Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: purpleblues on July 20, 2012, 10:55:04 am
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With LR 4.1 I experience the known lags when switiching tools and images, especially in larger catalogues on my lushly featured MacPro that used to scream with LR 3.6. Has anybody noticed substantial speed gains when switching from OSX 10.6.8 to Lion?
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Unfortunately, it seems to be about the same with 4.1 on Lion and SL. I held off until very recently to upgrade to Lion. I will be holding off on upgrading to ML for a long time as well.
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I don't have any substantial speed issues either switching between images or tools with LR 4.1 and OS 10.7.4 on my oldish Core 2 Duo iMac. Smallish delay in processing sharpening and noise reduction where I understand heavy processing is the price you pay for superb results. OTOH my catalog has only about 40,000 images.
Cheers
Tim
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I don't have any substantial speed issues either switching between images or tools with LR 4.1 and OS 10.7.4 on my oldish Core 2 Duo iMac. Smallish delay in processing sharpening and noise reduction where I understand heavy processing is the price you pay for superb results. OTOH my catalog has only about 40,000 images.
Cheers
Tim
What size files are you working with? Raw files from a Canon 5d II here, and laggy pefromance with LR 4.1 and a
3 year old iMac with 8 gb ram. Running out ram is usually not the issue, even with fairly heavy photoshop use.
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What size files are you working with? Raw files from a Canon 5d II here, and laggy pefromance with LR 4.1 and a
3 year old iMac with 8 gb ram. Running out ram is usually not the issue, even with fairly heavy photoshop use.
David
Up until the last 800 shots RAWs from 5D MkI, now RAWs from 5D3. The bigger files certainly exaggerate the sluggish sharpening effect: but no deal breaker.
I have tons of RAM (16Gb!) but my processor speed is not exactly state of the art.
In any case, re the OP, I switched to Lion before the camera upgrade and noticed no significant performance issues that could be attributed to the OS. LR 4 beta was clunky but 4.1 seems fine to me.
Tim
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Hi,
Here is my setup: MacPro (dual core intel xeon, 2.66 ghz) with 5 gb of memory. Snow Leopard. LR4.1
As I use LR (with some other programs running) my iStat Pro (in Dashboard) shows me the amount of wired, active, inactive, and free memory --I have no clue as to the difference between inactive and free-- but what I note is that as I work on multiple images the "free" amount goes down to mere double digit mb's and LR gets quite slow. Quitting LR and re-launching restores LR's normal speediness.
As Tim writes, I also note that noise reduction is slow to show the results; nothing that a bit of patience resolves.
I would add more ram but hesitate as it appears that moving to ML, and future upgrades in other programs, may not be possible for machines such as mine.
Jean-Michel
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Ram isn't all that expensive these days. You can get 8gb of good quality standard ram for $50 or so, as long as you buy it from someone other than Apple. It's usually better to have matching ram modules than to mix and match different sizes and brands. 16gb of Kingston DDR3 ram costs about $100 or so (4x 4gb modules).
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For me doing a clean install of ML has speeded up LR4.1 considerably.
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Unfortunately, it seems to be about the same with 4.1 on Lion and SL. I held off until very recently to upgrade to Lion. I will be holding off on upgrading to ML for a long time as well.
Pretty clearly Lightroom 4.X needs more hardware resources than LR 3.X—but I suspect the real source of the performance issues many of us have been experiencing is inefficient memory management in recent versions of OS X (persuasively recounted here (http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-deeply-broken-in-os-x-memory-management)) that have, at least through the 10.7 release, not been addressed, or even acknowledged, by Apple.
I did some performance monitoring after experiencing LR 4 sluggishness—which was especially apparent after a roundtrip to Photoshop—and it was clear the operating system was not performing appropriate memory clean-up procedures (known in the trade as “garbage collection”) for inactive processes. This is really odd, because UNIX has always been extremely good at managing memory and OS X is derived from a well-respected UNIX variant, albeit a rather old one.
