Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: Slobodan Blagojevic on June 20, 2010, 11:10:57 pm
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It is simply painful... looooong seconds between initiating an action (any action) and seeing the results... and it gets worse as I work longer... when I open it, it shows about 600-700 MB of memory used, but soon expands to 2 GB which brings everything to an excruciating crawl and perpetual beach balls.
The same hardware I have was quite fine for LR2 and even LR3 Beta (under which I would attribute an occasional beach ball for some actions to the beta status). I did trash all lightroom plists and have all the latest software updates.
As for hardware, I am on iMac 24 with 3 GB (max) Intel Core 2 Duo memory, under Snow Leopard 10.6.4., running LR3 in 64-bit mode (switching to 32-bit mode does not significantly change things).
Checking web forums, I see a lot of people with the same problem, but have not come across a solution yet.
Any ideas?
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No solutions here, but I am experiencing the same problem. I'm on a high end quad core PC (Vista 64bit, 3.6GHz, 8GB RAM, Veliciprator for OS, LR Catalogs on a RAID 0 array, etc). When browsing through the catalog I've seen memory usage creep up to 100% (all 8 gigs) at which point the machine slows to a crawl. This is just doing very basic stuff like flipping from photo to photo and tagging images with 1-5 star ratings, AFTER I've let the machine generate 1:1 previews.
I think there's a serious memory leak bug in the software and am hoping that Adobe gets a fix out soon.
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Checking web forums, I see a lot of people with the same problem, but have not come across a solution yet.
Any ideas?
I don't know if this fixed it our not.. but I experienced much the same issue when I first went to LR3 and used converted indexes/previews.
I deleted all my old indexes and previews and started over with LR3 generated defaults in the location of my choice.. and no more issues.
You could try this with a small sample index/preview folder without deleting your main ones.. see if it works. Even with over 164,000 images in my current catalog things work fine now..
Not sure the new indexes/previews actually fixed the issue.. I only know I had no more problem with it after I did..
I wish you luck.
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Hi,
I have not seen any problem, but I run on a MacPro with 16 GByte of memory. I have also a Macbook with just 4 GByte, but I didn't test LR3 on that one. I'm going to use the Macbook next week and will report back what I see.
Best regards
Erik
It is simply painful... looooong seconds between initiating an action (any action) and seeing the results... and it gets worse as I work longer... when I open it, it shows about 600-700 MB of memory used, but soon expands to 2 GB which brings everything to an excruciating crawl and perpetual beach balls.
The same hardware I have was quite fine for LR2 and even LR3 Beta (under which I would attribute an occasional beach ball for some actions to the beta status). I did trash all lightroom plists and have all the latest software updates.
As for hardware, I am on iMac 24 with 3 GB (max) Intel Core 2 Duo memory, under Snow Leopard 10.6.4., running LR3 in 64-bit mode (switching to 32-bit mode does not significantly change things).
Checking web forums, I see a lot of people with the same problem, but have not come across a solution yet.
Any ideas?
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... I deleted all my old indexes and previews and started over with LR3 generated defaults in the location of my choice.. and no more issues....
Thanks for the tip. After deleting mine, I freed some 10-12 GB of disk space, but the improvement in the LR3 performance appears to be rather marginal. The memory usage still creeps up to almost 2 GB after a while. The most annoying thing is working with adjustment brushes and having to wait for long seconds until you can actually see the effect... very often, by the time you see it, you've overdone it And I am currently working with a catalogue of merely 5,000 images.
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I run a Macbook Pro 2.54 with 4 Gb memory. I did nothing more then download and install LR3 to replace my LR2. The program runs very fast with no problems. Go figure?
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Thanks for the tip. After deleting mine, I freed some 10-12 GB of disk space, but the improvement in the LR3 performance appears to be rather marginal. The memory usage still creeps up to almost 2 GB after a while. The most annoying thing is working with adjustment brushes and having to wait for long seconds until you can actually see the effect... very often, by the time you see it, you've overdone it And I am currently working with a catalogue of merely 5,000 images.
I paid more attention to your gear.. An Imac is merely a laptop processor/system in an all in one.. so I played with a couple of my laptops and catalogs of some 20,000 images.
My main workstation is an i7 running at 3.8g with 12gs of RAM, a SSD system drive, and my indexes/previews on their own drive. There is no delay with the adjustment brushes unless I build up more than 12-15 adjustment points and from there it slows down. There is also, and always has been, a 1-2 second delay before the changes show up on the second monitor. This has always been irritating and I hope they improve it some day. This system has 164,xxx images in its catalog.
