to see the issue linked to the program running through the catalog and disk drive when there are a large number of images.  (I have about 190K pics on a 16TB drive as well as backed up to two synology SANs.)  Any time I do a searchin the catalog by metadata,even on a limitted set of images based on my base folder selection and file names or types, the result is stutter and die, return to life and then crawl until it is rebooted.  Beginning to think that the catalog is simply holding too much data in various nodes and there needs to be a search data path that does not need to flter out the histories of work done just to get the name and flags sorted out

[defaultg2wls6l1ad25]

Hi. You're describing a different issue to the one I'm experiencing. I only have 23k pics in my library (compared to your 190k) and haven't seen any significant issues with searching etc. My issue down to excessive memory usage while editing images in the Develop Module. Lightroom hogs whatever the machine has available and doesn't release it causing the machine to slow down and LR itself to become almost unusable. Closing it and opening it again clears the issue until it happens again which could be the very next image I edit. It's SHOCKINGLY bad!!!

[ryanc9115767]

I've been having the exact same issue. Primarily with denoise AI since it released. First few images will fly through the processing, but it progressively gets slower until eventually I quit the program, or it crashes. I then have to wait a few minutes for the memory to clear out. 

My CPU is getting on (AMD 1700x), but the GPU is a 3070 and I have plenty of ram! 

I've been meaning to try out "Lightroom" (cloud) to see if it suffers from the same issue...but don't want that to be the thing that pushes me into the cloud based workflow. 

It's hugely frustrating and I really notice how much time is being wasted on bigger jobs 🫨

[DdeGannes]

@ryanc9115767 , you indicate the Dnoise responds with the first few images, please indicate how many images you select to process at a time?

[ryanc9115767]

I do one image at a time (not batch processing). Lightroom starts stalling and freezing up after I've processed around 10-15 images. 

[GoldingD]

I do one image at a time (not batch processing). Lightroom starts stalling and freezing up after I've processed around 10-15 images. 

By @ryanc9115767

So a question (for Adobe??) would be what resource is being used by Dnoise AI, or more specifically Enhance, that is not being released upon accomplishing the Dnoise AI. RAM? VRAM? Camera RAW CACHE? Temporary Files? some other CACHE?

And is the problem within the LrC, or in the Hardware, or some setting in the OS?

Now per:

• https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/enhance-details.html

"Enhance heavily uses the available GPU and can use an external GPU (eGPU) if available. "

and

"Denoise is a GPU intensive feature. Therefore, a faster GPU is recommended to Enhance images quickly."

Hence typically members inquire about another members GPU and GPU driver when having such issues.

[Russell22478622rry6]

Your spot on with your assessment and timeline. This memory problem with LR has plagued me also, so much so I've downloaded a competitors software and will move over it it isn't resolved. Its not our problem to solve. This belongs squarely with Adobe.

[defaultg2wls6l1ad25]

I'm so close to doing that, but I shouldn't have to for a paid subscription application. It should just be fixed by Adobe but they just don't care in the slightest. From what I can work out the issue isn't affecting everyone that uses Lightroom Classic so they couldn't care less. I'm not sure what is causing the problem other than poorly written software. Maybe if you have a machine with enough grunt to combat it you don't see the problem so much. I think my machine is rather powerful and very highly specified and it has no problem chewing through 4k video editing or anything else I ask of it. Just Lightroom. Even Photoshop works fine apart from the odd bug in it. The longer this goes on the more I hate Adobe with a passion!

[Jao vdL]

If I read the system report correctly you are running a very old driver version for this card (23.1014). The newest driver is from July this year and has version 24.7.1. I would try updating the driver first. Also from the info I can find this is a fairly old card with only 4GB of memory. Windows doesn't automatically update this driver. From what I read there is also a setting you're supposed to do to make this run well but I have no experience with these cards.

[defaultg2wls6l1ad25]

If I read the system report correctly you are running a very old driver version for this card (23.1014). The newest driver is from July this year and has version 24.7.1. I would try updating the driver first. Also from the info I can find this is a fairly old card with only 4GB of memory. Windows doesn't automatically update this driver. From what I read there is also a setting you're supposed to do to make this run well but I have no experience with these cards.

