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Author Topic: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?  (Read 25594 times)

Farmer

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #60 on: March 07, 2012, 10:13:03 pm »

Compared to what ? the beta ?

I don't think I've read one comment anywhere yet saying responsiveness of LR4 is better than LR3, but I've read loads of complaints about the sluggishness of the UI in LR4. Adobe have some serious code optimisation to do before Lightroom becomes a slick tool again, assuming that's possible with the new process at all.

That's because people rarely bother to come to the web and tell everyone how happy they are or how something is not a problem.

I'm not finding any performance issues with LR4 on a relatively old machine (3 year old PC).  I'm not a heavy user with massive files and my system is nicely optimised, but I'd be surprised that there was really any particularly performance hit for anyone based on my experience.
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Rhossydd

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #61 on: March 08, 2012, 02:40:12 am »

That's because people rarely bother to come to the web and tell everyone how happy they are or how something is not a problem.
Quote
Not quite true, there are enough people posting "awesome". I've posted already how wll some aspects have worked too.
I'm not finding any performance issues with LR4 on a relatively old machine (3 year old PC).  I'm not a heavy user with massive files.....
Well you're either lucky, or you haven't done enough with it to spot the problems yet. No one seems to be posting 'wow it runs so much faster than LR3' messages.

What's disappointing is how little speed and responsiveness is valued in software design generally these days. It's all features, features, features; it runs too slow ? just buy a faster computer.
Adobe can do it. The Mercury playback engine in Premiere Pro 5.5 is a fine example.
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mac_paolo

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #62 on: March 08, 2012, 04:00:34 am »

Hi folks, with Lr 4 we have some more advanced caching systems in place (esp. in Develop) which can increase memory usage some ... on the other hand, you should experience overall improved responsiveness.  This is of course a delicate balance and tradeoff.
Is it related to the new option under DNG convert settings to store that extra data or is the speed improvement there anyway when working with proprietary raw files?
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Farmer

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #63 on: March 08, 2012, 04:11:12 am »

I'm not finding any performance issues with LR4 on a relatively old machine (3 year old PC).  I'm not a heavy user with massive files.....
Well you're either lucky, or you haven't done enough with it to spot the problems yet. No one seems to be posting 'wow it runs so much faster than LR3' messages.

What's disappointing is how little speed and responsiveness is valued in software design generally these days. It's all features, features, features; it runs too slow ? just buy a faster computer.
Adobe can do it. The Mercury playback engine in Premiere Pro 5.5 is a fine example.

I don't think it runs faster, overall, but I'm not hitting any sudden bottlenecks compared to LR3.  And the idea that software take advantage of faster hardware is not unreasonable and it's wrong to suggest that it's just badly written or bloated etc because they don't have to optimise due to new hardware.

I also suspect that a point release will probably see some further refinement - that's usually the way.
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hjulenissen

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #64 on: March 08, 2012, 04:33:02 am »

What's disappointing is how little speed and responsiveness is valued in software design generally these days. It's all features, features, features; it runs too slow ? just buy a faster computer.
Adobe can do it. The Mercury playback engine in Premiere Pro 5.5 is a fine example.
How much image quality loss are you willing to see for a 2x speed improvement? I am sure that demosaic, noise reduction, tonemapping etc can be done in a simpler, faster fashion.

-h
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jjj

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #65 on: March 08, 2012, 06:42:22 am »

How much image quality loss are you willing to see for a 2x speed improvement? I am sure that demosaic, noise reduction, tonemapping etc can be done in a simpler, faster fashion.
And I'm sure that if that were indeed possible, Adobe would have done just that. As being able to advertise a doubling in speed would be a great selling point.
The last two versions of LR introduces much more powerful developing features, this sort of thing tends to need more grunt power. Maybe in the next version the process engine will not be altered and instead it will be sped up.
« Last Edit: March 08, 2012, 06:47:29 am by jjj »
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jjj

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #66 on: March 08, 2012, 06:44:59 am »

What's disappointing is how little speed and responsiveness is valued in software design generally these days. It's all features, features, features; it runs too slow ? just buy a faster computer.
Adobe can do it. The Mercury playback engine in Premiere Pro 5.5 is a fine example.
Except it is just the opposite, that's a hardware solution, one only available to PC users that use specific video cards.

