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Lightroom: Performance and optimization: LR is slow
LR 4 is excruciatingly slow. Until Adobe is able to do something about this I am recommending my students and readers continue to use LR 3 or switch to Aperture.
Official
Responses
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Hi all,
We have put together a technote containing several suggestions for optimizing Lightroom's performance that we hope will help.
http://adobe.ly/LRPerformanceHints
Let us know which of these suggestions are helpful to you. Thanks! -
Hello all,
We do acknowledge that there have been a performance hit for truely "some" users, though that doesn't comfort the users that are seeing the performance hit that they are seeing, and professionals that do potentially lose time (which = money) due to the decrease in performance.
Now that there is acknowledgement of the issue, we still don't have a resolution, nor know exactly what is causing it on the multitude of systems that are seeing it.
Thanks to those that are delving in deeper to try to discover what the cause is, and hopefully we can all look for a solution, since it is happening on not all systems, but some.
I wanted to call attention to a potential solution that was given by another user on another forum after a chat with adobe support. I've paraphrased some of the steps and cleaned them up a bit so they can be digestible, but would be curious to hear of other's results after having tried these steps.
A fair amount of users are running in windows, and these steps are windows-centric, if you're a mac guru, perhaps you can divine how to perform similar steps on the mac platform.
Here is the chat log and troubleshooting steps.
Please try them out, and let us know if you see any improvement with any of these steps.
William is the tech, and Jojo the end user with performance trouble.
Chat log:
William: I understand that you're experiencing performance issue. Am I correct?
Jojo: Oh yes
Rename Preference folder
Please close all windows
Click the Start button.
Type %appdata% in the search box and press Enter.
Double click on Adobe folder.
Rename the "Lightroom" folder to "OldLightroom".
Clear Temp files
Click on Start button.
Type %temp% and press Enter.
It will open Temp folder.
Empty the files and folders inside it.
Results chat:
Jojo: ok done. it still has files that could not be deleted for Win Explorer and Google Chrome (the browser I use)
William: Okay.
William: Launch Lightroom and check if you're getting the same issue.
Jojo: that seems to have sped it up significant;y
William: Perfect.
William: Please double check if that works fine now.
Jojo: Much faster, but all of my presets are gone
Jojo: Export presets, etc
Rename old preference folder back so LR sees it.
Quit Lightroom.
Click on Start button.
Type %appdata% in the search box and press Enter.
Double click on Adobe folder.
Rename the "Lightroom" preference folder to "2-OldLightroom".
Rename the "OldLightroom" and rename it to "Lightroom".
After that open Preferences folder inside it.
Rename the file "Lightroom 4 Preferences.agprefs" and to "OldLightroom 4 Preferences.agprefs".
Launch Lightroom and test the performance
Results 2 chat:
Jojo: Oh yes, that's working well!
William: Perfect.
Jojo: Much better!
William: You can start working with the product smoothly now.
William: Great.
Jojo: Hey, are they fixing this in a release? I know a lot of photographers who are VERY upset about this performance issue. I was ready to change back to LR3
William: Corrupt preference may cause Lightroom to work slow.
William: We renamed the preference file and it is working fine.
End Chat log
Another user had mentioned that they "renamed the Lightroom 3 Preferences.agprefs to Old_Lightroom 3 Preferences.agprefs and now it works a lot quicker."
Those are at least a couple things to try that shouldn't take but a few minutes.
Report back with any change in LR 4.1 behavior
Thanks!
EMPLOYEE
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Those of you who are finding LUT v4 profiles to be causing problems - what software are you using to create the profiles?
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I’m
hopeful.
I am using DataColor's SpyderColor 3 for profiling my screens. How can I tell which profiles the software generates? And how could I change that to Matrix if it's LUT?
I have recently set up my PC from scratch using Win 8 instead of Win 7 (both 64 bit). I haven't done the profiling yet. All I can say so far that the enormous CPU usage that LR (4.0 to 4.3) used to generate when fiddling around with the sliders has completely gone. I still have the absolutely same hardware, same catalog etc., and LR 4.3 has become unbelievably much faster!
So indeed it might have to do with color profiling, and before I generate the profiles I'd like to know how to do it right.- view 6 more comments
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Most likely not since it is available openly as a download on their site and does not require entry of a serial number or license. This is not priated s/w. Works just fine with my Spyder3 colorimeter though I'm not sure it provides better results.
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Just because there is a link being shared in forums does not mean that it is legal download for anyone. It's named "tech support link". it seems to be impossible to find that link on their website. Very it's only for LaCie buyers who for whatever reasons need to download the software, and to make the download easy and hassle-free for them.
If users then start sharing it and even believe that this is a sign that the software can be legally used by anyone, we must not wonder when suppliers stop providing such easy access for their true customers. :( -
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@DarkVater
You can use both versions with Datacolor. It simply depends on your setup. See screenshot below. (Un)fortunately in german, sorry.
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Thanks, actually I AM German. :) I hadn't found these settings before.
But it seems I cannot generate matrix profiles with it ... -
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Adobe have investigated the problems some have reported with v4 profiles or even v2 LUT profiles and reported that their tests show LR 4.3 can handle both v4 and v2, LUT and matrix color profiles correctly, IF the profiles have been made correctly by the profiling software.
On Macs, LR does not handle the profiles at all, the conversions are done by the OS, so any problem is a profile or OS problem. The ColorSync utility can be used to verify or repair bad profiles, apparently (I don't use Macs). On Windows, LR does do the transforms, but can handle all types of correctly made profiles.
