Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: Slobodan Blagojevic on December 08, 2012, 08:37:19 pm

Title: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Slobodan Blagojevic on December 08, 2012, 08:37:19 pm
Adobe released tips for improving the performance of Lightroom 4:

http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/performance-hints.html

Hope this helps. My apologies if this is old news.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Steve Weldon on December 08, 2012, 11:07:01 pm
Well... it should be old news, but it wasn't that long ago (a few months) where some threads became more than a bit snarky at my claims SSD's and RAM in excess of 8gb could significantly improve performance certain parts of our work flow..    I also mentioned a few other areas for improvement..   This is all just common sense stuff, if you know what equipment your work flow task and how certain equipment works the conclusions should be a a no-brainer.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: kencameron on December 10, 2012, 02:08:02 am
I'm looking forward to adding the ssd when I spot the right sale.  ;D
I went for an SSD when the price per GB (for 240gb) got closer to 50c than $1, and don't regret it.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Rhossydd on December 10, 2012, 07:40:23 pm
Interesting to read their recommendations for "Order of Develop operations "

It's rather different to the recommendation of working 'top to bottom in the panels' that's been given here by some folk in the past.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: kaelaria on December 10, 2012, 11:33:13 pm
Some of those suggestions including the order of operations, only make a difference on the slowest of outdated systems.  A modern build negates any such editing order 'need'.  Top down is still the best solution for image quality, which is what was referred to, not 'speed'.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Rhossydd on December 11, 2012, 04:26:00 am
..  Top down is still the best solution for image quality, which is what was referred to, not 'speed'.
Er no. Have you read the page ?
Specifically:-"performing spot healing first improves the accuracy of the spot healing, and ensures the boundaries of the healed areas match the the spot location."

That's a quality issue, not just speed.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Vistographer on December 11, 2012, 04:44:49 am
Let me pick this subject to have a first post here. This might have been mentioned before, but it took me a long time figuring it out. That might be just me, but I doubt it:
When changing from LR3.x to LR4 my catalog size increased considerably. This coincided with a long photographic trip to the US Southwest and many images in dusty places. Long story short, my catalog exploded from 350K to over 6GB. For 35K images in total. This not only slows down performance when working, but also slows down and fills up the backup chain. I tried everything from optimizing the catalog to rebuilding it from scratch and doing some fancy stuff on the database directly with SQlite commands. Nothing helped. But deleting the history did help. A lot. The catalog went from 6GB to 700MB. That is a massive reduction in size, much more than I had expected from the information I was able to find on this subject.
Why did the catalog grow out of proportion? Probably because I do a lot of local adjustments and I had to deal with thousands of dust spots in my SW images. And when you are working on multirow, multi exposure panoramas, that all adds up. I print some images really big, so every spot has to go.
So, if you do not need all that history, it might be a good idea to delete it once in a while.

Anne  

Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: kaelaria on December 11, 2012, 05:00:43 am
Er no. Have you read the page ?
Specifically:-"performing spot healing first improves the accuracy of the spot healing, and ensures the boundaries of the healed areas match the the spot location."

That's a quality issue, not just speed.

Agreed. And if you didn't notice, spot healing is at the top.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Rhossydd on December 11, 2012, 05:47:29 am
Agreed. And if you didn't notice, spot healing is at the top.
Indeed spot healing IS at the top, but the other geometric corrections are at the bottom. You have looked at the page ?
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: kaelaria on December 11, 2012, 06:56:57 am
Yes I did. As I said the effects are only seen on slow outdated systems.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Rhossydd on December 11, 2012, 07:51:32 am
... the effects are only seen on slow outdated systems.
That's not actually what it says.You've missed a potentially important point here.
This isn't just about speed, but it specifically says "improves the accuracy" and "ensures the boundaries of the healed areas match the the spot location"

This differs to the 'it doesn't matter what order you do things in, LR just does it all together regardless of what order you do things in' advice that has been proffered by some here in the past.

