Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: mshea on November 15, 2016, 05:06:54 pm

Title: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: mshea on November 15, 2016, 05:06:54 pm
I've used LR from it's inception and I've been running CC for quite some time—presently Vs. 2015.7 (Sierra 10.12.1 on a 2011 MacBook Pro with 8 GB RAM). Over the years, especially since I switched to CC, I've noticed startup taking longer and longer! It just took 4+ minutes for a folder of 20 images that I'd optimized yesterday, but I've seen it take much longer. I've optimized the catalogue over and over, but still no improvement.

Equally annoying—and I've experienced this with multiple versions much older than CC—the adjustment brush will cease to function and nothing works, except to quit and restart LR.

I'm curious as to what others are experiencing.

Thanks,
Merrill
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: Jeremy Roussak on November 16, 2016, 04:35:20 am
Like you, I've run LR since it was first available and am now running it under Sierra. My experience isn't remotely like yours. Although I have very occasionally noticed the adjustment brush seems to stop working, changing to a different photograph and back has always solved the issue and I've never found restarting LR to be necessary.

It's an obvious point which I assume you've investigated, but are you sure there's no underlying problem? Have you run Disk Utility, to check that the disk is OK, for example?

Jeremy
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: jrsforums on November 16, 2016, 07:35:46 am
I've used LR from it's inception and I've been running CC for quite some time—presently Vs. 2015.7 (Sierra 10.12.1 on a 2011 MacBook Pro with 8 GB RAM). Over the years, especially since I switched to CC, I've noticed startup taking longer and longer! It just took 4+ minutes for a folder of 20 images that I'd optimized yesterday, but I've seen it take much longer. I've optimized the catalogue over and over, but still no improvement.

Equally annoying—and I've experienced this with multiple versions much older than CC—the adjustment brush will cease to function and nothing works, except to quit and restart LR.

I'm curious as to what others are experiencing.

Thanks,
Merrill

As software evolves, it takes more resources.  Your system is soon to be 6 years old.  Processor speed, circuit speed, and amount of memory are probably contributors to what you are seeing.
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: rdonson on November 16, 2016, 11:13:24 am
Merrill,

I have a 2011 iMac with 16 GB RAM and a 2012 RMBP with 8 GB RAM.

The iMac seemingly takes forever to boot and forever for LR to load.  The MBP is much quicker.  I imagine the difference is due in large part to a quad core i5 in the iMac and a quad core i7 in the MBP.  The MBP also has an SSD which I'm sure makes a huge difference.

Chasing performance issues beyond hardware constraints is a well trod path.  Adequately sized caches for the Adobe products is a good place to start.  Having your boot drive that has sufficient free space is another good place to look.  If you have an SSD most recommendations are to keep it at or below 50% full for maximum performance.

On my iMac I do see slowdowns in LR like you describe in long sessions with a lot of editing with the brush and other tools.  I've simply adopted the habit of quitting LR and reopening it when that occurs.
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: uimike on November 16, 2016, 06:28:07 pm
Couple of wild guesses:

1. Have you turned your graphics card acceleration on (I suppose in your case should be off - some systems allow you to use one, but it is slooooooow)
2. Preview sizes?

mike
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: jimh on November 17, 2016, 03:15:27 pm
Yes, my experience is that after some amount of editing the adjustment brush goes dead until LR is restarted.   I'm not having slow startup but it does seem like rendering - when switching between photos - is getting slower.  The slow rendering is a big reason I'm planning on switching to On1PR (if it turns out to be good ) or Capture One.
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: Rendezvous on November 20, 2016, 03:37:07 pm
I was having a similar issue on my 2012 iMac - took ages to boot up, then ages for lightroom to open. I tried reinstalling the operating system, to no avail. I then bought an external SSD and installed OSX on that - problem gone. It seems it was the clunky old hard drive causing everything to go slow for me, though disk utility didn't reveal any problems with it.
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: Phil Indeblanc on November 28, 2016, 02:39:49 pm
I am currently using a SSD, but for TB of images, you just cant store them on a SSD, so I used a staging drive to work on and then offload to a standard HDD...Even then LR is a slow process when dealing with large file sizes and large databases. This is with no edits done yet.

So I am moving on, and looking at a number of other options....But as I posted in another thread, this teaches me a good lesson to make your own folder hierarchy database and NOT rely on any software for it.
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: john beardsworth on November 28, 2016, 02:59:10 pm
But as I posted in another thread, this teaches me a good lesson to make your own folder hierarchy database and NOT rely on any software for it.

And by default Lightroom does create a folder hierarchy that's fully consistent with the concepts in the DAM Book.

Maybe 650000+ photos isn't large? Fully edited, captioned and keyworded. Current raw files on an internal hard drive, finished jobs on Drobos. Not running slow at all, but Lr will test many aspects of a system.
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: rdonson on November 28, 2016, 06:27:38 pm
Lightroom works like every other content management system I used in my professional life (IT). 

1 - files are stored in a hierarchy on a storage system's file system (those file systems are light years better than what Apple or Windows offers for their desktops).
2 - metadata about files (including their location in storage) are stored in a relational database
3 - files and metadata are backed up daily or continually.

It's not rocket science but few photographers have been taught the basics of content management and how applications like Lightroom work.

Large content management systems store tens of millions of images or more quite successfully.  Think about how banks store checks, mortgage docs, loan docs, etc.
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: mshea on February 25, 2017, 09:35:16 am
Thanks for the tips, guys. I had an SSD installed and everything zips along like crazy!

Merrill
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: rdonson on February 25, 2017, 09:51:18 am
Merrill, did the new SSD replace your original internal hard drive that you booted from?
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: mshea on February 25, 2017, 11:21:43 am
Yes, it replaced the original hard drive. A Samsung 1TB 850 EVO.
Merrill
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: rdonson on February 25, 2017, 04:06:10 pm
Super.  Glad that everything worked out well for you!
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: Hoggy on February 26, 2017, 06:40:10 am
Yes, it replaced the original hard drive. A Samsung 1TB 850 EVO.

 8)

Yes, when I saw that figure of 4+ minutes, I figured it had to be a spinner.
I first used my SSD as a second drive for LR only - worried about longevity.
Then I later installed it as a boot drive as well.
Now I ain't ever going back to a spinner boot drive!

Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: Wayne Fox on February 27, 2017, 05:27:22 pm
Thanks for the tips, guys. I had an SSD installed and everything zips along like crazy!

Merrill
i was about to mention that major slow downs like that are symptomatic of a hard drive that is nearing end of life ...
Title: Re: LR startup slow as cold molasses + another issue
Post by: luxborealis on March 05, 2017, 06:34:40 pm
I have a 2011 MBP and a 2012 MBA both w/ 8GB of ram. The difference is like night and day with the MBA taking 10s of seconds to load and the MBP taking minutes (sometimes as long as 10 minutes) to load. SSD is clearly the way to go these days.