Here We Go, More Trouble

[John R Smith]

Despite your collective goodwill and (I am sure) many crossed fingers and touching of wood, it seems my eighty quid for the LR3 Upgrade may have been sadly misplaced. I got the box in the mail yesterday, installed it in the afternoon and gave it a good testing. I ran it for several hours, re-created my catalog from scratch, gave it a clean new ACR cache, tested the perspective correction and converted several files to PV 2010. All was good, and just to be sure I ran many re-loads and re-boots. This morning things were fine, too.

Just now I decided to settle down to a bit more testing, and the first thing that happened was the dreaded CRASH as I loaded the program. Win 7 just says "Adobe Lightroom 3 has stopped working". I copied the additional information from Win 7 about the fault just in case anyone can make sense of it -

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:   APPCRASH
  Application Name:   lightroom.exe
  Application Version:   3.0.0.10
  Application Timestamp:   4bf6e72b
  Fault Module Name:   ntdll.dll
  Fault Module Version:   6.1.7600.16385
  Fault Module Timestamp:   4a5be02b
  Exception Code:   c0000005
  Exception Offset:   000000000004d256
  OS Version:   6.1.7600.2.0.0.768.3
  Locale ID:   2057
  Additional Information 1:   c9d6
  Additional Information 2:   c9d6bb6f7aa3252401ebf8ed17f16f50
  Additional Information 3:   6e76
  Additional Information 4:   6e76e979833944eaf15ef8a46f9b0ccd

This is exactly the same problem I had before with the LR3 30-day trial. The snag is, it seems totally unpredictable and random. The next load was OK. Thing is, with the trial version it would also do this while I was in the middle of an edit. I also have the very slow problems which others have reported when using an adjustment brush or spot removal. Sometimes the screen goes black and the whole PC seems to hang. All my other apps run fine, including LR2.7, and so did the LR3 betas run OK. The system is Win 7 64 bit, 4GB RAM, Intel dual core 2.1 ghz, 500MB HD.

I'm a bit despondent. And it's raining here in Cornwall. But the perspective corrction does seem very good.

John

[MBehrens]

Win 7 64 bit,
John

I forced the install of the 32-bit LR3 on my Win 7 64 PC and have found it to be much stabler. After the adobe installer expands the files to the desktop adobe folder and asks - Install or Go to the Folder - go to the folder and run the Setup32.exe. Doesn't seem to be any slower or perform any different from the 64-bit LR3.

Also if you have dual monitors with the primary monitor right and the secondary monitor to the left, wit the desktop extended - of course. LR3 crashes and mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work in this configuration. I moved my left monitor to be logically above the primary in the windows display settings, its a little odd go up to get to the monitor on the left but the mouse wheel works and crashing has minimized.

[John R Smith]

I forced the install of the 32-bit LR3 on my Win 7 64 PC and have found it to be much stabler. After the adobe installer expands the files to the desktop adobe folder and asks - Install or Go to the Folder - go to the folder and run the Setup32.exe. Doesn't seem to be any slower or perform any different from the 64-bit LR3.

That's interesting. I would have thought that this might prevent LR from using all of the memory in the PC, but I might well be off-track on this. I don't use dual monitors, so that is not an issue.

After more testing last night, the issue with very slow screen updates and apparent hanging in the develop module seems to be directly related to the use of lens corrections and perspective corrections. If you turn those off, then the adjustment brush and spot removal tools work perfectly normally.

John

[keithrsmith]

I have LR3 on Win 7 /6Gb and I have had no trouble at all.   It i spossible that you either have a bad memory module, and /or a bad video driver.  

I suggest running a memory test - theer are several downloadable , and checking the driver version.  I did have problems a while ago which were fixed by a driver update.

Keith

[Nacnud]

I've had quite a few crashes.
Crashes always seem related to large amounts of memory being chewed by LR.
I keep the Resource Monitor running and keep an eye on it (available via button on Task Manager)
I've now got into the habit of restarting LR when the memory usage gets unusually high.
New 64bit PC with 8Gb RAM.