My Dell Precision Mobile Workstation with 4gs of RAM, a Core 2 Duo 2.5g, 1g quatro video, mechanical hard disk.. It basically performs as you describe with a catalog of 10,000 images.
My new Lenova x201s 2.5 pound laptop.. not really a processing machine but it is fast. i7, 4gigs of RAM, SSD, and scores significantly better than the Dell above on the Windows Index.. It works great.. up to the point of 6-7 adjustment points.. and then it starts to slow down.
I also tried 2.7 and didn't notice much change from 3.0.
It appears there is a hardware factor when using LR. We've always known this but we've never talked about it much.. Since I do most of my work, and virtually all of my heavy work, on my main workstation it doesn't affect me much. But the few times I was forced to use my Precision Mobile Workstation in the field I sure did.. and an Imac mechanically is pretty much the same.. unless you have one of the brand new ones..
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I run a Macbook Pro 2.54 with 4 Gb memory. I did nothing more then download and install LR3 to replace my LR2. The program runs very fast with no problems. Go figure?
Same here! I didn't rebuild anything. I use 6GB of RAM on a 2.4GHz MacBook Pro.
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If you browse the other LR forums, including the official Adobe one and Victoria Bampton's, you will find that users are reporting a similar divergent experience with LR3. For some it runs fine, for others it is very slow. And so far there does not seem to be much of a pattern to it.
My own experience on Win7/64 with an Intel dual core 2.1 and 4GB RAM is that LR3 runs OK, but somewhat slower than 2.7.
John
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It is simply painful... looooong seconds between initiating an action (any action) and seeing the results... and it gets worse as I work longer... when I open it, it shows about 600-700 MB of memory used, but soon expands to 2 GB which brings everything to an excruciating crawl and perpetual beach balls.
The same hardware I have was quite fine for LR2 and even LR3 Beta (under which I would attribute an occasional beach ball for some actions to the beta status). I did trash all lightroom plists and have all the latest software updates.
As for hardware, I am on iMac 24 with 3 GB (max) Intel Core 2 Duo memory, under Snow Leopard 10.6.4., running LR3 in 64-bit mode (switching to 32-bit mode does not significantly change things).
Checking web forums, I see a lot of people with the same problem, but have not come across a solution yet.
Any ideas?
I have a MacPro 2.66 Quad with 13GB RAM: Some operations take longer and others are shorter. The overall feel is the same or a bit better than 2.7. However the incredible improvement in IQ makes this an exciting update for me. It seems rendering previews and exporting JPEGs takes longer and this would seem to be attributed to the more sophisticated processing of the 2010 engine---no free lunch. As for expanding memory I believe this is the normal course of events. The program has no idea what you intend to be doing at first and increases it's share of RAM as you go in order to keep as much of your work in RAM as possible. Even with several GB of free RAM available my LR3x64 will start up with less than 1GB of RAM. After bouncing around modules, painting, keywording, publishing etc the RAM usage will raise to about 4GB. If I leave it for the day it will slowly drop back down when it realizes I'm not working any more. I believe this is the nature of UNIX memory management. Frankly, between LR3 and Snow Leopard 3GB of RAM will not go fast and furious. That said I hope things will improve for you one way or the other.
David
PS When I bought my MacPro in 2006 I was sure I'd never need another Mac again just like I thought with the G4, 9600, 2ci etc. LR3 is probably the end of the line for this box. By the time LR4 comes out I'll have to pony up the cash for the latest monster tower!
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Aside from from having minimal memory, more often than not having the OS, LR3, photos AND cache on one 5400 rpm harddrive results in slowing LR v1,2,3 operations down. Of course I'm only guessing that is your setup with the iMac. Those constraints have been discussed since early Betas. As LR "grows", I can only assume (!) the problem will grow with it. I seldom read of folks that have the 'slow' problem also list their hardware as a DeskPro, 4+ gig ram, and 4-7200 rpm hard drives.
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Photo Op,
Go to the Adobe LR3 Forum and you will find plenty of folks with high end gear and complaints about lack of performance.
And it is both sides of the platform aisle about equally, PC and Mac. The slows don't seem to favor any flavor or configuration.