"slow outdated systems" well yes, that's what most people use. Not everyone can afford to stay at the bleeding edge of technology which is why LR4's demands on hardware aren't well received by a lot of users.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: JRSmit on December 11, 2012, 01:29:41 pm
Some of those suggestions including the order of operations, only make a difference on the slowest of outdated systems.  A modern build negates any such editing order 'need'.  Top down is still the best solution for image quality, which is what was referred to, not 'speed'.
Would you call a ivybridge platform with an i7 3770 and 16gb and ssd outdated? Yet comes to an almost complete standstill with spothealing!
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: David Eichler on December 11, 2012, 02:06:57 pm

Why did the catalog grow out of proportion? Probably because I do a lot of local adjustments and I had to deal with thousands of dust spots in my SW images. And when you are working on multirow, multi exposure....  I print some images really big, so every spot has to go.
So, if you do not need all that history, it might be a good idea to delete it once in a while.

Anne  



I don't know why anyone would do heavy spotting with Lightroom. Photoshop seems much better suited to that.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Slobodan Blagojevic on December 11, 2012, 02:49:54 pm
I don't know why anyone would do heavy spotting with Lightroom. Photoshop seems much better suited to that.

Because it is easier, faster, and simpler?
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Jeremy Roussak on December 11, 2012, 02:56:14 pm
I don't know why anyone would do heavy spotting with Lightroom. Photoshop seems much better suited to that.

Because it is easier, faster, and simpler?

And because it can be synchronised almost automatically to other shots taken around the same time.

Jeremy
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: David Eichler on December 11, 2012, 03:06:27 pm
And because it can be synchronised almost automatically to other shots taken around the same time.

Jeremy

The synchronization is great with the appropriate subject matter, which is pretty much only shots that have the same composition. Depending on where the spots are, variations in the composition and subject matter can make synching useless.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: David Eichler on December 11, 2012, 03:10:59 pm
Because it is easier, faster, and simpler?

I don't find it so, except for a few easy to find spots against a relatively even background.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Slobodan Blagojevic on December 11, 2012, 03:21:54 pm
Doing it in LR does not require a round trip to PS, is parametric, i.e., can be corrected at later time if necessary, and does not create another, and huge, file, as would be the case when round-tripping to PS.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: kencameron on December 11, 2012, 03:22:51 pm
It's rather different to the recommendation of working 'top to bottom in the panels' that's been given here by some folk in the past.
I don't see any inconsistency. at least which the advice I have read in the past, which has been to work top to bottom within the panels, particularly the "Basic" panel to optimize tonal corrections, rather than to work the panels top to bottom. Eg, I have never seen any advice to do, eg,  local corrections before general, or Camera Calibrations last, which would be the order of the panels.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Vistographer on December 11, 2012, 05:44:28 pm
I don't know why anyone would do heavy spotting with Lightroom. Photoshop seems much better suited to that.
Well, now you do.
But having said that, it is more of a workflow preference, really. I like the combination of power and ease in lightroom and, for reasons already mentioned by others, try to avoid going round trip to PS if I don't have to.
Anyway, it was the history I was pointing at. Even if you don't do heavy spotting, it will be growing forever if one does not clean it.

Anne
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Chris Kern on December 11, 2012, 06:43:39 pm
I don't see any inconsistency. at least which the advice I have read in the past, which has been to work top to bottom within the panels, particularly the "Basic" panel to optimize tonal corrections, rather than to work the panels top to bottom. Eg, I have never seen any advice to do, eg,  local corrections before general, or Camera Calibrations last, which would be the order of the panels.

I also think if often makes sense—at least to me; your mileage may vary—not to traverse the separate panels from top to bottom.  For example, I almost always enable Lens Corrections first because any profiled or manual changes I may make in that panel will constrain my final composition.  It never occurred to me until I read Jeff Schewe's Digital Negative book that I might be paying a considerable performance penalty for that, although fortunately he provides a simple workaround.  But because Lightroom renders its sequence of corrections on-the-fly, even if you throw substantial hardware resources at it, having a feel for how it does its magic does appear to be important.  I'd really like to see Eric Chan address this in a comprehensive way (hint, hint).  In his copious spare time, of course.