So the problems are most likely with the profiling software, and this should be reported to the software company. I seem to remember several of the posts I read referred to ColorEyes profiles.
Hope this helps.
Bob Frost -
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Robert Frost,
I'm sorry to say I'm not convinced, Bob.
Lightroom is the only application I have running on OS X (10.8.2) that has problems with ColorEyes icc v2 LUTs. Photoshop CS5 does not have any problem with those profiles.
The ColorSync Utility indicates the LUTs are fine.
I would be interested to know who at Adobe investigated the problem, when it was done and where the report was made. -
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Hi Bob,
Could you send me a v2 LUT that LR doesn't like, and say exactly what the symptoms are when you try to use it? Please send to bobfrost@btopenworld.com
Bob Frost -
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Robert Frost,
You should have the profile by now.-
Robert,
Was hoping I could get a copy of the v2 LUT that caused you the slowdown as well?
Please email it you me at petgreen [at]adobe com
You said using this profile: "...made zooming to 1:1 in the Library module very slow on my (2007) MacPro running OS X 10.7.5 and my new MacBook Pro (retina) running OS X 10.8.3 "
I'd love to test this out on my rMBP
Regards -
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Hi Bob, it hasn't arrived yet, but its probably going round the world still somewhere!
As regards your point that the profile works in Photoshop but not in LR, Victoria Bampton in her LR4MissingFAQs book, says that LR uses a different part of the profile to Photoshop (perceptual rendering rather than relative colorimetric) so a corrupt profile can work in one but not in the other.
Bob frost-
I sent your profile to adobe and to someone else, but have had no feedback yet!
Bob Frost -
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Just updated from Lightroom 3 to Rel.4 .
Im so sorry, that i cant afford so much time for my postproduction of my shootings with the Lightroom 4 engine. Its a real horror working with that Release, waiting seconds to seconds that a picture is developed.....
Is there a way to go back to Rel.3 and convert the catalog from 4 to 3. Or must i do a deinstallation of Rel.4, new Installation of Rel. 3 and start with my old backup catalog 3 ?
Maybe there will be an update in near future or not. At this time Lightroom 3 is the right choice !
Michael
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Performance Lightroom 4 - Please Release a Version 3.9 engine....... -
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The performance issue is an absolute workflow killer and I am at the point where I want to throw my 2009 MacPro tower out the window. LR4.2 has not improved matters whatsoever. I spend more time waiting for module switches and image adjustments to take effect than actually editing images. There were similar issues with the upgrade from LR2 -> LR3 but not to this degree.
Please, please stop adding new features, functionalities, and/or window dressing – get back to the basics and focus on making a functional product for your user base.
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Lightroom: LR4.2 Performance Issues remain. -
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I’m
frustrated
Switching from 4.2 to 4.3 caused a huge delay in displaying pictures when I browse them. I rendered 1:1 previews as well as standard previews. No way. It takes 2 seconds do display the crisp image.
I've got a 3770K @ 4.8GHz and running Lightroom and its catalogs on a SSD Samsun 830. Before rel.4.3 rendering was instant. Impossible to work this way...
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Lightroom 4.3 super slow on PC too. -
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When comparing memory usage between Aperture and Lightroom it is clear that Aperture caches much more aggressively than Lightroom does. I think it would be reasonable to let Lightroom use more memory (i.e. on a 32GB system Lightroom could use at least 16GB).
If a preference is required to avoid excessive memory usage on low-memory systems I think that is acceptable. -
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Yes, I have 6 core 4.7 i7 3930k CPU and NVIDIA 680 GPU running on SSD's. For the most part, my system is so over the shipping standard system.
I would like to know what are your usability base line? What files and what steps to jpg would prove I am 5 times faster than your definition of 'fast' is? The "5" just a made up number to explain what I am talking about.
Adobe should put together "this system" runs "this test" in "this amount of time". Slower hardware, gpu, HDD instead of SSD should 'expect' slower results.
Defining bare minimum suggested hardware is NOT the same as some run time test metrics that people can compare against.
For 4.2 to 4.3 users I deleted the preview cache under the cat file and let them regenerate on the fly. This is a pain in the very beginning, but I see it spend up overall. but then it could still be smaller than what it was. as I had 60,000 files I believe I deleted.
Also use "performance" power profile in "Control panel" "Power Options" turn off power saving in the graphics control panel as well.
IF YOU TRY THINGS REPORT FINDINGS.- view 4 more comments
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Platform optimizations is not what this is about. You can run an application optimized for i386 (no optimizations) and in most cases not tell the difference. And Lightroom is not inherently slow - I can make several expensive adjustments in real-time.
There are some bottlenecks, such as preview generation and RAW image loading. It would make sense to optimize these (by using idle to to preload) so the user does not have to wait. -
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If there is a way to profile LR for users, this will be cut down all speculation and permit to find where is the bottleneck(s) and permit to adobe to fix it fast.
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May I know why my topic (explicitely about LR 4.3) has been merged with a 7 months old one?
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Hello, me again, I have still been experiencing some slowness, but now I am at a standing halt. When I went to open LR 4.3RC today it said that "the beta version of lightroom has expired, the application will now quit" Huh? I really need to use LR right now, as I teach a photography class...anyone know what has happened?
Thank you in advance!!
-Kellie- view 2 more comments
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You're welcome; Suggestion, if you can and you haven't for a long while, especially since 3.X days, remove you preview cache and let it rebuild as you work.
