Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 4.x

[BCormier]

Anyone else notice that lightroom 4 is slow? Ligtroom 3 always ran fast on my system but Lightroom 4 seemlingly lags quite a bit.

My system is:

2.10 ghz Intel Core i3 Sandy Bridge

8 GB Ram

640 GB Hard Drive

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

Message title was edited by: Brett N

[KKuja]

Lets hope the proper LR4.0 comes out soon, not the unofficial beta 2 that most people have paid for.

I'm a little bit frightened because if I recall correctly these were almost the same words that someone said about Lr3 (and even Lr2).

I'm sorry I don't have anything ontopic to say. I have to confess I haven't yet even tested Lr4, because long ago I made a decision I wait for at least .1 or .2 update before testing.

[hamish niven]

KKuja, you are pretty right to be concerned.

I'd consider downloading the LR4 on the 30 day and making a catalog with a new set of images. Its got superb processing.

A LARGE issue is that +50 on exposure -25 highlight and +12 shadow is not the same for 2 photos, - kinda irritating as its very hard to set limits on where you would or would not place sliders.

With LR3.x, I'd never go above

• exposure +1
• fill +25
• black +20

but with  LR4, its semi sort of relative, ie zoom to 100% to check.

However, pushing the shadows - sorta little like fill to 50 adds so little noise.... amazing

You may be lucky with your computer set up and have few issues like I also have.

Import all your new images as DNG, and have an import preset that

• sets the lens profile
• sets any vignetting you want on the lens
• sets the CA - Chromatic Aberration
• sets the noise & pre sharpening
• sets the tone curve (even if default NOW linear)
• generates 100% previews

This will help with the speed, even if importing a 16 Gb chip takes as long as boiling a kettle having laid the fire, started it, filled a 4 gallon kettle and waited for it to heat.

Give it a go, the trial is only ±1Gb for PC / mac and even if you dont like it , you'd have the images in the LR4 catalog for when  ( I hope not if) Adobe get LR4.2 working nicely.

I hear your reticence and sensible model to avoid X.0 and X.1 releases, will you upgrade straight to Photoshop CS6 though?

Good luck, but do give it a try and I hope you are one of the lucky ones.

hamish NIVEN Photography

Message was edited by: hamish niven missed out and R

[Lee_Jay]

hamish niven wrote:

Thanks Tony

so it went to the right place, to where bugs were posted and not to the user to user forums, where people were talking about it, where people where asking about it and where the Adobe feedback would have been really appreciated.

Oh well.

shame that it was not shared here.

You're welcome.

[hamish niven]

Thanks Lee Jay

appreciate you passing it on for everyone.

Good job done for all

Cheers

[Eaglerapids]

Well, Jeff Van de Walker's reply back on March 14, post 229 page 5 of this thread stated that Adobe was looking into the problem and  "that development may go dark on the forums while trying to research this problem". That was 10 days ago now, must be a pretty big problem.

[Guest]

I'm replying to say that I'm experiencing much of the same slowdown that everyone else is experiencing. I've noticed a few things:

1. If I pull up the Windows task manager to see my CPU usage, I can see that just moving the mouse over Lightroom causes my CPU to spike between 50% and 80%.  This could be causing a lot of the problems with the sliders, since I'm trying to use the mouse to adjust the sliders at the same time that Lightroom is trying to calculate the changes.

2. I use a mouse/keyboard sharing program called "Mouse Without Borders" from Microsoft labs. It lets me use a single keyboard/mouse for two computers. With this program running my CPU spike is higher than without it running.

3. Deleting my preferences file helped bring down the maximum CPU usage a bit.

4. Opening a new catalog rather than my converted Lightroom 1 --> 2 --> 3 --> 4 catalog helped bring down the maximum CPU usage a bit. I am still hoping to be able to use my existing Lightroom catalog.