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hjulenissen

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #67 on: March 08, 2012, 07:04:29 am »

And I'm sure that if that were indeed possible, Adobe would have done just that. As being able to advertise a doubling in speed would be a great selling point.
I am confident that it is possible to do raw development faster than Lightroom by sacrificing image quality, and that Adobe would sell less if they did.

-h
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Rhossydd

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #68 on: March 08, 2012, 04:42:24 pm »

And I'm sure that if that were indeed possible, Adobe would have done just that.
I'm afraid that's a rather naive point of view.
In the past we've seen early versions of LR heavily criticised for performance issues and fixes for them have been rolled out later. The issues do get eventually fixed and resolved, but they don't help sell to the initial upgraders.
I strongly suspect that the marketing side of Adobe put dead lines for release that are absolutely adhered to pretty much regardless of the state of the software. I'd guess the deadlines are for the release of the public beta and a fixed release date that would only be missed if a very major problem was uncovered with the beta program. After it's released there's the frantic period of fixing all the bugs that have come to light and trying to make good all the features that they planned, but didn't have time to add to the .0 version. An example of that might be how no other book publisher's settings made it into 4.0, but will arrive in a future update.
It must be grim to be an Adobe software engineer knowing a product is being released before it's fully sorted and not reaching it's full potential, but of course no can ever admit that publicly.
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Rhossydd

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #69 on: March 08, 2012, 04:48:38 pm »

How much image quality loss are you willing to see for a 2x speed improvement?
There's always a balancing act between quality and speed.
The problem at the moment is that the sluggishness of the UI in develop makes it too awkward to get the absolute best from the software.
There have been many great imaging software products that have failed to achieve their potential because of poor interfaces and usability issues, despite ultimately superior results.

Lightroom has a brilliant UI and workflow, but when it becomes too unresponsive those UI benefits become lost.
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PhotoEcosse

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #70 on: March 08, 2012, 05:27:18 pm »

Bear in mind that each successive version of Lightroom will have been developed on the assumption that users will be running it on progressively higher-resource machines. (Forget the laughable "minimum system requirements" that Adobe quote for all their products - that is merely a sales ploy).

When I upgraded from LR2 to LR3 I was, at that time, using an old PC with only a dual core 2.8GHz processor and 4Gb of RAM (only 3.2Gb of which could be used by 32-bit Windows XP). Speed was just tolerable although, if I was running Lightroom, CS5 and, say, Color Efex Pro together, it became decidedly creaky.

Just before Christmas I upgraded my PC to a quad core i7 processor and 16Gb of RAM running Windows 7 in 64-bit version. At the same time I upgraded LR to the 64-bit version 3.6. The increase in speed was fantastic.

Now that I have upgraded LR to v.4, I notice no reduction in speed compared to v.3.6 but I hate to think what it might have been like on my old obsolete machine.

It really is horses for courses. You can't expect to run 2012 software on, say, a 2010 computer and get reasonable results.

I guess the real test, for me, will be in the next few weeks when I start processing 70Mb Raw files from the Nikon D800
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Schewe

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #71 on: March 08, 2012, 08:03:25 pm »

Bear in mind that each successive version of Lightroom will have been developed on the assumption that users will be running it on progressively higher-resource machines. (Forget the laughable "minimum system requirements" that Adobe quote for all their products - that is merely a sales ploy).

Not a sales ploy...it's simply the lowest hardware that Adobe tests against and officially supports. More is always better.

So, in my experience, here's the breakdown of LR bottlenecks...it's similar to Photoshop but importantly different.