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for the OP:
How much free disk space do you have on the drive with the catalog and the images? I was noticing a slowdown in LR3 after being very happy with the performance of LR3b2, but after checking a bunch of different solutions out, realized I only had about 15% free space left on the external drive my images are stored on (catalog is stored on a separate drive). I got bigger disks for my images and have seen LR3 become a lot more responsive.
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I did notice that all the previews that are already drawn in catalogue are redrawn in the LR shipping version. They are not drawing that fast, I think icons drew faster in 2.7.
Performance wise, I really see a very small hit in LR 3 for the added controls in Dev module but really a few tenths of a second. Even the brush tool is working fine.
I don't use my portable though for other than capture, so the catalogue is emptied often.
The editing computer is a MacPro 9GB memory, Raid 0, enough space left for everything.
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I'm having quite similar problems to what's described here. For example, changing between different splits tone presets take several seconds to see the results. All previous versions of Lightroom never had any problems like this. Hardware is 3GHz quad-core, so shouldn't be a problem. I hope Adobe looks into this really quickly because the software is (at times) virtually unusable.
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I guess this is validation for my own personal rule never ever to buy version x.0 software. I think I'll wait for 3.3 or 3.4.
Ed (running LR2.7 on my seriously puny and nearly obsolete HP laptop, but it still goes like sh*t off a shovel)
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I'm having quite similar problems to what's described here. For example, changing between different splits tone presets take several seconds to see the results. All previous versions of Lightroom never had any problems like this. Hardware is 3GHz quad-core, so shouldn't be a problem. I hope Adobe looks into this really quickly because the software is (at times) virtually unusable.
Despite my comments in this thread that all was well (couple weeks ago) I am now inexplicably in the Painfully-Slow camp. I have no idea at the moment why but the develop module is close to useless as the response time for every singe adjustment is several seconds now. I've moved the Camera Raw cache, purged it, de-fragged the drive etc. I have also purged all system caches just for fun. I guess I'll be waiting for an update now and hope that fixes it. Very strange development. If it was like this from the day I upgraded to LR3 I would assume my 2006 MacPro was the issue. Clearly that is not the case.
David
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Me too..It seems to be getting slower with time...spinning beach balls with even simple operations...Mac Pro quad core with 20 gig RAM...no problems with 2.7 or 3 beta.
Steve
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Me to, Slow Slow Slow!!! I think this is a classic get out the door syndrome. Aperture released so do we, even if it's not ready and some features are not included. The hell with the customers, they can wait. Adobe is a profit driven company without any other concerns. With all the layoffs fewer and fewer people are tasked with more complex upgrades and this is what happens. Time to start looking at other products again, but I fear they are in the same boat.
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"I find LR3 on my MacPro 8 core to be overall faster than 2.7 was."
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I upgraded the day of release and it ran faster then 2.7 and possibly 3 beta. It has just been in the past few days that I noticed slow performance and the "spinning wheels of death".
Steve
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"I find LR3 on my MacPro 8 core to be overall faster than 2.7 was."
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I upgraded the day of release and it ran faster then 2.7 and possibly 3 beta. It has just been in the past few days that I noticed slow performance and the "spinning wheels of death".
Steve
I'm in the "faster for now" camp.. But I will say this and I'm not sure why it's happening. I've noticed a real slowdown with localized editing with perhaps 1 in 20 images. When it first happened I backed out of LR and went back in without a reboot and things didn't improve as it normally does with a memory leak. I rebooted and the issue for that image went away and we're back to normal speed. I've had to do that perhaps twice a week (I use LR daily) since.
This is on my main workstation.. a i7-920 @3.8ghz with 12g's of Kingstons Extreme series 2000 triple channel DDR3 and Win7 x64 Ultimate.. A Crucial C300 256g SSD for the system, 14tb's worth of 2tb drives, and a 1tb HDD just for my LR indexes and 1:1 previews. (2) 5770 video cards.
This isn't a slow machine. I regularly run Firefox, Outlook, a torrent client, an IM client, and often Slingplayer (allows me to watch stateside tv on my local HDTV) at the same time as my imaging programs. With two 2690's for the computer programs and a 50" plasma for the Sling.. its plenty of hardware and screen real estate to work without any significant (noticeable in a negative way) bottlenecks or slowdowns. The machine is stable enough where I only reboot it when I do a Windows or other program update. It will run for weeks without rebooting and no slowdown.
So why the slowdown on certain images and why the need to reboot to clear them? Something is up..