I might add, at the risk of wandering too far off-topic, that from my perspective one of the most important attributes of the Schewe book is that it provides a conceptual framework for using the Lightroom (ACR) tools, rather than treating them as a series of disconnected controls (e.g., the standard tutorial approach of "if you want to achieve this, move this slider").  He doesn't explicitly invest a lot of words in discussing LR performance optimization, but he certainly prompted me to think more about what the software was doing.  I did a fair amount of software development myself before I retired, but there are some things you can't guess unless you know what the programmers had in mind when they designed a specific product.  After reading his book—I'm now going around for a second pass in an attempt to recapture the stuff that leaked out of my aging brain the first time around—I believe I'm using LR considerably more efficiently than before.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Rhossydd on December 12, 2012, 01:39:56 am
Eg, I have never seen any advice to do, eg,  local corrections before general, or Camera Calibrations last, which would be the order of the panels.
That's been the advice often trotted out here in the past. Start at the top, work down, sharpening and lens corrections last.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: stamper on December 12, 2012, 04:24:46 am
The problem with lens correction last is that the correction also corrects vignetting. This can impact on the way someone processes an image? Why make careful corrections and then see them lightened in the corners which would change some of the corrections? IMO it is best to get rid of any vignetting and then process an image. :)
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: john beardsworth on December 12, 2012, 05:35:03 am
The general advice remains the same - as the article says, these performance tips are only things you can try if you've got problems.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: digitaldog on December 12, 2012, 10:24:23 am
The problem with lens correction last is that the correction also corrects vignetting. This can impact on the way someone processes an image?

I don't believe it will in newer versions. If memory serves, early on when both where new to LR, there was some effect on one over the other but I think it was fixed so that you can work in whatever order you want with the Vignette. I think crop also played a role early on in the order but no longer (you can crop then Vignette).

As far as work top down, there was a time we didn't have the selective brushes. I don't think there is any argument that adding a lot of brush work on a raw can slow LR down. I'd prefer to do spotting and the easy clone work LR can do towards the end anyway.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: henk on December 12, 2012, 04:34:01 pm
I tried everything from optimizing the catalog to rebuilding it from scratch and doing some fancy stuff on the database directly with SQlite commands. Nothing helped. But deleting the history did help. A lot. The catalog went from 6GB to 700MB. That is a massive reduction in size, much more than I had expected from the information I was able to find on this subject.
Why did the catalog grow out of proportion? Probably because I do a lot of local adjustments and I had to deal with thousands of dust spots in my SW images. And when you are working on multirow, multi exposure panoramas, that all adds up. I print some images really big, so every spot has to go.
So, if you do not need all that history, it might be a good idea to delete it once in a while.

Anne  


Hi Anne
Perhaps a stupid question but how do you delete the history for a selected number of pictures in LR4 in one go?
Henk
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: john beardsworth on December 12, 2012, 04:48:42 pm
You can't, so not so stupid a question, but history has negligible performance effect so there's no point in doing so anyway.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: kaelaria on December 12, 2012, 04:54:52 pm
Yes you can, manually with db commands.  Depending on how much editing you do, how big your catalog file has grown, how fast the drive it's on is etc, it can make a big difference.  It's been requested as a new feature for some time.  It's not something the avg user should try doing on a production db at least.

My cat is over a GB, on a fast ssd and my system flies.  I don't need to do it.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Steve Weldon on December 12, 2012, 07:41:49 pm
I'm a bit putt off by the title "Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom"

It's a case of too little too late.

For hardware intensive applications Adobe should put some effort into testing, perhaps support several reference builds, and talk specifically what hardware helps and during what part of the work flow.  At a minimum.  There is more.

Adobe is a big company supporting professional users.  This is not too much to ask for.   It's also not to much to ask when GPU support for Lightroom will happen, even if they don't commit to a  specific version or date. 

In other words.. a professional company TALKS to their customers and keeps them informed.  They want us to enjoy their software and not be angry when its working too slow on our old equipment.  The best way of doing this is to put a LOT more effort into hardware support.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: stamper on December 13, 2012, 04:15:32 am
There must be a limit to what a company can do to make a product more attractive. A lot of users are already complaining about bloat. Any additions mean a price rise because they won't do extra work for nothing. A lot of the suggestions for addons won't technically be possible and some of them will frankly be laughable. Support for video imo comes into that category. Strip that out and it will improve speed or make room for something else. Last but not least some wish that more features of Photoshop should be added. That isn't going to happen. :)
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: stamper on December 13, 2012, 04:20:54 am
Quote

They want us to enjoy their software and not be angry when its working too slow on our old equipment.

Unquote

Creating programs for old antiquated equipment must be difficult. Every system is configured differently. If someone has an old system, poorly maintained and with drivers out of date how can they produce a program to suit all?
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Vistographer on December 13, 2012, 04:49:22 am
Hi Anne
Perhaps a stupid question but how do you delete the history for a selected number of pictures in LR4 in one go?
Henk

Hi Henk,

In Library module, choose Grid View. Select the pictures (so, select_all if you want to purge the whole history). Switch to Develop module. Now, under the Develop menu, you will find the option "clear history".
That's it.
Remember that clearing the history does not delete the parametric memory. What I mean to say is that for instance, if you made local corrections, you can go back to them, change values or change your brushed area, etc. All of your changes and the ability to change them again are still there.

Anne
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: john beardsworth on December 13, 2012, 05:00:42 am
Well spotted, Anne. I hadn't noticed that possibility.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Steve Weldon on December 13, 2012, 01:28:50 pm
Quote

They want us to enjoy their software and not be angry when its working too slow on our old equipment.

Unquote

Creating programs for old antiquated equipment must be difficult. Every system is configured differently. If someone has an old system, poorly maintained and with drivers out of date how can they produce a program to suit all?

They cannot.  This is the point.  Well, unless it's a low overhead piece.

This is why they should do all they can to help the user understand what's needed for a certain level of performance, and as much as practical how the software will perform on a persons older machine.  Of course they'd be discouraging sales, but I think not as much as their current practice of leaving users in the dark.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: digitaldog on December 13, 2012, 03:21:32 pm
In Library module, choose Grid View. Select the pictures (so, select_all if you want to purge the whole history). Switch to Develop module. Now, under the Develop menu, you will find the option "clear history".

The key is the use of the Develop menu. Selecting multiple images in Grid, then switching still only deletes the one history (most selected) IF you use the History panel itself. Which kind of makes sense.

I'm not sure why I'd do this. One of the super cool features of LR is the unlimited history (unlike Photoshop which loses it all after you quit).
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: john beardsworth on December 13, 2012, 03:33:31 pm
I'm not sure why I'd do this.
For the placebo effect?
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: kaelaria on December 13, 2012, 05:45:15 pm
Interesting - good find, I'm not sure when they snuck that in - but it has zero effect.  I really don't know what the point of it is, or what it actually does.  One thing is clear, it's not hitting the database much at all. 

I copied my 1.31GB catalog, cleared all my history, confirmed everything was removed from the history panel on various shots.  ZERO catalog filesize change.  No point as far as performance doing it that way. 

I then put my original copy back, since it doesn't do anything positive, I'll keep the option to have the data usable.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: francois on December 14, 2012, 02:17:45 am
Interesting - good find, I'm not sure when they snuck that in - but it has zero effect.  I really don't know what the point of it is, or what it actually does.  One thing is clear, it's not hitting the database much at all. 

I copied my 1.31GB catalog, cleared all my history, confirmed everything was removed from the history panel on various shots.  ZERO catalog filesize change.  No point as far as performance doing it that way. 


You need to optimize your "zero-history" catalog before seeing a file size change.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: kaelaria on December 14, 2012, 02:23:37 am
Good call!  That did it - 1.31GB to 787MB :)
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: henk on December 15, 2012, 10:10:54 am
Hi Anne,
Thanks for the information ( bedankt voor de informatie! )
My system looks as follows:

Lightroom version: 4.2 [850741]
Operating system: Windows 7 Ultimate Edition
Version: 6.1 [7601]
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Physical processor count: 8
Processor speed: 2,9 GHz ( i7 )
Built-in memory: 12286,4 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 12286,4 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 398,2 MB (3,2%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 384,6 MB
Memory cache size: 220,7 MB
System DPI setting: 120 DPI
Desktop composition enabled: Yes
Displays: 1) 1920x1200
Cach: 50GB

