LR 9.1 slowing to a crawl when importing

[zobelaudio]

Guys,

never had this before. when importing from card(300mb/s) after about importing 30 files, LR slows to about 1 file/min.
we're talking GFX100, so big files, but I've imported from this before and never had this issue.

Any thoughts
cheers
Stephan

[rdonson]

Stephan,

It might help us help if you shared info on your computer (specs, etc),  its operating system and where you're saving your files to. 

[zobelaudio]

it goes to a USB3 ext. drive like always. It has just finished now, 4 hours for 400 files...

[kers]

Is your harddisk almost full?
You need about 15% free space to move things around...

Also use from time to time Onyx to clean your computer from cache and run maintenance scripts: Onyx is a free program that is around for years and does good job; it runs on cleaning operations already inside your mac.

https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

[mcbroomf]

I think if I had this problem I'd do the following;

  Check the card reader hardware by doing a transfer directly (ie no an import through LR) to the same drive
  Check that I'd not inadvertently added or changed an import preset and/or previews while importing
  Check if my catalog was somehow the cause by creating a new empty one
  In addition to checking how much room on the USB drive check how much room there is where you keep your LR catalog/previews and backups

[zobelaudio]

thx for your tips, guys, I have already done all that and there is more than 15% free on the startupdisk.
do you think it matters the same on the destination disk, as there is only 100Gb free now from 5TB ?

[Denis de Gannes]

thx for your tips, guys, I have already done all that and there is more than 15% free on the startupdisk.
do you think it matters the same on the destination disk, as there is only 100Gb free now from 5TB ?

I would advise that you stop writin any further files to that HDD and remove some of the file that are stored there!

[mcbroomf]

thx for your tips, guys, I have already done all that and there is more than 15% free on the startupdisk.
do you think it matters the same on the destination disk, as there is only 100Gb free now from 5TB ?

For sure, if that disk is fragmented then it has to address the disk all over the place to store the files. 
To test this just choose another disk (with plenty of room) as a destination to import the files (you can remove them from the catalog and delete them later on)

[JRSmit]

thx for your tips, guys, I have already done all that and there is more than 15% free on the startupdisk.
do you think it matters the same on the destination disk, as there is only 100Gb free now from 5TB ?

That is basically a full disk. When more than 50% full the disk speed starts to drop progressively. Over 70% is basically a no-no.

[kers]

just a thought...

start with copying the images to disk and see how fast that goes...
after that import them from disk into LR... and see how fast that  goes...

To see where the bottleneck is.
--

make a new user and import again in a blanco catalogue ;  see if that changes anything

from these tests you can draw some conculsions...

[Denis de Gannes]

That is basically a full disk. When more than 50% full the disk speed starts to drop progressively. Over 70% is basically a no-no.

Absolutely!

[Mwestall]

Absolutely!

I run disks to 90% capacity. Whilst writing beyond 70 odd% will slow down, reads are fine. You are using the slower innermost tracks of the disk. Running regular defrags obviously helps. But only use very filled disks for archived/complete work. I keep my  current work on ssd, them migrate to spinning rust at leisure once a project is complete. Even if you do need to work on them later the performance hit is marginal as the RAW file remains untouched, only metadata is being updated by LR.

[fdisilvestro]

If your destination is a spinning HD, make sure you have unchecked the preference "Generate Previews in Paralell" in the Performance tab. This option is good for SSD but not that great for rotating disks