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Despite my comments in this thread that all was well (couple weeks ago) I am now inexplicably in the Painfully-Slow camp. I have no idea at the moment why but the develop module is close to useless as the response time for every singe adjustment is several seconds now. I've moved the Camera Raw cache, purged it, de-fragged the drive etc. I have also purged all system caches just for fun. I guess I'll be waiting for an update now and hope that fixes it. Very strange development. If it was like this from the day I upgraded to LR3 I would assume my 2006 MacPro was the issue. Clearly that is not the case.
David
UPDATE!!! I came home today and everything is working fine now. I did not change anything. The computer's been up all night and day. Very strange.
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Same problem on mine. LR 2 and LR 3 beta worked well. The trial version of 3 is excruciatingly slow in Develop mode. Switching through images on the filmstrip can take up each to 10 seconds to load. (In library mode, there is no such problem.) Any editing takes a few seconds to show, resulting in overdoing something or other inaccuracies or frustrations. It is pretty much useless as is. I liked the image quality in the beta, but see nothing that makes me want to spend over $100 (Japan price is higher I am very sure) to upgrade to something that does not work properly. Adobe is aware of this, but the time they get bugs out, my trial will have expired and I will not take the $100 plus gamble that the 3.1 version is fixed.
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Same problem on mine. LR 2 and LR 3 beta worked well. The trial version of 3 is excruciatingly slow in Develop mode. Switching through images on the filmstrip can take up each to 10 seconds to load. (In library mode, there is no such problem.) Any editing takes a few seconds to show, resulting in overdoing something or other inaccuracies or frustrations. It is pretty much useless as is. I liked the image quality in the beta, but see nothing that makes me want to spend over $100 (Japan price is higher I am very sure) to upgrade to something that does not work properly. Adobe is aware of this, but the time they get bugs out, my trial will have expired and I will not take the $100 plus gamble that the 3.1 version is fixed.
I've encountered this problem for just a few nights and now all is well: I experimented with the Camera Raw cache on different drives to compare speed. I saw between 6-10 seconds for each new picture in Develop. The weird thing was when I returned to the previous picture it would load from cache quickly as expected but going back two photos would force it to rebuild the image. It's as if the cache only had a memory of 1 image despite being set at various levels (after purging) from 1 to 100GB.
I ended up assigning a spare 150GB drive (via eSATA) as the Camera Raw Cache (and nothing else) and set the limit to 130GB. After clearing out the old cache locations and rebooting it all started working at a reasonable pace again. Switching to a fresh image in Develop brought up a clean preview and the image controls were online with the Camera Raw cache image in about 1 second. I noticed during my experiments that rendering 1:1 previews on a group of images actually renders the image in both the Preview cache AS WELL AS Camera Raw cache. I had no idea previously....By doing this these images came up almost instantly in Develop, ready to play. I've selected about 14000 images and began rendering 1:1 previews. It's all extremely fast now in every way (even as the 1:1 previews are rendering in 3 different threads in the background!) and I'm very content with LR3....for now. I realize this may not be a viable solution for everyone and frankly it feels like something else has been going on I don't understand. All I'm saying is there's light at the end of the tunnel for some at least. Good Luck to All.
David
MacPro2006, 13GB RAM
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Here's what I've been observing. I open a folder of a few hundred images that have already had 1:1 previews rendered. I scroll through them at a normal clip (1 every second or so, as long as it takes to redraw the screen) and by the time I've viewed about 100 images, Lightroom's RAM usage has climbed steadily to 100% at which point everything slows down. If I stop viewing images, LR will release some of the RAM back to the system, but will still hang onto about 60-70% of the total RAM available.
Here's a screenshot of my activity monitor, the blue line is the total RAM usage, the other lines are CPU activity for each of the 4 CPU cores. The blue line starts at around 25% when I open LR, and climbs steadily as I flip through images.
This is on a pretty fast PC too... 3.6 GHz Quad Core, 8 GB of RAM, Velociraptor OS drive, LR catalog on a separate RAID 0 array.
[attachment=23001:Screen.jpg]
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UPDATE!!! I came home today and everything is working fine now. I did not change anything. The computer's been up all night and day. Very strange.
I tried a few large exports and 1:1 renders and development at the same time and no "beach balls"...this is odd. I am surprised that Jeff hasn't commented.
Steve
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...I am surprised that Jeff hasn't commented.
About what? LR 3 is just fine on my machine with a bit over 140K images of primarily raw images. I will say that loading in a P 65+ raw file in Develop can be a bit slow but LR is dealing with a 60MP capture then. I'm running LR 3 in 64 bit on a recent Mac Pro with OS X 10.6.4 and 32gigs of ram. The LR 3 is on a 15K SAS drive and the images are on an external 6 drive stripped array.