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< and let it rebuild as you work.
Not advised! Do it overnight, not while you are trying to work, or do it over the weekend if overnight is not long enough to render all 1:1 previews. I do this about every 3 months or so. Delete the acr cache at the same time, so that catalog, previews, and acr cache are all back in sync. That seems to solve a lot of problems, IME.
Bob Frost -
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You are off-topic.
Anyway, RC means Release Candidate. Install a stable version.-
Well, Alessandro, it's still slow. There, that's on topic.
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< Adobe should put together "this system" runs "this test" in "this amount of time". Slower hardware, gpu, HDD instead of SSD should 'expect' slower results.
No need for Adobe to do this; anyone could write a test. The Retouch Artists Photoshop test gained quite a lot of credence among users. When I first used this test on an old computer, it took 41/2 minutes. My current machine takes 10 seconds.
If Rob Cole is reading this, I'm sure you could write a test routine.
Bob Frost-
Thanks for the vote of confidence Bob, but I believe you would be *equally* qualified ;-).
R -
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I experiencing the same performance issues like described here in this topic. If I move for example the sharpening slider it takes between 5-15 seconds that the change will be displayed! (LR4.3) What’s going on in the meantime???? The Hardware can’t be to slow: i7-870 with 8GB RAM, SSD, Win7 ...
But what I figured out is, that if I move the mouse for just a view milliseconds to the picture, away from the slider, the picture is recalculated immediately and I do not have to wait anymore. Why LR4.3 works that way and how can this behavior be changed?-
That's is really interesting Peter... I'm going to test that right now !
Come back after testing it, it wasn't the case for me. -
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I'm really happy because I found the problem! A new optical mouse did a wonder! The old one must had a serious problem. I'm so happy.
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in reading this thread, and appreciating very much all the struggles, i put forward my own observations.
i have a fairly standard win8 setup that i refresh or recover about once a month, because LR will go from zippy-fast to tar-pit with use.
i am not a high-end user, nor a pro, though i am an enthusiast with a large 160k+ catalog to organize, after a pc crash separated everything from metadata. My bad and not the issue here ;-)
so basically i strip it down and reinstall drivers once a month, and watch the performance degrade predictably.
i've tried working with a small scratch catalog and see no difference in performance.
i've tried moving the catalog to different drives, and see no difference in performance.
i set lightroom to use lots of resources, but when i pull my meters up, it is barely using ANY resources, but STILL lags horribly. Talking 5-30 seconds PER MOVE in the develop module.
i have no issue with this being my ignorance, or my machine, or my setup, or my drivers. What i DO take issue with is paying for the privilege of beta-testing both win8 (which is a big wt*!?! all by itself), and adobe products for them.
i feel for working professionals. I can barely tolerate the frustration, and my livelihood isn't depending on it.
i've gone through the basic troubleshooting steps a million times, so don't get me started on that. I tire of helpdesk obfuscaters wielding the same old checklist hoops they require me to jump through like a trick circus pony. Not hearing that i've tried it, and denying assistance unless i go through it one more time with them.
so far the only fix i've found is temporary, and involves stripping my system down to zero and reinstalling LR, PS6, Chrome and a pdf reader, along with video and input (including wacom) drivers.
please do not ask me to list my specs. I haven't a clue what all those numbers mean. And at my age, i see investing oodles of time into learning what techies go to school for as a project with exceedingly diminishing returns. It takes less time to strip the machine and reinstall everything once a month.
but since i hadn't seen that as a solution, i thought my feedback about it being a temporary fix might provide another clue to whoever knows more about these things than me.
thank you for listening. -
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I’m
disgusted
After installing LR4.4RC, I notice a different behavior of the mouse in the Develop module. LR4.3 and earlier allowed one to click on a slider (not hold) and move the slider by rolling the mouse wheel. This is very useful for finding an optimum adjustment for that slider, at least if the visual image could keep up.
Unfortunately, 4.4 is just as slow as 4.3. 15+ seconds between each movement of the wheel is unacceptable. With this additional loss of functionality in the latest update, I'll continue to use LR3.6 until Adobe gets the LR4 program bugs fixed or stops LR3.6 from working, in which case I'll be looking for a different program. -
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I’m
pissed off!
Lightroom uses SQLite as it's relational database system. It is a simple system without a lot of support because it is a cheap open source tool. It has been very poorly set up for lightroom and will be the bane of all future users.
You can install all the SSD drives you want and it won't cure bad design. As your catalogues get bigger and with more relations you'll likely to have a catastrophic error at some point.
Adobe needs to upgrade to a better RDB system such as MYSQL (Facebook uses MYSQL) and then add some maintenance tools like defrag, find lost entries, logical and physical back up and reorganization, page and cache size settings and general performance tuning etc., etc.
It may seem like a novelty to the photographic community to use a relational database system for managing, well, relationships but corporate America has been doing it for decades. Adobe has to get with the program and hire some computer technicians and square away this technical fiasco before it buries them.- view 11 more comments
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"That's likely why they suggest editing in a certain order."
That has nothing to do with the database. -
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I'm NOT saying there aren't problems in Lightroom, and I'm not recommending others do something this drastic, but because of other problems I was encountering, last weekend I blew away my system drive, and reinstalled Windows 7 and my various applications.
It has made a significant improvement in Lightroom 4.3 performance. Not, it's still not instant, and some things aren't even what I'd consider speedy, but for most things, most of the time, it's perceptibly faster.