5. I have an NVidia graphic card. I used the following NVidia control panel 3D settings, which helped bring down the maximum CPU usage a bit. These same settings made Lightroom 3 brushes work. Without these settings I could barely brush on any effect:

     Anisotropic filtering: OFF

     Antialiasing - Gamma correction: OFF

     Antialiasing - Mode: Override any application setting

     Antialiasing - Setting:  2x (2xMS)

     Antialiasing - Transparency: Off

     Buffer-flipping mode:     Use block transfer

     CUDA - GPUs: All

     Enable overlay: Off

     Exported pixel types: Color indexed overlays

     Maximum pre-rendered frames:  3

     Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration: Compatibility performance mode

     OpenGL Rendering GPU: Quadro FX 2700M

     Power management mode: Prefer maximum performance

     Threaded optimization: Auto

     Triple buffering: Off

     Texture filtering - Anisotropic filter optimize: Off

     Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample op: Off

     Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias: Allow

     Vertical sync: Force on

That said, I have returned some performance to my machine, but Lightroom is still highly unusable. Where I used to be able to process a few hundred photos in an hour, it now takes hours to process 30 or 40, just because the response in the program is so unbearably slow.

My machine

Lenovo W700DS, with the second laptop screen turned off.

6GB RAM

512GB SSD primary disk, Lightroom catalog, previews, and imported images on this disk.

1TB secondary disk, unused by Lightroom.

Intel Core2 Extreme processor (processor is a bit slower, which does affect my import/export times, but I render 1:1 previews on import and wait for the CPU to settle down before attempting to work)

1920x1080 primary display

Standard previews set to 2048.

Windows 7 64-bit Professional edition

I routinely work with full-resolution RAW images from my Canon 5D Mark II (very large).

I hope this information helps shed some light on the problems. Can anyone else confirm that their CPU spikes just moving the mouse across the application? Not even pressing buttons or trying to do anything. Just move.

Thanks,

Geoff

[kwdaves]

For those with slider problems, widening the right panel by clicking on its left edge and dragging it to the left may help a bit by lengthening the slider lines (whatever their proper names are).

For those who have sluggish behavior overall, for example taking 10+ secs to generate a preview in the Library module, deleting and then regenerating your standard previews may work wonders. Please, please. Someone be the guinea pig and try it.

[Guest]

I deleted all my previews. It didn't make a difference for me. I still have

problems with CPU when moving the sliders and moving my mouse.

Sent from my iPhone

[Guest]

I posted a video on Youtube demonstrating the problem with CPU usage with Lightroom. Almost 100% CPU utilization on a dual-core processor when moving the Temp slider.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUZR0W2bpQk

Geoff

[Scooby007]

I get between 15% and 30% (i7 3.4)

[Lee_Jay]

B r e t t wrote:

I get between 15% and 30% (i7 3.4)

So do I, but don't you want it to use 100%?  That's how it's going to be the fastest.  If there's a bug or limitation, it's that it's NOT using all the available processor power.

[joema3]

I just installed LR4 and am appalled at how slow the Library module is when sequentially stepping through photos. At 1:2 zoom, it takes 3.3 seconds to change and render the next photo. This is on a overclocked quad-proc, hyperthreaded i7-860 @ 3.8 Ghz with 8GB RAM, catalog on a 10k rpm SATA drive and photos on a RAID 0 array. 64-bit Windows 7. GPU = nVidia GeForce GTX-275, 896MB, driver = 8.17.12.9053 (290.53).

This is not a fringe, esoteric operation. You click once to magnify, then hit the right arrow key for next. In UI parlance it is a "common user path". How could Lightroom testers or program managers sign off on something like this?

LR3 was much faster. Is there any rational explation for this, or installation/config error which explains it?

I haven't had major problems with sliders in the Develop module, but LR4 in general feels sluggish and Library browsing is intolerably slow. I see the "Loading..." message so often it's essentially a logo.

[kwdaves]

joema3 wrote:

I just installed LR4 and am appalled at how slow the Library module is when sequentially stepping through photos. At 1:2 zoom, it takes 3.3 seconds to change and render the next photo. This is on a overclocked quad-proc, hyperthreaded i7-860 @ 3.8 Ghz with 8GB RAM, catalog on a 10k rpm SATA drive and photos on a RAID 0 array. 64-bit Windows 7. GPU = nVidia GeForce GTX-275, 896MB, driver = 8.17.12.9053 (290.53).

The problem you describe is exactly what I saw after the LR2-LR3 upgrade. I fixed it by deleting and then regenerating my previews.

Try this: delete the contents of your previews folder in the Lightroom folder, then in LR4 select "all photographs" and then click on Library/Previews/Render Standard-Sized Previews.

This is a separate issue from the sluggish slider behavior others have reported.