But then again, LR 3 runs fine on my late 2008 MacBook Pro also running 10.6.4. Michael and I both used MacBook Pros while we shot out LR 3 video.
Some things are slower than 2.6 because they are processor intensive...add Process 2010, noise reduction and Lens Profile correction as well as manual transforms and trow in a few gradient filters and a local brush or 2 (or more) and things can slow way down...
If you are getting tons of SBODs on a Mac or non-responsive on a PC, then something is wrong...on a Mac there's not a lot of troubleshooting to do...optimize the catalog, trash the old version 2.x previews and generate new ones and make sure your catalog and images are on fast drives running Snow Leopard and LR 3 should be fine. On Windows it's a bit more difficult to troubleshoot because of OS versions, 32/64 bit, slower drives, anti-virus activities and other "system" issues can slow LR way down...sorry, can't really help optimization for PCs...
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I believe I have some insights regarding poor performance in Develop. I created this thread:
"Extra Processing in Develop" thread at Adobe forums (http://forums.adobe.com/thread/675565?tstart=0)
to cover them. You only need to read my third post (I'm akgguy on that forum) for a summary. Hope this helps some people.
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About what? LR 3 is just fine on my machine...
And unemployment is not a problem, given that 85-90 % of the work-able population is employed... and wars are not lethal, as so many people returned from wars alive...
In other words, the fact that some people (even if that is a vast majority) do not have problems, does not mean there is no problem. And that problem is very, very real for those who do experience it.
There is so much anecdotal evidence on various forums so far, including Adobe Lightroom ones, of LR3 being much slower than LR2 or even LR3b, under certain, yet undefined circumstances, that someone at Adobe should finally pay some attention (not necessarily Mr. Schewe, though). It is apparently not hardware or platform specific, i.e., people with state-of-the-art hardware experience it, as well as those with more down-to-earth machines, on both Mac and Win platforms. And it is not just the new functions in LR3... anything can cause the beach ball, even as innocent as moving the cursor to the menu to select File>...
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Thank's for the info. Lightroom V3 Develop Module brush adjustments still don't respond as expected. ...
Sorry to hear that the workarounds I've found didn't solve your performance problems with adjustment brush strokes. As I said in that thread, the things I've found only account for a subset of all the problems being reported. Brushes are fine for me as long as I disable Detail panel. How does LR3 perform if you set Process 2003 for the image? It occurs to me that is a good way to find out whether your problems are related to the new image process versus some other problem with LR3.
Karl
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An I entitled to a wild a''ssed guess?
I'm guessing the reason we have so many 'like' systems and so many differences.. is because the problem isn't with the system or necessarily the software. Just looking at it from afar.. the biggest differences we have in our systems is video cards. I'm guessing its something to do with the Open GL version/feature and how well the card handles it.. and if/when CS4/5 is open and has Open GL enabled.
I've noticed my own issues only crop up when I've had CS5 open (Open GL enabled) before LR3, or its open a the same time.. From a fresh reboot, don't open CS5.. and things run fine.
Video cards cross platform boundaries. And reading the blogs.. most of these issues are with desktops and not laptops with their built in video cards. I've never had an issue with performance on a laptop.. and I have five here I've tested of different vintages. Laptops of course aren't on the same performance level as a desktop.. but they seem to have less problems.
What's a spinning beach ball, is that a Mac thing?
Those with issues.. it might be helpful if you could say if you're having issues on a desktop or laptop.. and what brand of video card each has.
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...
What's a spinning beach ball, is that a Mac thing?
Yes. I believe that the Mac OS displays the spinning beach ball mouse cursor when the mouse is over an app that hasn't fetched events from it's event queue for a while.
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Like most on here I've had slow times with LR3 and have a spec'd up 'puter... so I've done digging and come up with this thought process...
Firstly, it's nothing to do with the front end of our machines, CPU and RAM etc are fine, several brush strokes are easy for a CPU to do and don't need much RAM. What slows us down in to do with three things:
Writing this data back to the LR3 cache used in develop mode.
Adding data to the sidecar/xmp file
Some NVidia driver tweaks...