By @Jao vdL

Hi. Thanks for your response. Since my original post late Nov 23, I've invested £500 in a new Gigabyte/NVIDIA 4070 GPU with 12GB RAM installed as I had a suspicion this might be part of my problem. It's made a massive difference to the execution time for Denoise and in exporting images. It has not however made any difference whatsoever to the 'memory leak' problems. I still have to close LR every 3 or 4 images and restart it otherwise performance is so bad I cannot sensibly process my pictures. It's driving me nuts! I've also noticed more recently that I get a lot of 'Unknown Error' messages popping up when processing. During export operations I get one or more 'Image could not be exported' messages. Lightroom is a truly lousy product at the moment. Here's my latest system info:  

Lightroom Classic version: 13.5.1 [ 202408271704-d15d09cd ]

License: Creative Cloud

Language setting: en

Operating system: Windows 11 - Business Edition

Version: 11.0.22631

Application architecture: x64

System architecture: x64

Logical processor count: 20

Processor speed: 3.6GHz

SqLite Version: 3.36.0

CPU Utilisation: 0.0%

Power Source: Plugged In

Built-in memory: 32682.0 MB

Dedicated GPU memory used by Lightroom: 2710.6MB / 12012.0MB (22%)

Real memory available to Lightroom: 32682.0 MB

Real memory used by Lightroom: 1970.1 MB (6.0%)

Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 5372.6 MB

GDI objects count: 830

USER objects count: 3049

Process handles count: 2465

Memory cache size: 14.8MB

Internal Camera Raw version: 16.5 [ 1954 ]

Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 5

Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2

Camera Raw virtual memory: 577MB / 16341MB (3%)

Camera Raw real memory: 708MB / 32682MB (2%)

U-main: 116.0MB

System DPI setting: 144 DPI (high DPI mode)

Desktop composition enabled: Yes

Standard Preview Size: 1440 pixels

Displays: 1) 3840x2160

Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: Yes, External touch: No, External pen: No, Keyboard: No

Graphics Processor Info: 

DirectX: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 (32.0.15.6081)

Init State: GPU for Export supported by default

User Preference: Auto

Enable HDR in Library: OFF

Application folder: 

Library Path: 

Settings Folder: 

Installed Plugins: 

1) AdobeStock

2) Flickr

3) Nikon Tether Plugin

Config.lua flags: 

Adapter #1: Vendor : 10de

Device : 2709

Subsystem : 40ee1458

Revision : a1

Video Memory : 12012

Adapter #2: Vendor : 1414

Device : 8c

Subsystem : 0

Revision : 0

Video Memory : 0

AudioDeviceIOBlockSize: 1024

AudioDeviceName: $$$/dvaaudiodevice/SystemDefaultAndEffectiveDeviceName=System Default - Speakers (Realtek(R) Audio)#{comment}DVAAU-4201250: Open the audio hardware preferences page.

AudioDeviceNumberOfChannels: 2

AudioDeviceSampleRate: 48000

Build: LR5x120

Direct2DEnabled: false

[Jao vdL]

Wow. Yeah that would drive me insane too! I see no major red flags in this report. Your driver is up to date (check that you're using the studio version and not the game ready version though). There is one minor red flag that will lead to some slow down but should be nothing as crazy what you describe. That really sounds like a much deeper issue. It says this in your report:

Standard Preview Size: 1440 pixels

Displays: 1) 3840x2160

That is a sign that your standard preview size is set wrong and will lead to lightroom having to rerender your previews constantly leading to many seconds lockups when browsing images so definitely something to fix but it will likely not fix the bigger problem. In catalog settings make sure your standard preview size is set to (Auto) which should select a preview size in the 3000 pixel range. Large enough to be displayed full screen on your main display. No clue why Lightroom allows you to set this too low anyway.

[defaultg2wls6l1ad25]

Hi. Thanks again for getting back to me. I've just checked the settings for the catalog as you suggest and it was indeed set to 1440 pixels instead of Auto. I've no idea how that ever got changed as I've never visited that dialogue page in the Catalog Settings before. I definitely have been noticing wait times ranging from half to several seconds when swapping between pictures during processing so hopefully this will help. Another question this raises in my mind, should I be using Smart Previews or 1:1 previews during Import and performance preferences? Thanks again. Your spot of that issue is greatly appreciated.

[Jao vdL]

Only use smart previews if you expect to need to edit your images with the originals offline, such as when they are on a NAS and you are editing away from the office. Otherwise they are a giant waste of time (they take long to generate) and disk space. Smart previews otherwise simply never get used. 1:1 previews are only used when zooming in 1:1 in Library. If you do that a lot (e.g. to check focus) they might be useful. Otherwise, if you only really zoom 1:1 in develop (develop does not use any of the previews), best not to bother and just make sure your standard previews are big enough for full screen display of the images in Library. An alternative to 1:1 previews is to import using embedded previews (it's a setting in the import panel). Classic will instead of generating its own previews, just use the jpegs embedded in every raw file and use those for the previews. This allows you to import and immediately have 1:1 previews so you can cull for sharpness right away. Note that these previews will get overwritten as soon as you make any develop changes but embedded previews is by far the fastest workflow if your workflow is import -> cull -> develop only culled subset. 

[defaultg2wls6l1ad25]

Brilliant - thank you for that really useful explanation. I'll change my settings and see how things go. I'm still not convinced it'll solve the memory problem - but anything that gets me moving faster than I am at present will be a huge bonus.