Top of the ladder is processor speed...

The second is multi cores (although that tops out quickly, 2 cores is almost 2x better than single core but 4 cores is not nearly 4x, more like 2.5-3x at best).

The third is 32 vs 64 bit processing which 64 bit being at least 20-30 % better depending on ram. If you are under 4 gigs then the difference is more like 10-15%.

Ram...but past a certain point it doesn't matter. This is really where Photoshop and Lightroom are fundamentally different. As long as you have 8-16 gigs of ram on a 64-bit machine, that's the best you can expect for Lightroom. Adding more won't help. But regarding Photoshop on 64 bit machines, more ram is indeed important. I have 32 gigs and wish for 64 gigs on my main workstation...particularly when I'm working on pans from my IQ 180 files :~(

The last bottleneck is HD speed. Lightroom is constantly reading and writing lots and lots of little files to the HD. If you drive is optimized for large block writes (like you might do for Photoshop) it may actually slow down small block reads/writes for Lightroom. Faster HDs can and do make Lightroom seem much faster.

Aside from increasing the speed of your CPU or adding cores, the three things you can do to speed up LR is go 64 bit, add ram to at least 8 gigs (16 is better if you need to run LR and Photoshop) and get really fast HDs. It's ideal if you can keep your catalog and previews on a different physical drive than your images. And it's ideal if your catalog and previews are on a really fast non-boot drive (if the OS starts paging it really slows down disk access).

SSDs can make Lightroom fly, but are expensive...stripped arrays can boost speed (as long as you back up cause stripped arrays are fragile).

Lightroom is not really bloated...it's doing a ton of little things and a few big things. The fact the programing is done in Lua is part of the performance issue...the other part is that in reality, LR is a really heavy database app with tones of UI and interface performance requirements. But I'll tell you that will not change...

So there you have it, my best suggestions for looking at speeding LR up!
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dreed

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #72 on: March 08, 2012, 08:55:18 pm »

Not a sales ploy...it's simply the lowest hardware that Adobe tests against and officially supports. More is always better.

So, in my experience, here's the breakdown of LR bottlenecks...it's similar to Photoshop but importantly different.

Top of the ladder is processor speed...

The second is multi cores (although that tops out quickly, 2 cores is almost 2x better than single core but 4 cores is not nearly 4x, more like 2.5-3x at best).

The third is 32 vs 64 bit processing which 64 bit being at least 20-30 % better depending on ram. If you are under 4 gigs then the difference is more like 10-15%.

Ram...but past a certain point it doesn't matter. This is really where Photoshop and Lightroom are fundamentally different. As long as you have 8-16 gigs of ram on a 64-bit machine, that's the best you can expect for Lightroom. Adding more won't help. But regarding Photoshop on 64 bit machines, more ram is indeed important. I have 32 gigs and wish for 64 gigs on my main workstation...particularly when I'm working on pans from my IQ 180 files :~(
...

In there somewhere needs to be bus speed of the system - that's the speed at which data is sent to/from RAM to the CPU.

This does not always increase with CPU speed.

If you were to look at this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microprocessors
Under the column "Memory", you will see entries such as "3 × DDR3-1066" or "2 × DDR3-1333".

If you were to compare two systems that each had the same amount CPU speed, you should expect that the one with the "DDR3-1333" will be about 33% faster than the one with "DDR3-1066".

The CPU can only work as fast as data can be delivered to it.
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Schewe

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #73 on: March 08, 2012, 09:18:38 pm »

If you were to compare two systems that each had the same amount CPU speed, you should expect that the one with the "DDR3-1333" will be about 33% faster than the one with "DDR3-1066".

The CPU can only work as fast as data can be delivered to it.

True but I have no specific knowledge about bus speed other than I'm currently using a Mac RAID card for super fast disk speeds...