LR3 can have a BIG cache, so give it one, up to 200GB, preferably not on your start up drive and not on an external drive on the end of a USB 2.0 or Firewire 400. Put it on an internal 'scratch' drive with plenty of space on it. Read this wonderfully clear explanation http://lightroom-blog.com/2010/04/camera-raw-cache.html (http://lightroom-blog.com/2010/04/camera-raw-cache.html)
So, keep LR3 cache off your start up drive, put it on a 2nd internal drive if possible or a drive connected by Firewire 800 or eSATA, now what about your ACTUAL files... where are they...? LR3 usues the cache to do the redraw etc... but it does write stuff within the DNG/RAW file, so when you open it up somewhere else it shows your adjustments, so the location of your files is important and if they are 'miles away' on a 5400rpm fairly full drive in again connect slowly this will contribute to additional speed loss. So put them inside your machine if you have space, using eSata or put them in an external air cooled box, again with faster firewire or eSATA, both are monumentally quicker than USB 2.0.
Thirdly, there have been speed improvements for nVidia graphics card users by tweaking the set up to run for 'max performance' in LR3 and set the card up for LR3 rather than gaming. A good clear tweak is here http://www.thejohnsonblog.com/2008/09/06/l...ia-performance/ (http://www.thejohnsonblog.com/2008/09/06/lightroom-2-and-nvidia-performance/)
Also here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/adobe_lightro...57607074073712/ (http://www.flickr.com/groups/adobe_lightroom/discuss/72157607074073712/)
For me I've almost eliminated the dreaded slowness by doing the following:
LR3 cache on 2nd internal 7200rpm drive connected by esata cable
LR3 cataloge's and images on big 2TB 7200rpm 3rd internal drive, esata connected
back up data stored on external box of drives
tips: 2nd internal drive is 500GB and has LR3 cache set at 200GB.. why not..? and has very little else on the drive, and is defragged weekly
defrag all drives weekly if you use a lot, also update video drivers and try the tweaks..
All windows Vista/XP x32 and x64 users... I know it takes afull day and is annoying but..... a 'format c' and re-installation of the OS is amazing... I hate to say it... but we know it's true.
S
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Steve, I appreciate the tips, but that still does not address the main issue: why LR3 is so much worse than LR2 and even LR3 Beta for some users.
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Like most on here I've had slow times with LR3 and have a spec'd up 'puter... so I've done digging and come up with this thought process...
Firstly, it's nothing to do with the front end of our machines, CPU and RAM etc are fine, several brush strokes are easy for a CPU to do and don't need much RAM. What slows us down in to do with three things:
Writing this data back to the LR3 cache used in develop mode.
Adding data to the sidecar/xmp file
Some NVidia driver tweaks...
LR3 can have a BIG cache, so give it one, up to 200GB, preferably not on your start up drive and not on an external drive on the end of a USB 2.0 or Firewire 400. Put it on an internal 'scratch' drive with plenty of space on it. Read this wonderfully clear explanation http://lightroom-blog.com/2010/04/camera-raw-cache.html (http://lightroom-blog.com/2010/04/camera-raw-cache.html)
So, keep LR3 cache off your start up drive, put it on a 2nd internal drive if possible or a drive connected by Firewire 800 or eSATA, now what about your ACTUAL files... where are they...? LR3 usues the cache to do the redraw etc... but it does write stuff within the DNG/RAW file, so when you open it up somewhere else it shows your adjustments, so the location of your files is important and if they are 'miles away' on a 5400rpm fairly full drive in again connect slowly this will contribute to additional speed loss. So put them inside your machine if you have space, using eSata or put them in an external air cooled box, again with faster firewire or eSATA, both are monumentally quicker than USB 2.0.
Thirdly, there have been speed improvements for nVidia graphics card users by tweaking the set up to run for 'max performance' in LR3 and set the card up for LR3 rather than gaming. A good clear tweak is here http://www.thejohnsonblog.com/2008/09/06/l...ia-performance/ (http://www.thejohnsonblog.com/2008/09/06/lightroom-2-and-nvidia-performance/)
Also here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/adobe_lightro...57607074073712/ (http://www.flickr.com/groups/adobe_lightroom/discuss/72157607074073712/)
For me I've almost eliminated the dreaded slowness by doing the following:
LR3 cache on 2nd internal 7200rpm drive connected by esata cable
LR3 cataloge's and images on big 2TB 7200rpm 3rd internal drive, esata connected
back up data stored on external box of drives
tips: 2nd internal drive is 500GB and has LR3 cache set at 200GB.. why not..? and has very little else on the drive, and is defragged weekly
defrag all drives weekly if you use a lot, also update video drivers and try the tweaks..