This doesn't mean there aren't design issues with the database, I don't know. But, as a relational database designer for the last 25 years, I can definitely agree that errors in design can cause significant problems with performance. But, with all their resources, I can't imagine that Adobe doesn't have a bunch of top-notch database people around to make sure the database isn't the hold-up. Although, that said, I'm also not much of a fan of SQLite.-
interesting! Because i just discovered that Win8 was backing up EVERY SINGLE CHANGE to a folder called FILE HISTORY and by default keeping them forever. I only happened upon this when it seemed like overnight my 3T back-up drive was maxed. All that was stored on it was photographs and this File History folder, which i never thought to check out.
to make a long story short, i excluded any folder containing photographs and set it to keep only the most recent copy. The file size immediately decreased from (i wish i could bold, italicize and underline this, with a drumroll) ONE POINT EIGHT FIVE TERRABYTES to a manageable couple of gigs. Phew!
and lightroom (with a nice huge cache) was ZIPPY-FAST. At least so far.
i'll keep you posted on that, though. Often (after i refresh or restore my system) Lightroom will be ok for a few days before it starts bogging again. But this time is the FIRST time i haven't had to refresh or restore as a Lightroom 'fix.'
great thread. SO informative! -
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I’ve done a bit more research and while not definitive, this is what I have found:
The change from LR 3 to LR 4 appears to me to be both a move to the Sqlite RDB and a re-engineering of the interface to the Camera Raw editor used by LR 3, the big Photoshop and the little bother Elements. What that means is that LR 4 is a shell sitting above the CR editor to simplify your interaction with this somewhat cumbersome utility. And they use to RDB to keep track of all the changes you make including very detailed info about the use of the sliders, cropping and so on.
Since I’ve used the CR editor directly with Elements, I can say LR4 does a pretty good job there.
The use of Sqlite is another story entirely. LR 4 is relying heavily on actually writing small amounts of data back onto your hard drive during the editing process. That works OK at first, but it degrades over time as the number and complexity of changes increases. One consequence to changing data continuously is that file size can change in a way so that it can’t be put back in the same spot as it originally occupied and therefore it becomes fragmented and spread out all over the drive, which causes your hard drive to flog itself to death. The reason for that is the Windows operating system and the spinning hard drives that most of us have are not designed to support rapid, random and continuous access to rotating media. I’ve studied the performance monitor while I work and I can see the disk Master File Table getting hammered as well as other non-LR files.
In summary I see that we have two choices: 1) go out and buy the latest and greatest Intel I7 with 8 cores, 16GB of memory and a full complement of SSD drives, or 2) pressure Adobe to get off its wallet, buy MYSQL and hire some RDB geeks to design a proper DB subsystem. Hey they could even call it LR 5 and stiff us for $100 each for this magnificent upgrade! LOL- view 2 more comments
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understood
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Apple Aperture uses the same database, with similar data, but does not suffer from the slowdowns described (related to library navigation). I believe Aperture simply caches the entire database in memory.
File fragmentation is not an issue with solid state drives (as the drive head does not move). But Lightroom performance is lackluster on SSDs as well. As stated previously, this should be solvable by caching/preloading/background rendering. -
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Thanks for the compliment Rick and I’d definitely hold off on an option 1) choice. Spinning media and slower CPUs is only part of the problem; poor DB design and implementation, combined with multi-threading and locking issues are not fixed with hardware.
To All:
I have been around the block a few times and can say with some degree of certainty that the LR folks are probably some of the best software people for designing image processing algorithms and UI friendliness, but fall a little short in understanding, let alone explaining, the underlying system software that supports their product. Further, since this problem has existed for more than a year, I doubt that it has occurred to them that the problem lays in the platform tools they use. And I also doubt that they have anyone qualified to look into the problem that I have suggested exists. Believe me this is not the first time such a situation has existed.
The other thing I can say with certainty is that software vendors rarely seek out or even listen to what the user communities have to say about technical issues. They insist that it’s our problem and we could not possibly know how their proprietary software works, so what could we possibly tell them?
I’ve only been a LR user for a few weeks and only a member here for a few days so I don't know if there is any way to get their attention. If any of you do please speak out. Bill-
I believe Adobe engineers read these forums, as I've been responded to in the past. But as you have experience as a developer, you probably know that being on the outside and giving relevant advice is not easy. In all honesty, all we can do is express our concerns about the performance, and hope that in their architecture meetings it will be given weight.
Also I do not see that they insist it is our problem, they simply do not have any solution at this point. With all the frustration expressed here I would be surprised if it was not part of their agenda for Lightroom 5. -
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I am about to switch to another product. As stated I don't care if it is a bug or not, it is not right for lightroom 4 to be so slow. Don't care about technical reasons... it is taking WAY TO LONG to fix it. Is aperture a good product to change to? Is there another GOOD choice?
Adobe has always been the "quintessential" software company for images and such, in my mind, but if this is not fixed QUICK my opinion will change.-
If you are on a Mac, then Aperture is a good product. If you have enough RAM in your machine it is also blazing fast, and hardly touches the disk (compared to Lightroom). For me I found the lack of lens profiles, poor sharpening tools and lack of proper noise reduction to be unacceptable. But it will likely be updated this year, so I would be keeping an eye on it.
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I bought my copy of LR one month ago.
It took me a couple of weeks to get to know it.
It took me a week to figure out something wasn’t right with performance.
