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stefantotev
Known Participant
March 26, 2025
Question

Major slowdown of the app after few hours of work

  • March 26, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 510 views

Mac Studio with M2 Ultra, 64 RAM, latest MacOS 15.3.2. LR catalogue has always been stored on a RAID of two SSDs connected via Thunderbolt 3.

 

For the last 6-12+ months I've been experiencing slowdowns of the app when it has been running for a while. This shouldn't be a hardware resources issue as I monitor the ram and cpu and they are not even at half of their power. I'm attaching screenshot just for example. Marked in yellow the SSD raid used for LR catalogue. 

 

What happens is that suddenly the app starts to lag a lot. Scrolling photos in grid view and opening/closing/zooming a photo is most noticable. Drawing masks is also very affected. 

 

What fixes the issue is to quit and reopen the app. Yes, quick and easy, but I've been doing it for the last 6-12 months and been hoping Adobe will fix this eventually, which never happened, so I decided to finally post about the issue. 

 

What I've tried is to reinstall the app. 

2 replies

Ian Lyons
Community Expert
Ian LyonsCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 26, 2025

You wrote "This shouldn't be a hardware resources issue as I monitor the ram and cpu and they are not even at half of their power."

 

Clearly, above statement is not correct because your screenshot indicates that at sometime during the editing session LrD/Ps was putting sufficent pressure on your 64GB of memory that an 8.4GB swap file was created. 

 

What were you doing during the editing session that might acount for this level of memory pressure?

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stefantotevAuthor
Known Participant
March 31, 2025

I haven't done anything else. In PS I work with PSD files around 100-200 MB max containing 10-20 layers at the most. During the "editing session" I haven't touched PS. 

In LR I edit high MP photos from different cameras ranging from 24 to 100 MP. It works fluid until it doesn't. There's no particular thing which triggers the laggy behaviour or at least I can't notice when it happens. What I notice is when it starts to lag when scrolling photos in Grid mode. Then I quit and reopen the app. 

This should not be happening with such hardware on a Mac. 

Ian Lyons
Community Expert
Ian LyonsCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 31, 2025

Again, whatever you're doing in the edit session is causing the memory pressure to become so high that it triggers the large swap file. When this happens performance will deteriorate until Lr is closed. When Lr is closed the memory that it was using is released, hence performance returns to normal.

 

We have no way of knowing what the underlying cause of excessive memory use is on your side. However, using the tools already at your dispoal (i.e. Acivity Monitor and iStat Menus) you can monitor memory pressure as you edit. 

Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
Rikk Flohr_PhotographyCommunity Manager
March 26, 2025

Please go to Help>System Info… and provide us with your software's installed version number. 

 

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org
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stefantotevAuthor
Known Participant
March 26, 2025

Lightroom version: 8.2 arm64

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