Is the Lightroom speed bottleneck the software or the machine?

Question

I'm going to bring this up as I've just built a new pc with the following:

i7 5960X cpu at 4ghz.

64gb ram

Samsung Polaris M2 drives, on for OS, the other for the lightroom scratch and catalogues.

Raw files are kept on Samsung 850pro SSD's and export to another of the same.

GTW1060 graphics card.

So it's a screamer. In the top 1% of system buids globally (apparently).

Yet, lightroom CC, exporting files of any description, of any task it only uses 40-60% of the cpu on average. There's no bottlenecks anywhere, dammit even the ram is the shortest latency I could get.

I had a similar situation with my old rig containing a 3930k, same percentage of cpu use although the new rig is quicker.

Is this a 'software thang'. Is it no longer the cpu that needs to be upgraded because it's under utilised?

Ironically, Lightroom 5.6 would top 100% on th eold machine often, but not on my new one. (Which was a surprise).

dj_paige · Answer

Some comments:there are reports that Lightroom doesn't perform well on 8-core CPU machines (I don't think anyone can explain why), and CPU speed is the primary driver of this taskexporting is throttled by design so that the entire computer doesn't come to a stop. If you have two concurrent exports going (instead of one large one), it will use more of the CPU. Three concurrent exports would use more of the CPU than two concurrent exports, etc.Amount of Memory and speed of memory is mostly irrelevant to this taskRaw files on an SSD also mostly irrelevant to this task, and in fact raw files on an SSD doesn't improve speed anywhere in Lightroom other than by a trivial amount that you will never notice.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded