Lightroom slowing down after lots of image work

[Josh-H]

Has anyone else noticed Lightroom slowing way down after a significant amount of metadata or processing work? Im finding it just chugs after a couple of days of heavy work and needs restarting. Not a RAM or processor issue as both have plenty of headroom on my system. Seems peculiar to the recent update for me....Not had this issue before.

[john beardsworth]

Not seen this, but optimise the catalogue.

John

[fdisilvestro]

Try increasing or purging the Camera Raw cache

[rdonson]

Yes, I've noticed this for years.  I think it got worse with Lr 4.  It's quite evident for me after heavy use of the Develop module on a large number of photos.  Especially localized adjustments.  Anyway, there's a simple cure.  Exit Lr and then reopen.  I don't know if the source of the problem is memory leaks or just a lot of caching in Lr. 

[Josh-H]

Yes, I've noticed this for years.  I think it got worse with Lr 4.  It's quite evident for me after heavy use of the Develop module on a large number of photos.  Especially localized adjustments.  Anyway, there's a simple cure.  Exit Lr and then reopen.  I don't know if the source of the problem is memory leaks or just a lot of caching in Lr.

Yes agreed.

Restarting does solve the problem. Optimising the catalogue does not.

[rick_k]

Yes I've notice for years that lightroom does not like to be left open. I restart it every day I sit down intending to do an extended edit session and have it set to re-optimize the catalog after backup on shutdown to try and help that.

Another thing the bothers me is it also get painful if you make a decent number of adjustments to one image. I've got one image of Eilean Donan that I needed to work the sky in the image a lot and then refine the border between the sky and ridgeline/treeline with many small additions to eliminate the halo effect. After this it was taking minutes of all 8 cores pegged 100% just to switch between the develop and library modules. I was/am extremely frustrated. I ended up taking the image to PS CC saving it as tif and then completing the work in LR on the tif image because the RAW + LR corrections was toasting my system.

[jrp]

On my MacBook Pro I usually quit lightroom explicitly when I've finished using it as it seems to consume power, even when it is doing nothing in the background.

[mbaginy]

Similar to Ron, I've experienced slower processing since LR4.  But since the I've also upgraded cameras, maybe some of the slowing can be attributed to the larger file sizes.  So I'm unsure where the reason is to be found.

[Tim Lookingbill]

Restarting LR to get back speed and performance might have to do with the OS on some systems cleaning house. I know with Mac OS X there are cron scripts that have to run at 3AM daily, weekly and monthly as long as the computer is left on or put to sleep at night and wakened in the morning. A complete system shutdown and restart will prevent this cleaning house to be postponed to the next available 3AM session.

This may rearrange the furniture for LR processes that may or may not be held in cache and require a refresher so it can find stuff with a restart.

Not sure, computers have become so complex making it nearly impossible to point to one causality. It could be anything including the position of the moon in the night sky.

[john beardsworth]

See this troubleshooting page and this page on optimizing performance. Optimizing the catalogue is often the best first call, and updating the graphics driver is another, but Lightroom stresses many areas of the diverse systems on which it is run.

[rdonson]

Good point, John.  Under catalog settings I have chosen to backup the catalog once a day as I exit Lightroom.  I have further chosen the options to test the integrity of the catalog before backing up and optimizing the catalog after backing up. 

I still experience the slow downs as I described where simply exiting Lightroom and restarting it have restored its performance.  I observe this whether or not the catalog is optimized.  I have also observed that the slowdowns are far less noticeable when running on a machine with an SSD instead or a hard disk for the boot drive. 

The phenomenon is quite prevalent when I shoot sporting events.  I generally have 1-2 thousand photos that I will work through before I'm finished and upload the final selected photos to SmugMug.

Perhaps it's time for Adobe to have an update that focuses on performance improvements.  Either that or recommend that for performance we all run Core i7 processors and SSDs.   

[nemophoto]

I, too, have had this issue for years with Lightroom. It's not usual for me to have to started Lightroom a couple times a day when doing heavy work. My desktop PC is relatively fast FX9590 with 32GB of RAM, and other than Photoshop, don't run anything else other than Outlook when editing to maximize RAM usage. And I still have issues. My notebook is brought to it's knees fairly quickly (though I rarely use it for any serious editing). I'm about to upgrade it from 8GB RAM to the max of 16GB. (My sole drive on the notebook is a 750GB Samsung SSD and my primary drive on the desktop is a 500GB SSD for the OS, so I don't believe that's the issue.)

In general, I've found that Adobe still is plagued by memory leak issues with it's software. Meaning, rather releasing RAM as it is no longer needed, it hogs more and more. Photoshop is a modicum better than it was, but I still have issue with that as well and have to restart the program a couple times during the day.

[westfreeman]

I have always quit after a big session of use and then things are back up and fine afterwards
I am one of many who think this program is great but needs a speed boost of some sort.  I guess I also need to make sure what is also running while using Lightroom.