All windows Vista/XP x32 and x64 users... I know it takes afull day and is annoying but..... a 'format c' and re-installation of the OS is amazing... I hate to say it... but we know it's true.
S
A few comments:
Most video cards people buy are geared towards gaming and not imaging. Driver updates are mostly geared towards increasing performance with certain games and to a lesser extent fixing bugs.
Really, video card performance and architecture has increased greatly in just the last 6-9 months. If your video card is more than two years old seriously consider replacing it. The gains to be had with a new modern video card cannot be overstated. Even a $120 ATI 5770 card offers great performance improvements over a two year old $600 card.. not to mention the OpenGL and DirectX11 are now much better than before and are what CS5/LR3 really needs. I'm convinced much of the performance problems can be rectified with new video cards. The occasional issues you have with newer cards (like the ones I described in a post above) will probably be fixed in future driver upgrades.
Forget estata and external drives unless you must. Who wants external drives, clutter, cables, etc, on their workstation.. Instead consider some of the excellent Lian-li EX-34 hot swappable 4 drive bays that just screw in 2 5.25 bays and it also includes its own 120m low rpm (no noise) fan. Each bay only has 1 molex power connector so that simplified cable clutter inside the case which impedes air flow. I have two of these in my case and I live being able to take then in/out for archiving.. and the drives run at about 37-41c in a 35c ambient temps (Bangkok)..
By using these bays you can then use the latest 2tb 3.5 inch drives which are both cheap, quiet, and fast. Even the WD Greens are only $119 and very nearly as fast as the $159 WD Blacks.. Clean, cool, less clutter, less cables interfering with air flow, archive drives come in/out and are hot swappable if you want, and with very little if any noise.
The cache. I have 164,xxx images in my current archive and it manages fine with a 20g cache. Bigger might be better, but 20g isn't causing performance issues.
Indexes and previews. Absolutely these should be on a separate drive. A fast one. Amazon just shipped me a number of the new Seagate Momentus 500g hybrid drives ($129) each.. I'll RAID O two of them together for my indexes/previews, and while it won't be as fast as the SSD I tested.. it will be near instant access as I move between folders and images at any speed I want. One more will be my cache drive.. I'll see how much difference that makes. 250g for LR3 Cache.. 250g for CS5 scratch disk.. These drives should be perfect for this sort of access.
If running Win7 or Vista.. defragging is usually a waste of time. Don't bother defragging unless the system tells you.. and then it will only tell you when more than 5% isn't contiguous.. and just set it for auto background defrag and forget about it. If you're running XP.. go Win7.. no reason to run XP anymore.. sorry.. its outdated in so many ways.
About reformatting a Vista/Win7 machine. The only way this will help speed things up is if you're not maintaining your drives properly and you've screwed things up. XP does benefit from new builds.. but not Vista/Win7.
I recommend this. When you first build Win7.. install all your programs and your system drive has all the updates and is finished.. make a clean mirror image and save it somewhere. If you do get the urge to reformat.. restoring this clean image will save you tons of time.
And of course you should be backing up your system drive to a working image as well.. the 'master image" is just for those 'start over' times..
Video cards.. I'm convinced of it..
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I am having this problem as well. For the first couple of weeks using LR3, I couldn't tell a difference (good or bad) in performance switching from 2.7. Then two days ago, I can work only 10 minutes or so before everything slows to a crawl. Even if I don't do much of anything, LR steadily claims all available RAM until I can't even switch applications. fA quit and restart starts the process over again.
I am on a two year old Macbook Pro so my video card and other specs aren't top of the line, but Photoshop and other intensive programs run fine. Definitely considering switching back to 2.7 until a fix is found. Ironically, my trial version of 3 worked fine. It wasn't until AFTER I BOUGHT IT that things went downhill.
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This is an interesting discussion. I moved from LR 1 through the 2.x series to Aperture 3.x (I had owned Ap. 1 and 2 but there were limitations). One of the big differences was the speed of the operations. I like to understand the range of tools and so I've been keeping up a bit with LR3 Beta and now final version and what I saw from admittedly very light forays intended just to get up to speed with new functionality and RAW conversion was performance that was so s... l... o... w... on a fairly new 8 core Mac Pro with 14 GB of RAM, OS up to date, etc. And that was with a new LR3 catalog with 1000 images from a single import.
