High Memory Usage - Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro

[Duncan Sibley]

Hello All

Is it just me or do we have a memory leak problem with some of the Adobe Products. Whether I am using Lightroom, Photoshop or Premiere Pro - any of them will eat up my memory so much that my laptop comes to a grinding halt.

You would expect that with Windows 10 64bit ,12gb RAM, i7 Processor, 1TB hard drive and a gaming laptop with a Nvidia Geforce GTX 860m Graphics and GPU that this should be more than enough to run any of these programs. What makes it worse is that if I want to have Lightroom and Photoshop open to edit between the two, I have no hope.

So, what have I done so far to help sort this

1) Cleared the Adobe Cache's

2) Increased memory allocation to 8gb

3) Reset all the programs

4) Uninstalled and reinstalled

5) Defragged the drives

6) Limited my startup items

7) Run a full virus scan in case of hidden Malware

8) Run sfc /scannow looking for corrupt dll's

9) Turned off background intensive services e.g Sysmain

10) Ensured Windows and the Adobe products were up to date

I am starting to look at this in one way. If I was the proud owner of a Mercedes-Benz, how long would I be content to say that I was happy with it if I could only get a top speed of 20 MPH out of it when it should be able to do 140 MPH?

Any suggestions would be very welcome.

[R Neil Haugen]

If that was (relatively speaking) a high-end MB, you'd have a point.

But that rig is nowhere near high-end. The 860 is an older nearly abandoned generation of GPU, and 12GB of RAM is barely above bare minimum operating requirements. You don't actually give the specific CPU, so I can't comment there.

That's an older and relatively speaking low level rig. Relatively to current standards.

Neil

[Duncan Sibley]

Valid point. I should say, it was when I got it. Saying that, I remember a comment made that if a computer is in the shops it is already out of date.

[R Neil Haugen]

I find it somewhat ... annoying ... how fast computers for high-end stuff like video editing/fx/color become dated.

I started video post about 6 years back, my builder modded my then-rig as best as possible, but within 6 months we gave up and he built a new one. Budget, and his background was gaming not v-post, so ... some choices weren't necessarily the best we could have made.

Finally he gave up gaming ideas and simply studied what was used by the shops that custom build for v-post, and did (again) another rig around a "middling" level. Which was a vast improvement.

But ... I'm handling media and running apps that are needing more than this rig can give. So ... he's moved to Texas, I'm looking at a local shop or just getting a rig from Safeharbor or PugetSystems.

Probably do the latter. Sometime fairly soon, this is getting ... boring ... sigh.

Neil

[MyerPj]

Our systems are similar. I'm keeping mine for another year or so, but was thinking I probably should just wait now until there is some hardware that Adobe tries to exploit, like they did initially with CUDA.

Most of the high-ish end systems I see talked about here, are not performing much better as people expected, usually the opposite.

[R Neil Haugen]

I've communicated with a couple folks now running on new gear, built by Puget & by Safeharbor, and they're getting very improved playback/response.

And clearly, others "just" getting a high-end Dell or whatnot, are oft rather frustrated with their purchase and the Adobe apps.

It ain't easy and assured that just getting new "hot" gear it's going to work better. That's for sure.

Neil

[Conrad C]

I mostly use Lightroom and Photoshop, but I post here too because I also use Premiere Pro.

I have not had a computer with less than 16GB RAM for many years now, and my desktop has had 32GB for a while. I think it was in Lightroom Classic 7 that Adobe put in some work to take advantage of computers with ample RAM and CPU cores. Lightroom typically needs 6GB or less of RAM to edit one raw image, but if there is more RAM available, Lightroom will attempt to improve performance by using the extra cores to cache previews of adjacent images in the folder (so that they show up faster as you go from image to image). And then it will use any extra RAM to cache those previews, because there is no memory faster than RAM. At that time they changed the system requirements  to support this. The current requirements for Lightroom say 4GB required, 12GB recommended.

Other factors affecting Lightroom: Performance tends to drop as the number of pixels to be processed goes up in both images and the display. I've actually been OK with Lightroom Classic performance on my quad-core i5, but I think it's because both my cameras are 20 megapixels or less, and my desktop displays are not 4K. The worst case scenario for performance seems to be high-megapixel raw images (24 megapixels and up) on very high resolution displays (4K, 5K). That is a lot of pixels to recalculate every time a slider gets moved. It got a little better when Lightroom added GPU support in the Develop module, but for a lot of users, it still isn't enough.

If the raw images are opened in Photoshop at 16 bits/channel, the one 12-bit or 14-bit single-channel raw image file is expanded into three 16-bit RGB channels, and if that is 24 megapixels and up plus layers and masks, that adds up to a lot of data to hold in RAM. Keep that open next to Lightroom and it's no wonder 12GB of RAM might not be enough. Remember that the OS needs a few GB just to run things, so the 8 or 9GB left is now divided between Lightroom and Photoshop, which is not ideal.

You didn't mention After Effects but it's another example of an application that tries to use extra RAM to help performance. It caches its RAM preview so you can hold a longer real-time preview in RAM before it has to hit the CPU again. I'm not sure of specific reasons that make Premiere Pro use more RAM.

You mentioned a 1TB hard drive. That may be a major bottleneck. For today's applications, hard drives are very slow. A SATA SSD is at least five times faster than a hard drive. Many new PC and Mac laptops now come with NVME SSD internal system drives; that type of storage is literally 25-30 times faster than a hard drive, the machines boot up in seconds, and everything is more responsive. No amount of defragging will make a hard drive as fast as that. Any SSD will do wonders for video and photo application scratch/cache/preview files. Even if just using hard drives, performance can be somewhat enhanced by setting up Premiere Pro preferences to spread out cache, preview, etc. files across multiple hard drives so read/writes can be done in parallel. Editing video using a single hard drive is unfortunately another worst-case scenario. (SSDs are so fast that it can be acceptable to edit on just one, depending.)

Another important storage factor is making sure there's always lots of free space on drives. If a drive gets too close to full, there's no place to put cache/preview/temp files, and a grinding halt is usually what happens. I aim for at least 100GB free on especially my system drive, but I try to leave a lot more.

The specific GPU model is not so important with Lightroom and Photoshop; what's important is that you have a relatively current one. For Premiere Pro the GPU is much more important.

If you're on a budget, try upgrading RAM to 16GB or more, and replacing hard drives with SSDs. When I replaced the hard drive with an SSD in my 2011 i7 laptop (a MacBook Pro), combined with an upgrade to 16GB RAM I did not need to buy a new laptop until 2018. Without those upgrades, it would have been too slow and abandoned earlier.