It took me a week to upgrade my OS HD to a 10K Velociraptor, upgrade my graphics card to an Nvidia 610, update all drivers and clean out my registry.
Once all the obvious potential problems were eliminated, the only remaining problem was the file access method.
It took me a few days to figure out that LR used Sqlite as its RDB.
It took me a day of watching the MS performance monitor to figure out that LR was demanding more from the hard drive and OS structure than could be reasonably be expected. That, plus unexplainable delays, led me to conclude that the way LR uses the RDB and the way it was set up was a big part of the problem. I’ve done enough research on the Sqiite RDB system to know that if someone very knowledgeable in its use were to really take it apart, they could probably suggest several improvements.
Now, I don’t mention this as a brag or to show off my sleuthing skills, but rather to demonstrate that it is not rocket science to figure this stuff out. First, you eliminate all the obvious and you are left with the probable cause of the problem. This is basic root-cause analysis and for the better part of a year the folks at Adobe haven’t even mentioned that someone there was “on it”, so I doubt that they are “on it” in any meaningful way.
I think I might have partial explanations for this lack of attention on Adobe’s part: the Mac Factor. You see the internal architecture of the Mac and its OS is significantly different from that of a Windows based PC. Different and better I should say. I don’t know for sure, but will speculate that there are fewer if any performance problems with LR running on Macs. So, there is now option 3) buy a Mac.
More LOLing!-
You speculate wrong.
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Your speculation would be incorrect. There have been a percentage of Mac and PC users reporting performance issues on the various 4.x releases. A review of this thread alone demonstrates this.
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Percentages, I don't know if there is an official figure. I have worked on 20 PC and 7 Mac configurations in the past year in 4.x LR. I have yet to find an abnormally slow system. So 0/27 is zero in my experience. I was at a LR meeting a few months back when the group of 40-45 people was asked and two people raised their hand. If it is 5% I would be shocked. But then I have only anecdotal evidence to provide.
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I hve been following this thread almost since day 1, all I can say is with the new Develope module, and the enhanced results I get with the latest 2012 process, performance has taken a hit and IQ has gone up.
For me not an issue, but for a profession photographer that's had to process 500-1000 images in a session, I can see what lots of people are complaining about. -
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This whole conversation is moot. In Vista, more Win 7 and even more in Windows 8. ETW tracing can give Adobe all the information they need to know what is going on.
And they could script it, to have those complaining run the script and return the ETL log file for analysis.
Its easy, but not always easy interpreting cause/effect though. The data they need can be gathered!!! -
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I’m
frustrated
I have finally with 4.3, a new computer build and basically no other programs installed, gotten performance in the development module that I'm happy with. However, performance in other parts of lightroom make no sense.
With the development module I could see what the bottleneck was... it used to be maxing out cpu when moving sliders. However, for things like exporting photos to jpeg, creating thumbnails of new photos, importing photos to the catalog lightroom takes its sweet slow time and is barely using ANY system resources. Why do I have 16gb of ram, a top of the line processor and a ssd drive if lightroom is content to utilize 5-15% cpu to generate previews for THE NEXT HOUR. I get that lightroom is built so that you can continue to use your PC while it's running tasks in the background.... but what if I just want it to finish so I can get to work???
Lightroom should have a user option (like many other programs do) to prioritize performance VS multitasking- view 14 more comments
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Don't disagree - I'll be a true believer when the official release is out. But at least in my case, it is a much superior performer to LR4.x.
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Dark Vater,
The way software works, you can't just fold changes from one into the other (when changes were as extensive as Lr5's probably were).
I feel reasonably confident that Adobe did not fix bugs in Lr4 performance and charge us for the fixes like ransom in Lr5, but rather invested a fair amount in rewriting, since there was no vision for a "silver bullet". No way to retrofit, and no way to do the work without getting paid for it. You know where that money has to come from, right?
PS - I understand that Lr4 performed *really* bad for some, and those folks are still (understandably) pissed. But it only performed a little sluggish for others, and the lucky ones aren't feeling so, unlucky.
Lr5(b) is a little faster and smoother than Lr4, for me, but not a lot.
Some people are believably claiming it is a lot faster and/or smoother, for them.
Rob -
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I have been trying LR5 Beta and there is a tremendous performance improvement on my Win7 32-bit machine - LR is usable again for me! Heck, it even runs on my Samsung netbook (definitely slower there but usable).
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that's heartening! Thanks!
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Not to rain on the parade of all the "LR5 is so fast that...", but you might want to look back. Way back to when V3 was in beta... and to when V4 was in beta...
We heard the same things then.
Is LR5 TRULY revolutionary and deserving of being a new version that Adobe can extract another chunk of money from us, or is it just the latest that SHOULD be a maintenance release? The release cycle is starting to seems just a bit suspiciously short...
In any case, given the debacle of LR4, I'd think there would be a LOT of potential users that would think twice about purported improvements in the beta and see what happens with 5.0, 5.1, and so on.- view 1 more comment
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"Is LR5 TRULY revolutionary and deserving of being a new version that Adobe can extract another chunk of money from us, or is it just the latest that SHOULD be a maintenance release?"
Dot releases don't have new features. This one has many, many new features. Thus, it's a full-release by-definition.