Application folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.2
Library Path: F:\Lightroom 4 catalog\Lightroom_4_2012_03\Lightroom_4_2012_03.lrcat

System drive is a 10Krpm
Library drive is 7.5K rpm

At the moment I have 102.300 pictures in the catalogue. Of which 3/4 is off line.
Catalogue is 196 Gb included one back-up and AFTER optimisation.
113.564 files and 55.756 folders

I have tremendous problems with performance. e.g. after 15 to 20 images work in develop it gets fast as thick syrup!
So I close LR and restart the system and work for another 15 to 20 images and then the same protocol!
Not very good when you are under time pressure!
The same catalogue with 98.000 images in LR 3 I had much better response and had never to close LR and start again. What I saw was that the performance with Lens corrections went down.. So I left that out and only did that at the very end.
After deleting the History of all current projects >250 images, I see a bit improvement but after  working on 30 images
slowmotion coming in when opening a new image. So, yes deleting history helps but is not a defenite solution!
 Anybody any other than spending again a 3K euro’s on a new system?

Henk
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: JRSmit on December 15, 2012, 02:15:06 pm
My experience with LR4.2 is in line with Henk's . and yes lens corrections is a key element, as are spot removals, in the serious perfomance drop experienced. The other day i had a project with several hundreds of portraits (headshots mainly) of young teenagers. Of course quite a few have Acne and pimples. and yes afte say 10-20 i had to quit and start LR to get some performance back. Yes i have a ivybridge platform with i7 3770 and 16 gb and Ssd.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: henk on December 18, 2012, 03:06:13 pm
Hi Anne,
Not sure you received my offline replay! Did not see my replay.
Henk
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: henk on December 18, 2012, 03:09:14 pm
Hi folks,
Did some alteration to my LR4 catalogue but not on the Hardware. Think I made some progress  ;D. Will report on it after tomorrow.
Henk
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: henk on December 31, 2012, 12:55:50 pm
Hi
I have done some test and changes and here are the results.
Done the following:
- Export as catalogue excluding previews. This worked but in editing the pictures it was to slow for the 1:1. previews. Did this in accordance to Ian Lyons advice. http://www.computer-darkroom.com/blog/2012/03/25/tips-to-help-mitigate-lightroom-4-0-performance-issues/
- Then an export including previews. 3 attempts. First, my system cam to a hold at 80% export. Second attempt LR came with a popup message““ Adobe photoshop lightroom 64 bit has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available. This happened also the 3e time. So I gave up on this. Mind you every attempt took about 5 hours!
Since I though it was a good idea from Ian to create a clean catalogue and Anne advice to delete the history and me being scared to corrupt my catalogue I did as follows:
Copy, with Terracopy the total LR directory on a new HD. Did an export catalogue without previews en replaced the copied Lrcat with this one. Then did a history delete and optimise and all works fine.
A quick and dirty edit ( Autotone and gross Adjustments) on about 50 images for the bin, learned me that  for about 30 images I had a good response but then it started getting slow and after 40 images I had to stop PR and start it again.
I leave it for the moment since it took quite some time to get to this point. But I will consider in the new year SSD upgrade and some extra RAM.
For now a Happy New Year and magnificent light in the New Year.
Henk
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: JRSmit on January 01, 2013, 06:07:18 am
Henk,

Happy new year.

i use a SSD for my catalogs, it does not matter for the performance degradation. It has little to do with the drive, it is more in the area of cpu speed and memory management, perhaps by this LUA part of the application. more memory can make some difference if you do a lot of exports, to see the total memory used by LR it is not just the lr exe, there is aslo anothe process thread to look for , i forgot the name, will come back on this when i can.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: stever on January 01, 2013, 12:25:48 pm
i have a new lenovo t340s with fastest available processor, 16gb memory, 500gb SSD, 750gb 7400rpm internal drive.  it also seems to me that preview rendering (1:1 previews of 5D3 files rendered in 4 sec/image - about 2 1/2 times faster than my 5 year old Dell), exports, etc. are limited by the processor.  i've designated a large cache on the SSD (no matter what kind of system you're using you should enlarge the cache and check every now and then to see how much is being used).  i'm disappointed that it doesn't seem to make a lot of difference whether the catalog and/or images are on the SSD or magnetic drive. 