[bob frost]

From: "joema3

I just installed LR4 and am appalled at how slow the Library module is

when sequentially stepping through photos.

Have you created your previews? If you are allowing LR to create the

previews as you step through the library, it will be slow. But if you

created your standard previews on import, or just did it by selecting build

previews from the library menu, it should be much faster.

Bob Frost

[joema3]

bob frost wrote:

Have you created your previews? If you are allowing LR to create the

previews as you step through the library, it will be slow. But if you

created your standard previews on import, or just did it by selecting build

previews from the library menu, it should be much faster.

Bob Frost

Thanks, selecting build standard previews during import, or afterward via Library>Previews>RenderStandard-Sized Previews reduced the "next photo" lag from about 3.3 sec to about 0.1 sec for standard size viewing. However -- if I click magnify once (default 1:2) then next photo takes about 3.3 sec.

Building 1:1 previews makes "next photo" in 1:2 magnification take about 0.6 sec (down from 3.3 sec). At zoom-to-fit or zoom-to-fill, it's about as fast (0.1 sec) as using standard previews. So ensuring the previews are built improves browsing speed for non-magnified views from intolerable to good (at least on my hardware).

Note these are 5MB .jpg files, not gigantic images or raw files.

The free Picasa photo viewer is almost instantly fast, and requires no configuration tuning and no preview building. However Picasa Viewer cannot do prev/next when zoomed in. The 3rd-party FastPictureViewer ver 1.7 (despite the name) is also sluggish on next/prev browsing of these images. Even Photo Mechanic 4.6.8 (what many pros use) isn't always super fast doing next/prev browsing. LR4 is actually faster for non-magnified next/prev browsing. CorelAfterShot Pro 1.0.0.39 is fairly quick. FastOne 4.6 is ironically not that fast. ACDSee 14.1 is lightning fast -- the only viewer I've seen that's fast as Picasa (maybe even faster).

So several "fast" image browsers (not just LR4) aren't that fast. I fail to grasp why makers of specialize image browsing/catalogging software don't prioritize fluid, responsive, lag-free image browsing.  If you're dealing with ingesting and culling thousands of images -- despite whatever else the software does -- it must be fast for next/prev browsing.

If you deal with lots of images, I'd suggest using Picasa Viewer or ACDSee as the 1st phase of image evaluation, before it even gets to LR4. That will use the fastest software on the highest volume. Then import what's left to LR4, ensuring previews are built as described above.

LR4 browsing speed for non-magnified views isn't that bad on my machine, assuming previews are built. So far I haven't see the "sluggish slider" behavior others have reported.

[Boggy4062]

There is no doubt - Lightroom 4 IS slow on any hardware configuration, much slower when comparing to Lightroom 3.x.  I doesn't matter how beefy the machine is (my is i7 with 8 CPUs and 16GB of RAM) which made the previous version fligh.  I descovered another bug: syncing of keywords does NOT work.  (and I did not test the rest of the fields). I believe that the product was rush to the market, and was not tested sufficiently. Not impressed with Adobe on this

[Blind Monk]

I was successful importing keywords in a Text file -tab separated values (TSV) format -into LR4. No problems using a TSV file at all.

A decent explanation of how this type of file should look can be found below (just forget that they use MS Excel as the example software):

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/TSV.html

Export lightroom 3 keywords into Save the resulting file as a .txt file, and import.

[unique_jb]

I think this is a general proble with adobe. Each new version is much slower than before. LR3 is much slower than LR2. Sounds like LR4 is going to be slower than LR3. Each new version of acrobat is much slower than the previous one. The same seems to be true for illustrator and photoshop. It seems that adobe for some reason is unable to make new versions of their software as fast (or ideally faster) than the previous one. This practice was acceptable in the 1990s (when single threaded performance was increasing exponentially) but since around 2003 this has no longer been the case, and it is critical to optimize single threaded performance and user interface latencies. Adobe for some reason doesn't consider this a priority I think.

[tfitz100]

While I haven't been *as* troubled by the slowness issues reported, I did see them a lot in the beta where the system would just slow down to a crawl when trying to make simple Develop Module adjustments.

That being said, I DO notice a delay when making some changes with some adjustment brushes. Up to a second or more sometimes. When I use the Tint brush and change the Tint on the slider, I have to wait about a second for the changes to propogate up into the image. This is not tolerable.