Since the upgrade cost was reduced last cycle to $69 (and presumably, though not confirmed, for this cycle too), have a faster release cycle seems reasonable. Elements has been on a 1-year release cycle for a long time, and it costs around $79 or so to upgrade. This looks like it's going to be something like 15 months so I don't see why $69 isn't a reasonable amount, especially with all the new features (there are more in this release that I will make immediate use of and that will save me time than there were in the LR4 release). -
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I postulate that people who complain about what they get for 69/79 dollars don't appreciate how much time and effort (and specialized knowledge and cost...) it takes to develop and maintain software like Lightroom.
PS - I wish Adobe would charge twice as much and make Lightroom twice as good.
Rob -
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I doubt it could be said any better than this David!
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Interesting, if cryptic reply.
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I have no problem when Adults express grievances. If you look around this forum and others, you'll find I have expressed a *LOT* of my own grievances. I've even won the reputation as an Adobe-basher by some of the more staunch defenders.
I *DO* have a problem however when people act like Adobe has ripped them off, on purpose. I don't know whether that's childish, or just naive, but I am a software developer myself, and I know how hard it is to develop software within a time-table and on a budget. I am regularly and unfairly accused of the same kinds of things that some of you (if the shoe don't fit, then don't wear it), are, no doubt wrongly, accusing Adobe of.
They did the best they could on Lr4, given their time-table and their budget - there is no doubt about that, in my mind. And, it has been a phenomenal release, for some of us, even if a bit moody (read: *NOT* terrible performance, but slower? - yes in some ways, in other ways - faster).
Did it cost you lost income in your photography profession? - I can see being upset about that. On the other hand, you could have tried Lr4 for 30 days, realized you couldn't make it work well enough, and either continued to use Lr3, or jumped ship altogether. You should be placing more of the blame on yourself, and less on Adobe.
Rob -
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Adobe is a business, not a charity.
They have to charge enough money to cover their development costs, whether those costs are incurred to improve performance or pile on new features.
Lr4 has been awesome for me. A bit constipated, and consequently moody..., but Adobe did some amazing work to bring us PV2012.
And I fully applaud them for having the courage to fix Lr4's worst maladies in order to bring us Lr5, rather than piling more on.
I'm happy to pay for their most recent development efforts.
Keep up the good work Adobe, and thank you muchly.
Rob -
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1Bear in mind that the title to this thread is “Lightroom: Performance and optimization: LR is slow”. There is little or no complaint here about LR 4 functionality; in fact it seems that most of us praise the LR4 features as well as the new LR5 features.
What is at issue for this thread in relation to LR5 is has Adobe discovered the causes of the previous release’s performance issues and have they developed fixes for them and included them in LR5? Or, will LR5 come storming out of the gate in limited beta usage only to do a face plant when the full production version hits the incredibly wide variety of systems and circumstances in the field?
Is it asking too much for a comment about this to come from Adobe? -
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i appreciate that some people are flush, and have little sense of how much $79 is (which is what i was charged). But when i buy a program, i expect it to work. Not to work the NEXT time i buy it.
i have spent literally hundreds of dollars on upgrades that didn't solve the problem. And i can't even count the hours.
adobe OWES me, and a LOT of other hi-volume photographers.- view 5 more comments
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I don't think they "redesigned everything under the hood", but nor did they just "fix the bugs that were making Lr4 go slow" - somewhere in between would be my guess. So yes: I imagine they did a substantial amount of re-writing... - but this is all "armchair speculation" - I have no inside info about what they actually did.
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My *guess* is that they did a significant refactoring of the code, something which (combined with new functionality) would drive you to a full beta test as opposed to just another RC of LR4.
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The ‹‹smart preview›› function in Lightroom 5 could perhaps be used as a workaround for performance issues. Perhaps it could be configured so you can work on the smart previews even when the full photos are available?
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As far as I can tell LR5 is a little faster. But it seems to be minor performance improvements instead of a radical shift in how photos are treated. What would make sense to me is to cache all the 1:1 previews in the filmstrip (and perhaps elsewhere as well, based on a priority queue), which should make switching between photos instantaneous.
I still have a lot of free memory with LR5 and switching photos is still slow, even though it is a little faster than LR4. I believe Aperture caches absolutely everything if possible, and this makes it incredibly snappy on my machine, as it hardly ever touches the disk. -
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This would be similar to the ‹‹proxy›› function used in Final Cut Pro X.
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We might as well debate the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
We will only know what LR5 can do when enough people try it in enough situations and get results that show a positive or negative outcome. Adobe might have hit the mark with the functionality when it produced LR4, but they performed poorly for a large segment of the user population at the same time. If LR 5 proves to be a jewel in the performance department as well as having excellent functionality; kudos to them. If it stinks the place up like LR4 has for many people, they always have the consumer complaint process for deceptive advertising.-
Why don't you try the Lr5 beta and weigh in?
I don't mean to sound "selfish", but what matters most to *you* is whether it works well for you, right? Well, does it? -
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I'll do that Rob. And, yes, working right for my purposes does matter to me. Remember, I'm very new to LR, so I have a lot to learn about the product in general.
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My main complaints with LR4 were draw speed of cropping and gradient tools... and occasionally the responsiveness of the sliders. In LR 5 beta everything is smooth and responsive.
Someone mentioned they wanted their photos to show up instantly. Get a SSD drive (you get get a really nice samsung 128GB for under $100) and put your catalog, previews and raw cache on it.
I'm editing a wedding in LR5 and have noticed a few random bugs that went away with closing LR and reopening, and I think writing xmp files made it crash... but all in all it is usable with the functionality of LR4 and the speed I expected before. You can't import your old catalog though which is a complete pain....-
While faster disks speeds up data reads, there is no reason to not allow the entire catalog and previews to live in memory. In my case that would be around 3GB, which is nothing compared to the 32GB available. Any edits could be done on the in-memory data and lazily written to disk.
