I've just been looking informally at how IView 3.1.1 stacks up against Lightroom. Having read some peoples comments about the performance of Lightroom.
I've used IView for 2 years as my DAM solution. Its big failing is a very poor handling of offline resources.
My set up is that I have a dual core 2.6Ghz PC overclocked to 3.25Ghz, 2Mb of RAM. My image archive is on a buffalo terastation and they are connected via a 1GHz Dlink switch.
I found that it took lightroom 8 seconds to import a folder with three large tiffs (120-200Mb) and one Jpeg. It took IView over one minute. IView does not have a loupe function, but showing a whole 120Mb tiff at 1:1 took about 25 seconds, in Lightroom it took about the same amount of time to do a 1:1 under the loupe.
I'd like to see better performance from LR in the subsequent develop module. My overall image library is about 140,000 images and so far I've only got 9000 in Lightroom. It feels as though things are already slowing down with this library size, but as I didn't record performance in any way, I can't objectively tell.
LR seems to have the potential to make IView obsolete due to its good handling of networked and offline images. Though maybe the library organisation needs some further development to handle large existing libraries.
Has anyone loaded a really large library yet?