I currently have an i7-2600K with 8GB of memory, a SSD drive for the LR4 cache and a seperate drive for the actual catalog and RAW files being used, so it's certainly NOT a harware issue as so many have pointed out.

Adobe needs to investigate this problem now. This should be the TOP priority for the development team, nothing else. I've seen the list of issues they have on their developers forum and they are all issues that need to be solved, but not nearly as serious as this one. Adobe engineers should be working AROUND the CLOCK on this one, period. Everything else should be on the backburner until then.

Another issue is that Adobe has NOT SAID ANYTHING about this problem to this community. That, in and of itself, is a problem--almost worse than the actual problem. A simple report of their progress thus far would suffice. I'm a senior software engineer, and if my team let a problem like this go for so long without any acknowledgement whatsoever, our heads would be on a platter with our company.

[falschrum]

Same here. Rubbish performance on my system. LR3 was very fast but LR4 is just slow and often crashes without a reason.

The overall system performance is also rubbish when i export pictures. In LR3 it was possible to run two export batches at one time without issues working in windows or surfin the web. With LR4 everything slows down. Even my cursor ist struggelin.

Dell Precision T3500, Intel Xeon 2,4 GHz, 12 GB RAM, All Data on an OCZ Vertex 2.

I´ll switch back to LR3 until Adobe will release a real final. LR4 looks for me just like a pay-beta.

[acresofgreen]

I was really looking forward to upgrading to LR 4 from LR 3, but this thread has convinced me to hold off for the time being or until I buy a new high-end computer, which won't be any time soon. 

[Bob Gates]

I just upgraded and found that when using a slider nothing happened until I clicked to enlarge the image, the the change kicked in.  I mean I could wait forever, just nothing happened.  I found the advice to export to a new catalogue, remove all previews and clear the cache and so far everything seems to be working ok.  On a fast Windows machine.

[hamish niven]

Its comments like this one

acresofgreen wrote:

I was really looking forward to upgrading to LR 4 from LR 3, but this thread has convinced me to hold off for the time being or until I buy a new high-end computer, which won't be any time soon. 

that the marketing department should really look at and say "Ohh xxxx we've gotta sort this out AND tell people we are"

And not just a post on a thread in the bug notification forum.

[Guest]

This is a good a time as any to remind folks that user-to-user forums are extremely self-selecting. You cannot use these, or any other user forum, to get an unbiased view of the temperature, as it were, of a specific release.

The great majority of users are not having problems described here. Adobe is looking into the clearest reports they have, and have already issued a statement that may help some people experiencing specific performance issues. I'm sure there will be more to follow.

But, the fact is that Lightroom has consistently run well on modest equipment since v.1. However, given the wide range of environments it is expected to work in, there is bound to be situations like this that show up from time to time.

Plainly put: there is no reason to not upgrade to v.4, unless there is a specific issue that you know will affect you. It is not possible to come up with an estimate of how it will work on your hardware with your dataset based on a survey of user forums. Fortunately, you can upgrade and use Lr 4 for a month and find out for yourself. The only cost is that you might have to recreate your previews if you go back to your (untouched by Lr 4) Lr 3 catalogue permanently. Since previews contain no precious information (assuming you still have your originals, which should be the case; if you don't have your originals, you probably have bigger problems to deal with) why not just blow them away and start with fresh previews in Lr 4 anyway?

I understand that user forums often become a place for people to vent, but no one should be confusing the collection of reports here as anything remotely coherent or telling in any manner. Only Adobe Support might have the hard numbers necessary to actually spot trends.

[quenton8]

Well written and thought out comment.

My analysis too is that the majority of people do not have serious problems (the tone curve issue asside, that was real and a workaround has been provided).

Given the complexity of programs in the last few years, and the variations in hardware (almost infinite), it is diffcult to impossible to assure that systems work on

all possible configurations, variations, versions etc.

So yes there will be some problems.  You may be able to work them out yourself, or with help of others on the forums, or you may have to wait a bit for updates and information from the development group.  BUT!! its no different for adobe than microsoft or any other supplier.  We have had similar issues with one of our clients who has strange performance problems that no other clients have -- we don't know what it is yet, although we have a couple of things that help -- sounds much like the LR4 issues.