If you look at CPU usage in LR4 it is very spiky, and it doesn't take much switching between photos before the UI layer gets unresponsive. By doing more work in the background it should be possible to smooth out these bumps.
Speeding up the tools themselves are more challenging as you do not want to compromise visual quality, but again I think the key is doing less work on-demand and more work ahead of time.
While LR5 beta seems snappier than its predecessors, there are still many improvements needed. One very noticeable example is: If I drag my photo at 1:1 in the Library module, there is no redraw. If I do the same in the Develop module, without making any changes, I need to wait for it to redraw. I would expect that *even after making changes* in the Develop module, a new 1:1 preview would be lazily generated so that if paused for a few seconds and then moved around the entire image would be pre-rendered. -
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My catalog is 5+ GB and my preview folders have gotten up to 20GB before I've deleted them all. You can make a virtual drive that is on your ram. This could be a good option for you, but probably not for everyone. In terms of tool speed I think it's about priorities.... for example I would rather have the crop tool be smooth than have the histogram be updating as I crop my photo. Lightroom 4 tries to do everything at once rather than prioritizing the tool responsiveness that you are currently using.
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I’m
Bummed
I downloaded LR5 and installed it. I then ran through a scenario I discovered while using LR4.
The scenario was this: A few weeks back, I had fired up the Windows performance monitor to watch resource usage while using LR 4. I had it set to watch CPU usage and thread counts on my second monitor. I plugged in my camera and I fired up LR4. I went right from the Library to Import. Import saw the camera and loaded the preview images. I was looking through the images for the ones I wanted and I noticed that the thread count was going up. But I was only looking at the camera images and hadn’t clicked import yet. So I sat back and did nothing while I watched the thread count go up by 100 every minute while CPU usage stayed at around 2.5 to 3%. I watched for 8 minutes and when the thread count had gone from 31 to 850, I decided to click the import button. I also noted that LR memory usage had gone from 500MB when I started LR to 1.3GB.
I imported 65 photos and started editing them. The thread count stayed at 850 for the rest of the session. While editing; I noticed performance started to slow. Most notable were the jerky images as I zoomed in and out and moved the photos around. After only about 20 minutes I gave up and checked the system status. CPU usage was averaging about 45%; LR memory usage was up to 3.3GB and paging was heavy. I looked at the event log and found that my NVIDIA graphics driver had posted a resource contention event 500, which meant that the system could not keep up with demand for my two monitors. That was what was causing the screen jerkiness.
LR4 renders the images and resizes the monitor output (CPU and memory required); my graphics card renders and resizes the monitor output (CPU and memory required). My graphics card is a low end 1GB twin monitor card. It will use up to 4GB of PC memory if it needs to. So, LR 4 was using 3.3GB of memory, the Graphics card was using 4GB and the system was using around 1GB. The paging file was getting around 12MS response time, which is 10 times what it should. And the whole session was staggering under the load. That’s a ton of work, all of which is using the same 8GB of DDR2 memory and my 4 Core 2 CPUs. LR4 simply got out of hand and overpowered my system. At that point in time I needed 12GBs of DDR3 memory and a 4 Core i7 processor set in order to run the workload.
I fired up LR5 and ran through the LR4 scenario described above and got exactly the same results. In other words, LR 5 processed my photos in exactly the same way as LR 4 did. Whatever causes LR4 to grow thread count like weeds in a garden is occurring in LR 5 as well. Whatever caused LR4 memory usage to grow by a factor of 6 is happening in LR5 as well. To me that means LR 5 is likely to perform in a nearly identical manner as did LR4 under similar circumstances.
This was a test to see if LR5 would behave in a similar manner to LR4 under similar circumstances. I’m sure that it did; nothing has changed there. I’m also sure that the file subsystem (SQLite) has problems with scaling up under multi-threaded access and I will likely face the same results when I devise a scenario that pushes the limits of the DB file subsystem. And that includes the caches and whatever that TMP file is.
Round one is over and the loser is Bill’s PC, bummer.- view 22 more comments
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Its procmon and I always mix the two up when I talk about them.
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yes, thank you. I opted out of the Process Explorer, when i saw that it actually disappears the task manager, and looked too complex for me to understand at this stage of my game.
i had a wonderful read on the wiki though, about threading and race problems. Those were described as causing problems that very much resemble the problems that lightroom has on my machine: the slowly increasing jitteriness until it just freezes. I've noticed this happens much faster when i have photoshop open and operating as well.
of course, i haven't the education to draw a conclusion.