Something that Jeff said is the real performance factor difference that I have been suspecting. My images are on fast drives (several WD caviar blacks) but those are in Drobos w/ a FW800 interface. I think perhaps what I'm seeing is that somehow Aperture is making the most of things and can still appear to import and render instantaneously with the Drobos on FW800, where this type of drive FW800 set-up may just tick LR off (to give it a personality). I'm not going to go and buy SATA or SCSI Drobos to test this, but I may throw a catalog on an internal Seagate Barracuda and see if it's the digital fiber and prune juice that the LR3 diet was lacking.
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I was having problems with my Mac Pro w/ an SSD sys disk and 12GB of RAM. I had converted my LR2 catalog, but after purging my cache and putting it on the SSD, I created a new catalog in LR3 and for a 25,000 image database. I rarely see it use more than 4 GB of memory and it rarely even slows down.
Neil
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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.
HTH,
James
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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=0 (http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=43622&st=0)
Some 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
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Well, I did some more testing last night. Fairly obviously, RAW file size should be a factor in all this. The only alternative RAWs I have are very small, from my old Panasonic LC1 at 5MP each. So I resurrected a few of those, picked one at random, loaded it into LR3 and did all the stuff I normally do - perspective correction, rotate and crop, basic edits and levels, grads, local brush adjustments, spot removal. And LR3 ran as smooth as silk throughout, no slow-downs, hangs or glitches at all. Every action was real-time and instantaneous. I kept an eye on memory usage, and it never got above 2GB.
So this might explain why some users are perfectly happy with LR3 and others are tearing their hair out. Probably, for every particular PC/Mac hardware setup, there is a RAW file size above which you will experience problems, and below which you will be absolutely fine. This RAW size hinge point might be 12MP on one machine, and 20MP on another, depending on your hardware. So some users on some machines with relatively small files will see no issues at all.
With LR 2.6 and 2.7 even my 39MP files ran just fine. On the same PC, LR3 is pretty much unusable if I activate the Lens Correction panel - even if I don't, multiple brush edits will slow it down very noticeably, which did not happen with 2.x
John
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UPDATE: looks like Adobe team found the bug in LR3 that's making it so slow. Fix is supposed to be coming soon.. More here (http://bit.ly/bXHkpR), on Adobe forums.
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UPDATE: looks like Adobe team found the bug in LR3 that's making it so slow. Fix is supposed to be coming soon.. More here (http://bit.ly/bXHkpR), on Adobe forums.
From Dan Tull:
"We just confirmed a fix for a mistake in the way cached previews were being accounted for internally. Previews are used pretty extensively throughout the app, but the most glaring place that one would show up was during sustained rapid advances through Library loupe on a large monitor."
Interesting... I am using two 30", so maybe that explains some of the LR3 odd behavior that I am seeing.
Steve
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From Dan Tull:
"We just confirmed a fix for a mistake in the way cached previews were being accounted for internally. Previews are used pretty extensively throughout the app, but the most glaring place that one would show up was during sustained rapid advances through Library loupe on a large monitor."
Interesting... I am using two 30", so maybe that explains some of the LR3 odd behavior that I am seeing.
Steve
Awesome news! That's exactly when I would experience the problem, during rapid scrolling and tagging through images in Library Loupe viewing. I use a dual 24" and 20" setup. Can't wait for the bug fix. Was even considering Photo Mechanic as a temporary band-aid to the problem.
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Been using LR 3.2RC, and it's better on rapid advances through photos in the library and when tagging photos. However I will still hit the brick wall at 100% RAM usage which slows everything to a crawl. I think that they are going to need to fix the way LR accesses RAM, capping it at 80-90% usage of available RAM rather than letting it run to 100%.
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Just downloaded the full release version of LR 3.2 and tried it out. Seems faster still, and it's TOTALLY fixed! My issue with RAM usage is gone, no RAM leak as you scroll through and tag images in the Loupe view. RAM usage stays at around 40% of the total capacity, just like it did with LR2.
Thanks Adobe!
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Just downloaded 3.2 and with dual 30" monitors seems much better. So far not seeing "the spinning wheel of death" with rapid scrolls, etc. Keeping fingers crossed.
Steve
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As John has noted above, the most common source of slowdowns for me has also been the use of the lens corrections panel. Preview generation following a perspective adjustment becomes painfully slow, and any other adjustments after that are essentially doomed. I'm hoping the full v3.2 release takes care of the problem. I'll download and try that later today.
Hoping for a solution!