Suddenly, spinning beachball in everything I do

[joesao]

Hi everyone,

I've been a Lightroom Classic user for many, many years.

Never had this issue on this machine (Mac M1 Max, 64 GB RAM). LRC was always buttery smooth.

Recently however I made a few changes:

- I got a Synology NAS for my photos (almost 17 TB) connected via ethernet (1 Gbps)

- I merged two catalogs I had (previously I'd load them individually to work on the photos)

- I created 1:1 previews for a huge percentage of my catalog (the previews folder alone is ~4 TB in size)

I don't know which one of these changes is the culprit, but suddenly I can't do ANYTHING in LRC without getting the endless beachball of death.

Touch a slider? Beachball. Zoom into a photo? Beachball. Even "I" (info overlay) has a huge lag. In short, it's completely unusable.

Obviously I've rebooted and shut down every other app and only have LRC loaded, and still, same problem.

Please help... thank you.

[joesao]

Sorry, I forgot to add some details that might matter:

- I'm running LRC v. 13.5

- OS is Sonoma 14.6.1

- My merged catalog has over 178k photos, all RAWs, and each file is between 100-200 Mb

[joesao]

Ugh, one more detail I forgot:

- The LRC catalog and ALL previews are kept on the Mac (I have an 8 TB SSD drive). This in theory should keep the interface snappy while the RAWs are on the NAS. The other weird thing is that even if I re-create 1:1 previews for, say, 100 photos I'm currently working on, they still lag ("Loading...") when I try to zoom in. This never happened before and defeats the whole purpose of creating 1:1 previews. Said differently, it's acting as if the 1:1 previews don't exist.

[Ian Lyons]

You don't appear to have mentioned which module you're having problems in. Since the 1:1 previews are only used by the Library module, then their size won't benefit the Develop module. The Camera Raw cache files used by the Develop module are only used temporarily whilst LrC loads the original raw files into memory..

> I got a Synology NAS for my photos (almost 17 TB) connected via ethernet (1 Gbps)

Other Mac users have reported a similar experience to you. Unfortunately, it's not yet clear if the issue is Synology Drive, macOS or LrC. 

You could try temporarily putting a batch of 50-100 raw files on your internal SSD, then check whether you still experience the delay in loading the filles.

[joesao]

Hi Ian,

Thanks for your reply. 

The endless beachballs were happening in every module, but today the beachballs are gone.

However, in Library module, even after I ask the computer to re-create 1:1 previews (and it finishes the task very quickly because they were already done previously), zooming in 100% still shows "Loading..." as if 1:1 previews didn't exist. 

Note that the 1:1 previews are locally on the SSD, so I don't know why they're lagging so much.

Thanks for teaching me that the 1:1 previews are not used in Develop module.

I'm going to skip moving files back to my SSD per your last suggestion because I know that works -- that's how I previously worked, but it's very cumbersome and that's the point of getting a NAS, so I don't have to shuffle files back and forth.

I saw a bunch of reviews by photographers using Synology NAS on ethernet with LRC and nobody seemed to note endless beachballs.

But as I said, today somehow the beachballs are gone from the user interface, so I'm truly puzzled. The only thing that remains right now is the weird "Loading..." in Library module on 1:1 previews that should render instantly since they've already been created.

[Jao vdL]

The beach balls might have had more to do with the OS in the background being busy indexing everything. Mac OS does this after system updates or hard crashes. It will reindex the entire hard disk and slow everything else down. This can take hours. 

Regarding the interface delays upon browsing which indeed should not happen if you have right sized previews. 1:1's are not necessary in general but your standard previews need to be big enough, so check that you have slected auto for preview size in catalog settings and that the auto selection is big enough for your display resolution. 1:1 previews are extremely rarely used. They really only get used when zooming 1:1 in Library. Standard preview size is much more important for interface responsivity. Some other things to try are to check your catalog integrity by restarting Lightroom classic while holding the option key. Select your catalog and do the integrity check. 

Lastly, since you are using a Synology NAS (I use one too and it works fantastically!), make sure it is mounted using smb and NOT through AFS. Best thing is to disable Apple file sharing in the synology setup interface and only allow smb. Apple has deprecated Apple File Sharing and the standard they recommend using is smb which is much better at getting you full performance on high speed interfaces. You want to directly mount the share in Finder. Don't go through any of the synology utilities as they don't give you full performance. 

[Jao vdL]

If you have automatic xmp writes turned on, turn it off. If you are syncing anything to the cloud, pause it. See if this helps (it's a test). There appears to be a bug seeing some reports here that some people experience when both of these are on that makes lightroom incredibly slow and also has the effect of invalidating previews constantly. I would guess you can even experience this with just xmp writes turned on.

[joesao]

Thank you Jao, both were already turned off so that can't be it...

[Jao vdL]

Thanks for checking. That's clearly not it then indeed.