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Author Topic: Lightroom painfully slow working over NAS  (Read 13064 times)

rsmith

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Lightroom painfully slow working over NAS
« on: April 23, 2008, 07:14:06 pm »

I recently got a Network Attached Server, when working off of the NAS importing and file transferring works at a reasonable speed but trying to edit and save metadata or save a new version of an existing file on the NAS is extremely slow. (1min per file on metadata updates)

hardware specs:
2x 5160 @ 3.0GHz Intel Xeon duo processors
8gb ram
Vista 64bit
nvidia GeForce 8800 GT

network
T1 lan ~1500kbps
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John.Murray

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Lightroom painfully slow working over NAS
« Reply #1 on: April 23, 2008, 07:33:39 pm »

Your Local Area Network is running at 1.54Mbs???  Or is that your Internet Connection?

Although you *can* store your images on a network drive, LR's database must reside on a local drive.  You might consider moving your images to a locally connected drive, and use NAS for backup . . . .
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Nat Coalson

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Lightroom painfully slow working over NAS
« Reply #2 on: April 24, 2008, 12:24:26 am »

Best not to work off any network drives in LR. Only USB 2 or Firewire 800 - only local drives..... this also makes your photo library more portable, a good thing.
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Nathaniel Coalson
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DavidB

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Lightroom painfully slow working over NAS
« Reply #3 on: April 24, 2008, 03:11:42 am »

For a while I've had ~28,000 images accessed through LR across a gigabit LAN to a ReadyNAS (from my Macs).  About as many again on local (Firewire RAID) disks.  On the whole it's been reasonable to work with the NAS, but while the data throughput is comparable to FW400 (i.e. faster than USB2) the directory lookups have been significantly slower.
With a NAS there are lots of issues/variables: the performance of the NAS software and hardware; the per-packet latencies introduced by the networking hardware you're using; the throughput/bandwidth of the network; the per-file latencies introduced by whatever networking protocol you're using; etc.
Local disk has very low latencies, and will almost always be faster, especially when dealing with lots of files.

1 minute per file does sound as though your NAS setup has serious issues though...


I've recently migrated my working set of images off the NAS to other RAID storage in search of more speed, but a NAS can work OK.
Quote
Best not to work off any network drives in LR. Only USB 2 or Firewire 800 - only local drives..... this also makes your photo library more portable, a good thing.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=191548\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Actually, I'd recommend direct (S/PATA and SCSI) drives, FW800, FW400, then USB2, in that order of preference.  But anyway...
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LoisWakeman

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Lightroom painfully slow working over NAS
« Reply #4 on: April 24, 2008, 04:13:10 am »

We bought a new laptop with Vista (pre SP1), and the network copy performance (over our gigabit LAN) was so appallingly slow that we installed XP over the top.

We tried all the suggested fixes re IPV6 etc. and it was still estimating 11 days to copy the personal data from the old laptop, which is why we gave up.

Have you installed SP1? I don't know if that improves performance.

Generally, it isn't advised to work on remote copies in any application, as interruptions in traffic (more common with wireless of course) can screw things up.
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colinb

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Lightroom painfully slow working over NAS
« Reply #5 on: April 24, 2008, 04:40:03 am »

Quote
network
T1 lan ~1500kbps
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=191500\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

If you didn't mistype that, then it is quite likely that it is the root of the problem. Are you really connecting using a T1? If so, then you're not using a LAN. T1 is [pretty ancient] Wide Area Network [WAN] technology. It has different latency and bandwidth behavior to that found in a LAN. Most wired LANs these days are running at 10/100/1000 Mbs.

If you're really running a T1 between your computer and your NAS then its reasonable to expect poor performance. Long latency especially means that any operation that doesn't take place in a oner, but it broken into smaller transactions with some kind of acknowledgement for each, will necessarily run quite slowly.

c
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rsmith

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Lightroom painfully slow working over NAS
« Reply #6 on: April 24, 2008, 11:13:54 am »

I believe our network is T1 but I am not positive on this, I will have to get in touch more with IT about this...they are much slower then you guys though

1.5 mbps is our internet connection speed, the NAS is in a separate building so I think must be running through this connection(although I might be wrong again, Im just a photo guy not IT savy).  This morning working off of ithe NAS everything is running smooth, most likely because there is no traffic on our network.  Does this mean that our upstream on the internet connection is just getting too overloaded during peak hours?
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seangirard

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Lightroom painfully slow working over NAS
« Reply #7 on: April 24, 2008, 12:18:28 pm »

If you're connecting to your NAS in another building over a T1 that is more of  a WAN setup (as someone else mentioned) - WAN stands for Wide Area Network as opposed to LAN, a Local Area Network. A T1 could definitely get saturated to the point where it might perform alright during off hours and crawl during peak hours.

I have found storing images on a NAS on a gigabit switched network pretty fast; maybe similar performance to using a USB2 drive.

Your best bet probably is to work on local storage and put some kind of backup policy in place that would run at night, etc. IT might not like that idea if these images are central to your line of business but from your description of the environment you have something will have to change for you to be productive.

Quote
I believe our network is T1 but I am not positive on this, I will have to get in touch more with IT about this...they are much slower then you guys though

1.5 mbps is our internet connection speed, the NAS is in a separate building so I think must be running through this connection(although I might be wrong again, Im just a photo guy not IT savy).  This morning working off of ithe NAS everything is running smooth, most likely because there is no traffic on our network.  Does this mean that our upstream on the internet connection is just getting too overloaded during peak hours?
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=191618\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
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rdonson

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Lightroom painfully slow working over NAS
« Reply #8 on: May 01, 2008, 11:48:10 am »

Quote
I believe our network is T1 but I am not positive on this, I will have to get in touch more with IT about this...they are much slower then you guys though

1.5 mbps is our internet connection speed, the NAS is in a separate building so I think must be running through this connection(although I might be wrong again, Im just a photo guy not IT savy).  This morning working off of ithe NAS everything is running smooth, most likely because there is no traffic on our network.  Does this mean that our upstream on the internet connection is just getting too overloaded during peak hours?
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=191618\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

As Sean points out, T1 data lines are generally used to connect to the internet.  Your internal network is most likely a 10 or 100 Mb ethernet.  Unless.... as Sean points out, you're using a T1 to get to wherever your NAS is.

Your IT guys probably need to give you a better idea of your network topology.
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Regards,
Ron

BernardLanguillier

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Lightroom painfully slow working over NAS
« Reply #9 on: May 02, 2008, 09:28:24 am »

Fast read access is essential for most modern imaging applications. Lightroom is one example, Bridge is another. Add to that Capture one, DxO, PTgui,...

I have personnally given up on NAS for live storage more than one year ago. NAS remains the best solution for back up though.

Cheers,
Bernard
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