OK.My idea was to try to get a thread going here which would draw together some of the more practical tips available on Luminous Landscape and Adobe Lightroom User to User Forum. Some invaluable 'discoveries' have been made since v 1.1 shipped, but these are scattered all over the place and are usually unearthed by accident rather than by design. Many of them relate to the speed issue and how to squeeze the maximum performance out of LR pending the next update which, according to Jeff Shewe on this site, will be soon.
As a start, here are some of the tips I've managed to pick up, thanks to very helpful replies to my queries from a variety of uses on Luminous Landscape. Bear in mind I use a PC. Also bear in mind that not everybody is a computer techie - many users just want to drive the beast without fiddling about under the hood and making things worse.
So, as a start, untick the XMP box in preferences for a smoother performance, and then consider these:
Richowens wrote:
What made the most difference for me was to change XP to performance rather than appearance. You can do this by going to Control Panel>System>Advanced tab and check to favor programs. This will revert XP to the Classic windows appearance but will allow programs to run much smoother. Myself, I prefer smooth to pretty and gee whiz any day.
I was getting crashes and messages that "Lightroom must close" constantly, often with MSCVR80.dll errors. This stopped that behavior and along with defragging my hard drives has LR running very smoothly.
richowens.smugmug.com
Then, Joh.Murray came to the rescue with this.
I would recommend that you let Windows determine pagefile size - *but* after defragging (which automatically loads startup drivers, etc at the head of the disk) be sure to defrag your pagefile:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysintern...PageDefrag.mspxAlso, take a hard look at the number processes running on your system, mine which also hosts a Visual Studio Programming environment, including a local copy of SQL totals 36. A handy utility that will identify *everything* that loads at startup is AutoRuns:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysintern...s/Autoruns.mspxHandy for eliminating Quicktime, Adobe Reader, Real Player, Java Update, Quickbooks, etc etc etc from loading at startup.
imagesbymurray.com
And John Murray again:
The Autoruns webpage describes how to filter the displayed list to "non-microsoft" entries only - I'd recommend you start there, uncheck *only* process you are sure about. Anything above HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Services is worth a look:
The PageDefrag util is pretty easy - just run it *after* you defrag your hard drive:
Start Menu | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | Disk Defragmenter
wolfnowl came up with this idea:
Assuming you're running XP, try this. Close all running programs. Do the three finger salute (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and a window will pop up that says 'Windows Task Manager'. The second tab from the left says 'Processes'. Click on that tab. At the bottom left it will tell you how many processes are running. If it's more than about 50 you probably have some unnecessary processes running. These processes CAN include anything from necessary Windows processes to file loaders and even (possibly) to viruses and trojans. Now there are ways to turn off or even delete those processes, but it's not something you can do without knowing what you're doing or you risk turning your computer into a large paperweight.
Joh.Murray in response to a user's query on defrag:
Windows defrag ignores both the pagefile and the registry hive files.
You *can* move, or even turn the Pagefile off, then defrag. What you end up with is the pagefile physically located after all (currently defragged) system data; nothing better or worse than just leaving it alone. Putting the pagfile on another spindle (spindle meaning another physical drive, *not* another partition on the same disk) makes great sense only if that drive is *not* sharing controller bandwidth with the system drive. In other words two drives sharing the same SATA hub, or IDE cable will show no performance increase by moving the pagefile to that second drive.
If you *really* want to get anal - you can image a windows installation, reserving enough space for the swap file at the head of the drive - problem is - what happens if you change the amount of system memory? When XP was in beta, MS had a utility called bootvis.exe that analyzed system boot time including driver loading etc. I found the location of the swap file on the system drive made little or no difference, as long as the file itself is contiguous.
Getting back to the subject here - having sufficient RAM is orders of magnitudes more desirable than having your system begin to page chunks of memory out to a drive. If your system is paging, it will make little or no difference where your swap file is - it's gonna be s-l-o-w!!!
Finally - I'm *not* talking at *all* about Photoshop scratch files here - thats another subject entirely.
Pagedefrag runs outside of the Windows Kernel, like checkdisk.
gunnar1 found one of the tips helpful:
Rich's suggestion to revert to Windows Classic worked wonders for me. It eliminated virtually all of the issues that I was having with Lightroom. I still intend on upgrading the amount of RAM from 2G to 4G though.
This is the kind of thing I have in mind - anybody who has a tip THAT WORKS feel free to chip in here.