the last couple of times i've Exported as Catalog, i've had the failure message come up.  however it seems that the complete catalog was successfully exported with all images and opens properly!?
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: stever on January 10, 2013, 12:24:49 am
after 3 weeks, my Crucial M4 SSD failed.  this prompted me to do some more research and reflect on the lack of obvious performance improvement from the SSD (with admitted limited comparison testing).  i found Ian Lyons blog www.computer darkroom.com/blog/will-an-s (don't guarantee the address) which gives some very detailed results of SSD vs hard disk - the conclusion being that the SSD can have about a 10% benefit as best.

my conclusion from experience and other research is that the only way to significantly improve performance is with faster processors and more cores (assuming adequate memory -i've got 16gb, but 8gb may be enough).

since a significant amount of my photography is international with little support available, the potential unreliability of the SSD is unacceptable and the upside of the experience was SSD failure within the return period rather than in Patagonia in Feb
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Steve Weldon on January 10, 2013, 03:16:54 am
after 3 weeks, my Crucial M4 SSD failed.  this prompted me to do some more research and reflect on the lack of obvious performance improvement from the SSD (with admitted limited comparison testing).  i found Ian Lyons blog www.computer darkroom.com/blog/will-an-s (don't guarantee the address) which gives some very detailed results of SSD vs hard disk - the conclusion being that the SSD can have about a 10% benefit as best.

my conclusion from experience and other research is that the only way to significantly improve performance is with faster processors and more cores (assuming adequate memory -i've got 16gb, but 8gb may be enough).

since a significant amount of my photography is international with little support available, the potential unreliability of the SSD is unacceptable and the upside of the experience was SSD failure within the return period rather than in Patagonia in Feb

1.  My Crucial SSD's (4) have never failed. (3) are nearly 3 years old and (1) six months.  However, I've noticed an usually large failure rate in the forums.. and not so much from the SSD electronics, but because of the way the firmware conflicted with other parts of the system.  Because of the relatively short validation periods I never recommend them for my builds.

2.  Without even reading this test (I have, the blog has been around a while) we know that SSD's are I/O devices, or devices that read and/or write.  Therefore they WILL offer tremendous advantages in the I/O portion of our workflow.  We can only give a percentage of improvement if we GUESS about the workflow, we must know the detailed workflow to know how much benefit an SSD offers.  For instance, someone tethered to a computer in the studio shootiing products, one every 60 seconds, probably won't notice an improvement at all.  But a sales rep showing off his portfolio through use or LR's catalogue and preview images , and who uses SSD's for the catalogue, data drive, cache.. will notice big changes.   

Still, SSD's improve other parts of your system enough so that a modern system will almost always include an SSD for your system drive, and workstations will add at least one and sometimes two more SSD's for catalogues and data.


3.  RAM is critical to workflow and I'm glad to see Adobe finally address this in the referenced article.  Unfortunately it's true that for most people the most speed changes comes from the CPU and RAM selection.  Too bad Adobe hasn't yet engaged the GPU's most of us have.

4.   I use SSD's BECAUSE of their LOW failure rate (and of course the speed increases) in relation to HDD's.. precisely because I travel internationally and find myself in remote areas often.  SSD's easily take more physical abuse (drops. bumps, vibration) and because they don't generate heat (a result of using much less power) my systems run cooler and for longer times on the batteries.  One small laptop I used recently would only last 3.5 hours watching movies on an international flight.  After replacing the HDD with an SSD I achieved 9 hours on the return.  For all these reasons, much higher reliability, they use less power, generate less heat, I find them highly desirable for international/rough&tough type use.     So, I wouldn't necessarily base your decision on the single sample you've tried.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Steve Weldon on January 10, 2013, 03:21:53 am
i have a new lenovo t340s with fastest available processor, 16gb memory, 500gb SSD, 750gb 7400rpm internal drive.  it also seems to me that preview rendering (1:1 previews of 5D3 files rendered in 4 sec/image - about 2 1/2 times faster than my 5 year old Dell), exports, etc. are limited by the processor.  i've designated a large cache on the SSD (no matter what kind of system you're using you should enlarge the cache and check every now and then to see how much is being used).  i'm disappointed that it doesn't seem to make a lot of difference whether the catalog and/or images are on the SSD or magnetic drive. 