My own hunch is that this probably happened when Apple migrated from a 32-bit to a 64-bit code base. But whatever the cause, the result is that OS X seems to need a lot more physical memory than it should. I don't claim my tests were exhaustive—or even, frankly, very rigorous—but if you're going to keep a lot of processes running, I think a good metric would be 8 GB of RAM per core. So 16 GB on a dual-core machine and a whopping 96 GB on a 12-core machine. For most if not all Apple hardware, that will mean buying third-party memory upgrades since Apple doesn't provide memory options for the maximum amount of RAM its products can address.
Another option, which helps quite a bit in my experience, is to kill idle processes. When you stop actively using a program in OS X, by default it continues to execute in the background. This shouldn't matter—and doesn't on other UNIX systems I'm familiar with—because the operating system should reclaim all but a very tiny amount of the physical memory the process was using when it was running in the foreground. Since OS X doesn't do that very efficiently, you can force the application to relinquish it's entire virtual memory allocation by using the operating system's "Quit" command. For example, if you launch Photoshop from Lightroom to do some pixel editing involving multiple layers, Photoshop will consume a huge amount of memory space. If you explicitly "Quit" Photoshop when you're finished with it (after saving your PSD file, of course) instead of clicking on the red button at the top of the PS window, the physical memory previously allocated to Photoshop will immediately become available again for Lightroom to use.
Apple really ought to fix this. I know many people have contacted the company in an attempt to document the problem, but as far as I have been able to determine Apple has never responded to any of them.
The good news, of course, is that if you stuff enough RAM in your Mac, the memory starvation will go away. (The bad news is that will inevitably only make the next bottleneck apparent, but that's the nature of performance tuning on every computer I have ever used.)
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Another option is to switch to a Win7 machine. I only have 8MB or RAM with an Intel i7 quad core processor and both LR and PS run as fast as I need them to. I did a 5 image stitch using PS and I think it took all of 25 seconds to complete (it was my first one so I don't have anything to compare it to). I feel sorry for all the battles that Mac OS users have to go through to get the printing path cleaned up and other stuff. I just download LR4 and PS CS6 and things work straight away.
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Another option is to switch to a Win7 machine. I only have 8MB or RAM with an Intel i7 quad core processor and both LR and PS run as fast as I need them to. I did a 5 image stitch using PS and I think it took all of 25 seconds to complete (it was my first one so I don't have anything to compare it to). I feel sorry for all the battles that Mac OS users have to go through to get the printing path cleaned up and other stuff. I just download LR4 and PS CS6 and things work straight away.
Yes, indeed. It pains me to say it—I'm a confirmed UNIX hack from way back—but Microsoft has been doing a better job of modernizing NT recently than Apple has with OS X.* (Although as far as I know, NT 6.1 is still using NTFS; the long-needed filesystem upgrade finally materialized in NT 6.2, a.k.a. “Windows 8.”)
Still, for some of us, Windows is a cure worse than the disease.
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*Microsoft also lately seems more forthcoming about bugs.
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Whoa there cowboy - Did someone really suggest moving from Mac to Windoze, surely not ???
I would rather walk around with a dozen nails in my boot!
I'll just wait for the Arch Angel Jobs to haunt the OSX development team, till they have fixed it ;D
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Yes, indeed. It pains me to say it—I'm a confirmed UNIX hack from way back—but Microsoft has been doing a better job of modernizing NT recently than Apple has with OS X.* (Although as far as I know, NT 6.1 is still using NTFS; the long-needed filesystem upgrade finally materialized in NT 6.2, a.k.a. “Windows 8.”)
Still, for some of us, Windows is a cure worse than the disease.
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*Microsoft also lately seems more forthcoming about bugs.
Yeah, I've done some C and C++ programming using UNIX on my PC and like it a lot. Unfortunately, it won't be a day to day OS until Adobe port PS and LR there. I've used Mac OS on my daughter's laptop but really don't see any compelling reason to pay the price premium to Apple for their hardware/software combination. I can build a PC with great features pretty cheaply and if I need to upgrade anything, just pop open the case and do it. Open standards are my preferred way to go.