By the way - I also prefer my LR secondary display on the left but the way I set it up is slightly different.
The left screen is the main Windows desktop and I open Lightroom on the right screen extended desktop.
Works a treat and I can keep an eye on my email etc on the left screen when I don't need LR secondary display.

[John R Smith]

Yes. I have been keeping an eye on memory usage as well. Sometimes LR3 seems to swallow all the available RAM, but in a very uncontrolled fashion, as if the program had gone into some sort of loop, with RAM cycling up and down in bursts. It may be, of course, that there is a defect either in my hardware or Win 7 setup. However, in that case it is puzzling that both beta versions of LR3 ran very solidly with no issues. On the basis of what I have seen so far, though, it would seem fair to say that -

* LR3 is much more processor intensive than vers 2x, even when performing the same operations. And when you use the lens and perspective corrections, this piles on the processor load even more. My dual-core Intel 2.1GHz is not enough to keep up.

* LR3 is much more memory hungry than vers 2x. When editing the same file in the Develop module, I would say it is using 500MB to 1GB more RAM than I was before.

John

[John R Smith]

I just had another appcrash on loading LR3, but I could not replicate it. Deliberately trying to provoke it by subsequent reboots and reloads resulted in no further problem. Later on, editing a file with Perspective Correction applied and two or three local brush adjustments, I tried to do a before/after compare. LR drew the before view but then just hung, with the other half of the screen not displaying the re-sized view. Looking at Resource Monitor, memory usage was cycling up and down between 3GB and 3.5GB, and both processors were running flat-out at 100%. I got bored with this after about 3 mins or so, and managed to get back to the Library view.

Please don't think I am just throwing stones for the sake of it here. I really like LR, in fact it has revolutionised the way I work over the past few months. And some of the new features in 3 are undoubtedly worth every penny. The perspective control, in itself, is excellent. And although I haven't tested it extensively yet, the NR is vastly improved over LR2 - the way it smooths noise in skies is magical. The actual appearance of the noise is also much more grain-like and less blotchy. So there is a lot to like.

Library view is fine. Import is quick and solid. Printing seems fine. But the Develop module seems to have a mind of its own, at least on my PC.

John

[MBehrens]

That's interesting. I would have thought that this might prevent LR from using all of the memory in the PC, but I might well be off-track on this.

Since installing the 32-bit version in my 64-bit OS (Win 7 Pro) I've eliminated all crashing. It was very bad before and could recreate a crash at will. I'm not perceiving any slow-down from this installation. Not using all available RAM? Maybe not but who cares, LR isn't that memory intensive of an app and between constantly crashing or utilizing memory - I'll take the stable environment.

I'm a software engineer for a large aero-space company and we find that there is little performance increase in 64-bit apps. If you need the memory address space its a good thing, otherwise its a lateral move to 64-bit.

Morey

[John R Smith]

Morey

Your experience is interesting. I have not tried a 32-bit install myself yet, but I may well do so. Fairly obviously, this may point to some deep-rooted problem with the LR3 code, and possibly the way it handles memory in 64-bit mode on Win 7, if it is possible to alter LR's behaviour in this way.

I am getting very strange and apparently contradictory behaviour from my installation. For the past two days, I have had no further appcrash failures on loading. This may be just a blip, or it may relate to the fact that I went through the preferences folder and deleted all references to "Lightroom 3 beta" that I could find.

However, the weird stuff in the Develop module continues. But I am getting closer to the exact area where the problem lies - specifically when lens or perspective corrections are applied. I can now repeatedly and predictably push the program into total instability, where it will just go off into the weeds in some sort of recursive loop. All I have to do is to load a specific image into the Develop module, and select "before and after" view. When this happens LR draws the "before" image, then slams both processors at 100%, memory usage oscillates violently, and LR will not respond to user input for a period of up to 3 mins, displaying a blank screen at intervals. Most users would think the program had crashed (and I thought so at first), but eventually it does recover. I can make it do this with one particular edited image, but not necessarily another. Now I have to find out exactly what the trigger for the instability is - so far it looks as if it may be something to do with snapshots.