But don't forget that LR isn't nearly as ram hungry as Photoshop is and depends on ram to a lessor degree.
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Rhossydd

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #74 on: March 09, 2012, 02:24:45 am »

You can't expect to run 2012 software on, say, a 2010 computer and get reasonable results.
That's a fundamentally bad attitude on many levels.

Really good coding is making software faster and more reliable on the same platform. Letting things effectively run slower and slower just isn't elegant coding.

For the end user why should we have to spend an additional £500+ on new hardware every time there's a software upgrade ?
Are the requested features really so resource hungry that has to necessary ? I doubt it. It's especially galling when really simple things get ignored that really can't cost anything in software complexity to add eg a keyboard short cut for the purple label, how hard is that ?

Why should we expect to have to junk expensive working hardware so often ? It's not exactly great for the environment.
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Farmer

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #75 on: March 09, 2012, 02:54:49 am »

You don't have to junk anything - you don't have to upgrade the software.

It's unreasonable to tell developers that they can't leverage more powerful hardware with their new software.
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Phil Brown

David Eichler

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #76 on: March 09, 2012, 03:30:26 am »

That's a fundamentally bad attitude on many levels.

Really good coding is making software faster and more reliable on the same platform. Letting things effectively run slower and slower just isn't elegant coding.

For the end user why should we have to spend an additional £500+ on new hardware every time there's a software upgrade ?
Are the requested features really so resource hungry that has to necessary ? I doubt it. It's especially galling when really simple things get ignored that really can't cost anything in software complexity to add eg a keyboard short cut for the purple label, how hard is that ?

Why should we expect to have to junk expensive working hardware so often ? It's not exactly great for the environment.

No one is forcing you to upgrade if you have reasonably recent equipment and software. Can always try out the software before buying, to see if it works with your system. LR3/PS5 is pretty damn powerful, high quality software. However, one thing I learned from my experience with Lightroom 3 is that the functionality with hardware that is not the latest and   greatest can be improved. Until LR 3.5, LR3 was very slow with my system (iMac 2-core, 2.66 ghz, 8gb RAM) when using the lens correction features. Now it works fine. LR4 is again seeming a bit unresponsive after many edits and using the lens correction. The clone tool especially. However, still not nearly as bad as early LR3. Hoping they fix LR4 for this as well. By the way, does the Mac OS have any effect here? I am on 10.6.8 and have so far been reluctant to move to 10.7 since everything seemed okay and I really didn't need what OSX 10.7 had to offer.
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hjulenissen

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #77 on: March 09, 2012, 04:46:50 am »

If you were to compare two systems that each had the same amount CPU speed, you should expect that the one with the "DDR3-1333" will be about 33% faster than the one with "DDR3-1066".
This is not generally true. Will your car go twice as fast if you reduce its wind drag to 1/2?

-h
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stamper

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #78 on: March 09, 2012, 05:02:26 am »

I suspect that it wouldn't matter how fast Adobe could make it some wouldn't be happy? Even if it took off out of your monitor and took to the skies some would want a repeat so they could time it. ::)

citro

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Re: Does LR4 need to go on a diet?
« Reply #79 on: March 09, 2012, 11:48:52 am »

I don't really think diet is a good word.

My situation: I installed Lightroom 4 (trial), and converted my catalog (18000+ RAWs 10MP). I regenerated standard previews. I enabled only library, develop and print modules.

After some moderate use (just occasional 1-2 gradients on image, some brush adjustments), I noticed significant slowdowns (non-responsive sliders, delayed refresh or no image generation at all). On most pictures I adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, clarity, saturation and vibrance.

I checked memory usage - 1GB, max. 1.5GB. LR 3.6 was never a speed champ on my machine, but it was much better than LR4. Stopping and restarting the program didn't help, restarting the PC helped a little (apparently).

I like 2012 Process Version and workflow, but LR4 needs significant performance improvements.

My configuration: Win7 64bit, 6GB RAM, Intel Core2Duo E8400.
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