the last couple of times i've Exported as Catalog, i've had the failure message come up.  however it seems that the complete catalog was successfully exported with all images and opens properly!?
I just finished a W530 with a Adata 256gb SSD (tiny thing) in the Msata slot, a 512gb SSD in the SSD slot, and I think we'll change out the optical for a 1tb SSD.. should decide soon.  Thiis is a fantastic machine, with the Adata Msata as   system, it scored 12,544 Geekbench scores.. We're using this to run a music studio so it only has the 1600x900 screen and not the 1920x1080.. but next month I'll probably order one for myself.  Hopefully I'll get the review posted soon.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: henk on January 15, 2013, 12:18:26 pm
Hi,
Now after a week full use of LR I must say that the effort I put in is paying off. Yes, I still have to close LR and fire it up again but that is about after one hour. Just in time to get my mouse arm end eyes a rest! Including local adjustments and even a few lens corrections. So I am a bit more happy. Still think that Adobe should put in their effort to get the software much more efficient. Even if this is at the cost of new tools. First speed then tools!
Henk
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: stever on January 15, 2013, 12:27:51 pm
Steve - yes, those are the reasons i bought an SSD in the first place.  i always thought an SSD would be in my future - and it still is.  After searching the web and talking to my local tech guy, i'm waiting for the next generation and more reliability history for specific brands/models.  if my normal use benefited more from the SSD speed my decision might be different, but with the minimal improvement in LR, i can't justify the additional cost and reduced peace of mind with the SSD.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: Steve Weldon on January 17, 2013, 09:29:48 pm
Steve - yes, those are the reasons i bought an SSD in the first place.  i always thought an SSD would be in my future - and it still is.  After searching the web and talking to my local tech guy, i'm waiting for the next generation and more reliability history for specific brands/models.  if my normal use benefited more from the SSD speed my decision might be different, but with the minimal improvement in LR, i can't justify the additional cost and reduced peace of mind with the SSD.
Stever -  I really think it would benefit you to reconsider using SSD's if your goals are a more reliable drive, especially if shock and vibration figures into the equation as important to you.  If you look only for SSD failures you'll find plenty of them, but if you look closely at their failure rate compared to HDD's I think you'll find in favor of SSD's.

If cost is putting you on the  edge consider a Seagate Momentus XT 750gb for about $129.. They're significantly better performers than regular HDD's and for a few bucks more.

Curious, is your 500gb SSD with your T340 you speak of the Crucial M4?  I used to be a huge advocate for Crucial and still have a couple of their C300's in use today.. ALL without defects, while the forums were full of issues with both (M4 and C300) related to firmware issues.  The C300's were riding the first consumer wave of high performance SSD's and my firmware bricked mine too.. almost forgot about it.  Since I haven't had an SSD fail in something like 150-200 (sloppy guess) of them, or for that matter an HDD in the same time frame.   Anyway, my question was if the M4 was the 500gb model in your T340, did it come that way from Lenovo or did you add it after the purchase?  Lenovo wouldn't tell me what SSD's models they were offering, only if it was SATA II or SATA III and capacity where the W530 is concerned.   If you want the most reliable SSD then consider the Intel 520, it's more/better validated than anything else it competes against.

Btw -  I finished the review on the W530 (http://www.bangkokimages.com/Articles/Equipment/entryid/1211/Lenovo-W530-Thinkpad-Laptop-Workstation-w-Adata256gb-X300-MSATA-SATAIII-6gbps-SSD.aspx).  I think your T340 is similar enough where some of the information might be useful.
Title: Re: Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom
Post by: leuallen on January 18, 2013, 04:18:31 am
I have two Crucial M4's in my system. There is a firmware bug that causes the drive to to fail after about 5400 hours. The drive will run for one hour then crash. There is a firmware update available that fixes the problem. I applied it to my drives and all is now well.

Larry