After I read through these replies and comments I decided to try something. I have a Windows 7 64bit machine with 8GB memory. I disabled the swap file, rebooted and the performance increase in extraordinary (at least for me) So I'd be interested in what others findings are.
Well, disabling the Win 7 swap file did not improve things for me. No difference either way. Pondering this issue further, with the admittedly small amount of LR3 experience I have so far, the situation seems so confused and contradictory I am not surprised that the Adobe gurus here are keeping quiet about it at present. But there is no doubt that some people (including me)
are experiencing serious peformance and stability isues with LR 3.0. Given the vast range of potential hardware/OS/platform combinations there are out there, this is not altogether surprising, perhaps. Some ideas of mine to chuck onto the table -
* LR3 and ACR 6.1 use the same underlying process engine and code. And ACR users are reporting the same sort of problems -
http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....=43622&st=0Some ACR users are suggesting that the only way around the problem is to apply lens corrections as the very last step in the editing process.
* The LR3 betas ran fine (perhaps a little more sluggish than 2.7). The only radically new piece of code in the LR3 release is the lens and perspective corrections, which were not publically beta tested (but presumably alpha tested). The nasty things on my PC only seem to happen when the lens correction panel is in use. One interesting indicator of this is that the CA correction is now brain-dead on my PC, not responding instantly to the slider, even with nothing else turned on. In 2.7 this was always real-time interactive.
* I have recently upgraded my PC hardware (laptops). The previous machine was really poorly specified by present standards - old core2 duo processor, only 1.5GB RAM, slow and small HD, and Win XP SP2. But it was still perfectly quick enough and stable with my Hassy 39MP files and running LR 2.6. It also ran the LR3 betas just fine. My new laptop is not by any means state of the art, but is pretty typical of the average box these days - Win 7 64 bit, 2.1 Ghz dual-core, 4GB RAM, 500MB HD which is twice as quick as the previous one. Everything else
except LR is blazingly fast on this new machine compared with the old one - but LR3 is a dog.
* Why are some people reporting
no performance issues, across both the Mac and Windows platforms, whereas other people are? Is it that they do not use lens or perspective corrections? Are they applying lens corrections last in the process flow? Are they processing much smaller RAW files than me? (MF 39MP Hasselblad files).
This is just my opinion, but I do not think that adding SSDs, splitting the cache and catalog over separate drives etc etc is really dealing with the problem. All it is probably doing is masking it. I reckon there is something pretty radically wrong with the code optimisation in LR3 - especially when you consider that something as huge and complex as CS5 runs happily on a vast range of hardware.
Unfortunately, those who really know something about all this will be unable to comment. But I would expect a 3.1 or 3.2 to be quite a radical upgrade. In the meantime, quite a few of us are acting as beta testers, and paying for the privilege
John