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Ram isn't all that expensive these days. You can get 8gb of good quality standard ram for $50 or so, as long as you buy it from someone other than Apple. It's usually better to have matching ram modules than to mix and match different sizes and brands. 16gb of Kingston DDR3 ram costs about $100 or so (4x 4gb modules).
It's still damned expensive if you have a Feb 2008 MP. 8Gb costs around £250 [2x4GB]. Prices have never dropped. You could buy a new Imac for same price as filling it up with memory. Probably faster too.
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Whoa there cowboy - Did someone really suggest moving from Mac to Windoze, surely not ???
I would rather walk around with a dozen nails in my boot!
I'll just wait for the Arch Angel Jobs to haunt the OSX development team, till they have fixed it ;D
A more reasoned response to using one or the other can be found here (http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/eitheror-both). And this is from people who helped design the original workflows for Final Cut in film and for major US TV shows.
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...or Mountain Lion.
FWIW I've upgraded to ML and am just zipping along as usual (MBP 2011, 2 GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB ram) with D800e raw files. Sure there is a bit of lag from time to time, but I am also careful about freeing up memory when I know I'll be doing some serious editing in the Develop module. Bottom Line, I have noticed no loss in speed, it anything, it seems a bit zippier.
One thing to consider is getting a small app called Free Memory from Rocky Sand Studio (http://www.rockysandstudio.com/apps/freememory) to help take care of the "garbage collection". It's free for its basic config and only $0.99 for the "Pro" version. I don't know all the under the hood stuff about memory usage, but it seems to be well worth it!
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Mountain Lion is in general faster than Lion for most normal things. It uses a different compiler (LLVM) which generates more efficient code than the old compiler (GCC).
That said, I'd be surprised if Lightroom performed much differently on Mountain Lion than on Lion (or Snow Leopard). It would probably be faster if it was 100% native code versus having a substantial portion in LUA. But that's the price you pay for having a cross-platform application.
As for apps like "Free Memory"... bah. You really think someone selling a $0.99 app knows more about OS memory management than the Apple engineers? That's right: No, they don't. It may flush stuff and make more look "free" in activity monitor, but that's not really indicative of what's helping the machine run quickly.
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I would directly upgrade to to Mountain Lion and skip the previous system versions. I haven't noticed much difference using Lightroom (with Lion or Mountain Lion) but I find that the general performance is a bit zippier with the ML.
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You want to 'free' memory? Open a Terminal window and type 'purge'. That will accomplish the same thing as your $0.99 app.
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You want to 'free' memory? Open a Terminal window and type 'purge'. That will accomplish the same thing as your $0.99 app.
Purge will indeed clear the buffer cache, but all the programs you're currently running—even the foreground terminal emulation window you're using to run it—will then experience a brief subsequent delay. It's a blunt instrument, and was not really designed to “free” volatile memory. Yes, it helps, and I use it, myself, but Apple really should address the memory management problem properly so users aren't forced to resort to such inelegant workarounds.
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Hmmm...As far as I know, in X the only way to actually free up RAM is to quit an application. It seems that some here are suggesting that Windows behaves differently. Is that the case?
I've got an i7 27" iMac running 10.6.8, with 12GB RAM, and it seems zippy enough for me. However, I only do basic adjustments with LR4. No PS work with layers and all that, nor HDR. And I usually run no other apps when doing PP.
As Lion doesn't bring anything to the table I'm interested in, performance or bells and whistle wise, will be staying with 10.6 until new hardware forces my hand. But, if already moved to Lion, it would probably be a good idea to upgrade to ML. 10.6 saw real improvement over 10.5.
Maybe folks should step back a bit and remember what it was like to do this stuff just ten years ago. We would have been quite jealous of even the mediocre equipment available today.