Poor performance in the Develop module on retina iMac

[bbrantley]

I've read elsewhere of folks also having sluggish performance in LR Develop, but on my retina iMac it's about the same as it was on my previous MP.  Maybe a tiny bit chunkier, but certainly not enough to even consider downrezzing for performance.    These are with 36mp files.

It's weird that some people are experiencing huge slowdown and others aren't.  I'm glad I'm in the latter camp, because there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it, and I know it would drive me nuts.

[bbrantley]

I would like to revise my statement.  After some much more serious work in LR, I am seeing significant slowdown in a number of areas in Develop while at 5k resolution.  Interestingly, some similar-sized images seem to do better than others.  

There are some clear problem spots/culprits.

For example, toggling soft proofing on and off ("S") triggers occasional beach balls and does not reliably use the same amount of time on each cycle.  This is definitely suggests that something is amiss, because it should take rough the same time once in steady state.  I don't see any disk activity (paging out memory, re-loading the raw file) that would serve to inject random delays.  It's weird.

Spot removal, always one of the more expensive/slow tools, performs especially poorly.  Executing an undo on a spot removal sometimes takes 5 seconds or more.

I think Adobe definitely has some work to do.  I'm a little surprised this made it through QA

[graeme]

I would like to revise my statement.  After some much more serious work in LR, I am seeing significant slowdown in a number of areas in Develop while at 5k resolution.  Interestingly, some similar-sized images seem to do better than others.  

There are some clear problem spots/culprits.

For example, toggling soft proofing on and off ("S") triggers occasional beach balls and does not reliably use the same amount of time on each cycle.  This is definitely suggests that something is amiss, because it should take rough the same time once in steady state.  I don't see any disk activity (paging out memory, re-loading the raw file) that would serve to inject random delays.  It's weird.

Spot removal, always one of the more expensive/slow tools, performs especially poorly.  Executing an undo on a spot removal sometimes takes 5 seconds or more.

I think Adobe definitely has some work to do.  I'm a little surprised this made it through QA

Have you tried increasing the cache size to 100GB ( Prefs - File Handling - Camera raw Cache )? I've seen this fix suggested on several forums.  Maybe reset the pram as well.

We're pretty close to buying a Retina imac for Lightroom / Photoshop / Illustrator use ( we'd go for the 4g i7 with the Radeon R9 M295X 4GB GDDR5 graphics option ) but the persistent complaints about Lightroom performance are making me nervous.

Am also wondering how well the retina imac / yosemite combination will play with Photoshop / Illustrator CS5.

[bbrantley]

Have you tried increasing the cache size to 100GB ( Prefs - File Handling - Camera raw Cache )? I've seen this fix suggested on several forums.

I saw this and tried it, but I don't see any difference.  I suspect those people were having other (additional) performance issues on top of the baseline ones.

Maybe reset the pram as well.

This is on a brand new iMac with essentially nothing but LR installed.  "Reset PRAM" is already one of those classic "take an aspirin and see how you feel in the morning", placebo-effect, I-have-no-idea-why-but-let's-try-it things that almost never actually does anything in normal situations.  So to have a chance of doing anything on a brand new machine is, well, pretty unlikely.  Just my opinion. 

[graeme]

This is on a brand new iMac with essentially nothing but LR installed.  "Reset PRAM" is already one of those classic "take an aspirin and see how you feel in the morning", placebo-effect, I-have-no-idea-why-but-let's-try-it things that almost never actually does anything in normal situations.  So to have a chance of doing anything on a brand new machine is, well, pretty unlikely.  Just my opinion. 

I agree. I just saw it mentioned on another forum & the poster insisted that his retina imac / adobe issues had cleared up after doing this. I won't suggest that you 'Repair Permissions'.

Good luck with sorting out your problems.

I think I'll hang fire on buying one of these beasts, I'm reading horror stories about Illustrator performance too. Sounds like a great computer which is exposing some failings in Adobe software.

Graeme

[bbrantley]

I won't suggest that you 'Repair Permissions'.

I thought about mentioning repair perms, but I decided I'd ranted enough. 

I think I'll hang fire on buying one of these beasts, I'm reading horror stories about Illustrator performance too. Sounds like a great computer which is exposing some failings in Adobe software.

I suspect they can fix at least some of them, even without moving to the GPU.  At the same time, 4x pixels is a lot.

[graeme]

I hope no one minds me bumping this thread.

I'm just wondering if anyone has any new thoughts / experiences / info on this issue. Checking other forums out, it seems that some users are affected much more than others.

I could really do with a faster mac at the moment: The retina imac sounds like a great buy if Lightroom will run well on it.

Graeme

[KarlGohl]

To those who posted above saying they have poor performance in LR Develop module on a 5K iMac: if you have tried LR6, has the ability to use the GPU improved the performance?  I have a friend who is trying to decide between retina and non-retina iMac, so would like we'd like to know.  Thanks in advance.

Karl

[FredT]

To those who posted above saying they have poor performance in LR Develop module on a 5K iMac: if you have tried LR6, has the ability to use the GPU improved the performance?  I have a friend who is trying to decide between retina and non-retina iMac, so would like we'd like to know.  Thanks in advance.

Karl

Yes, performance has been dramatically improved.