John

[John R Smith]

Well, it now looks as if we have some answers from the Adobe website. Dan Tull is saying that, yes, there are serious bugs in the LR 3.0 release and that the LR engineering team are working on them. Presumably there will be a bugfix release in the (hopefully) near future. So we are not imagining things, there is not necessarily anything wrong with our PCs, RAM or OS or video cards, and we all just have to be patient. Fair enough.

If it is at all helpful to anyone else who like me is struggling a bit but carrying on with LR3 for the sake of the new features in the program, my testing over the weekend produced the following results -

* The situation where LR3 crashes at startup may have been caused by the LR3 beta preferences file still being in the User/Application Data/Roaming/Adobe/Lightroom folder. Deleting this seems to have fixed the problem.

* Re-installing LR3 in 32-bit mode did not work for me. I tried it, and on my Win 7 PC all that happened was that it ran even slower (as I would have expected). Very noticeably slower. I have now re-installed LR back to 64-bit.

* My problems are specifically in the Develop module when editing single images. The strange thing is, that they are completely inconsistent. Two similar photos, with the same perspective control adjustments and roughly the same number of brush adjustments, grads, spots etc, will behave differently. One image will barely edit, with frozen brushes and spot removal, the other one will be fine.

Dan Tull says - "I think there's may still some memory buildup issues in Develop to root out, especially around the caches used to improve interactive performance while brushing and spotting, but there's more analysis to be done there and as with any caching we have to be careful not to slow things down by caching too little."

* I was wrong about snapshots. They are not the culprit. The issue seems to be something to do with the way LR caches its editing data, and the way it writes this stuff back to the catalog as you work. I was able to test this with a rogue image which is guaranteed to cause trouble. I deleted the whole folder from the catalog, optimised the catalog and then re-imported the folder, forcing LR to recreate the edited image from the xmp file, not the catalog. When I opened the image again, it worked fine - for a while, until I had edited it once more for a bit.

Roll on LR 3.1  

John

[GrahamB3]

Since installing the 32-bit version in my 64-bit OS (Win 7 Pro) I've eliminated all crashing. It was very bad before and could recreate a crash at will. I'm not perceiving any slow-down from this installation. Not using all available RAM? Maybe not but who cares, LR isn't that memory intensive of an app and between constantly crashing or utilizing memory - I'll take the stable environment.

I'm a software engineer for a large aero-space company and we find that there is little performance increase in 64-bit apps. If you need the memory address space its a good thing, otherwise its a lateral move to 64-bit.

Morey

I'm using win7pro 64bit with 8GB ram. I used the LR 3 beta from day 1, and now the retail version, also from day 1 with 0 crashes.

I realize problems are exasperating, and you probably question why I choose to post a "no problems here" reply. Just to point out that LR, in 64bits, can be very stable for some.

Regarding the "need" for 64bits, I don't know what you shoot, but I'm confident my 36MB raws appreciate having as much ram available as possible. Certainly the converted 16bit 139MB Tiffs, especially when using multiple layers in Photoshop, benefit from greater than 4GB of memory.

I suspect LR, especially the 64bit version,  is revealing flaws in systems. Faulty power supplies, a bad ram chip, outdated graphics drivers, there are many causes of crashes. If your system is up to it, I can attest there's nothing inherently "buggy" with 64bit LR.

Graham

[MBehrens]

but I'm confident my 36MB raws appreciate having as much ram available as possible. Certainly the converted 16bit 139MB Tiffs, especially when using multiple layers in Photoshop, benefit from greater than 4GB of memory.
Graham

Without a doubt Graham, working with files that size the 64-bit memory space is going to be a huge advantage. But for folks working 10-15MP files it's debatable. Unlike Photoshop where you may open multiple images of that size at a time that requires a huge amount of RAM, LR is a sequential processor and only one image is ever fully loaded in the develop module. The other modules work from previews, so the RAM requirements are much lower for LR.

With LR3.2 RC out now it's evident that LR3 was not revealing any latent issues with folk's systems and had some flaws, that seem to be corrected. I'm back to LR3.2 64-bit and loving it.