it's a mystery, and i love a good mystery. Why spoil it with unfounded opinions? -
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I’m
indifferent
1First, *thank you* to those that have taken the time to download the beta, test and report. That in it of itself is a lot of work. I'm still skeptical. I find myself going back 6 months or so and can't help but think that I still feel like those of us who have had performance issues are not being heard by Adobe- or they still treat us like 'birthers' in that we are convinced about something that the vast majority of people don't believe is true. I truly still wonder if Adobe (and some poster in this 'performace issue' thread) believe us "1%ers" even have performance issues- or really cares. We spent months defending ourselves by arguing with posters who said we were a small minority and to suck it up or find something else. Honestly, I feel that with each major or point release Adobe is adding more perfume on the pig. I need to see improvements on performance with each release *first*. So far, in general, with each upgrade the opposite has been true (albeit it has had new and useful features added). Im willing to bet that prof photogs would pay $2-300 for a product that screams like Capture One for tethering and processing and has the features and UI friendliness of LR4x. Which is why I truly believe that Adobe has positioned this product with its low price for the masses of non prof and prof photogs needing to enhance a small number of photos and who have time on their hands and is counting on volume to make their profit. This is where I think we will continue to be frustrated with Adobe because we're not their core market. Certainly, their prerogative as a for-profit company but not helpful to me. For those photos who really value their time, you can surely attest to those many many hours of post-processing, how much its costing you with each painfully slow re-draw and how much more time you could be spending with your family instead- or shooting or marketing. This lost productivity is what I think about most. LR has some amazing features already that I love and its why I continue to deal with it, but I need it to tether and process photos quickly (preview, edit, tweak, delete, rinse and repeat) and although not expressly stated by Adobe, I need it to be *faster with each release* on a HW system that is reasonably current (Im on a MBP Retina loaded). So far, for me, Adobe has failed this simple test with each major or point release but folks like PhaseOne are catching up.
Was this response valuable at all, probably not, and I do apologize to those who have read this and didn't get any value from it. But I appreciate the opportunity to vent and I sincerely appreciate those that have tested and posted their experiences. thank you!- view 1 more comment
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Clearly, pressure must still be applied. LR5 beta is better, but speed, though improved, remains an issue. The new bells and whistles are nice but Andy, you said it well; is Adobe's market for LR amateurs or pros. If not pros, then their legitimacy is questionable. And it remains amazing to me why anyone would waste their time denigrating those many of us with performance issues as somehow delusional.
What makes no sense to me with LR4, is how it uses all the ample resources of my machine just to write and rewrite a simple preview, something of insignificant size. From what I've read in this forum and experienced myself, this is where the problem ultimately lies.
So Adobe, fix this issue, whatever it takes, before giving us more bells and whistles. -
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Andy, I’ll be presumptuous and say you’re welcome.
Since joining this group a few months ago, I have been dismayed by the sophomoric and thinly veiled aspersions being tossed about for no apparent reason; most of these comments coming from just a few of the more vociferous Adobe apologists.
Adobe chose to build the LR infrastructure on the cheap, with embedded open source DBs, self-developed thread management and software based rendering and resizing. This is an appropriate strategy for a low-end consumer software product. Judging from the cameras that many people discuss here, the “average” LR user is a professional photographer or at least an “above average” pro-sumer. You don’t really hear much from the Cool Pix community.
Adobe is now facing a serious threat to their product and there is little they can do about it; at least not in the next few months or even years. Adobe must re-design the infrastructure for 1) storing images and the edits that go along with them; 2) managing multi-threading and 3) adopt the Open-GL API for graphics display.
I suspect that comments from people like me are treated like farts in a windstorm; they don’t really get noticed. The only way to get the attention of a producer of any product is to not buy it. Adobe has unwittingly created an enormous window of opportunity for its competitors. If a competitor can make the business case to a professional photographer that the competing software will cut post processing time in half and do it reliably regardless of the workflow; well, I’ll leave it to the pros to figure that one out...
Bill -
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Lr4 performance woes hurt Adobe.
Lr5's lean feature list isn't a feather in their hat either.
No doubt they spent a substantial amount of their Lr5 development time improving performance (within the confines of the design, of course), which was too big of a job for an Lr4 dot release.
In my opinion, Lr5 is proof that Adobe heard our (your) pleas - they clearly concentrated on performance at the expense of feature enhancement.
PS - People reported wildly different behavior Lr4-performance-wise, and wildly different perception of other peoples performance, etc. - it's no wonder the user-to-user "answers" have been so varied. Yes: Adobe mostly stayed out of it - Lr5 was their answer.
PPS - I am not an Adobe defender/apologist (really, I'm not), but I think we should be fair to them, as we expect them to be fair to us.
Summary: It's frustrating to have a program like Lightroom, which is so good in so many ways, and continues to be so inadequate in so many other ways, but to say Adobe didn't take performance complaints to heart is unfair. -
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Okay so for what it is worth:
Bad first.. yes, 4.0 should have been fixed and Adobe should just admit it and be done with it.
Good.. 5.0 works great so far. Not only is it faster on develop, etc, it also imports and changes files from the native raw to DNG much faster than before. The other improvements are very nice.
Adobe... please don't let us down again. I have always thought of your company as the best in the business. You lost some points on 4.0... and alway remember a saying a boss once told me... "It takes 7 at-a-boys to make up for one awe-sh*t -
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Since I have contributed a bit to this ongoing thread, and have been following it since it started, I thought I would update my current state for anyone interested:
I have decided to drop Lightroom from my workflow, and have replaced it with PhaseOne's Capture One.
Phase is a much more professional product, it performs faster, Tethers faster and more reliability, and perhaps most important, has a much better RAW processing engine. White balances are "cleaner and crisper and much better". Contrast and tonality are greatly improved, the selective editing tools and keystone lens adjustment tools are far superior, and noise reduction and sharpening perform better. I notice about a full stop of quality improvement with files processed from my 5D MK3 in C1 verses Lightroom.
C1 might not be suitable for non professionals as it is more complex and more than double the price of Lightroom, ($350-400) and doesnt have anywhere near as good of a UI/UX design as Lightroom (Lightroom is really well designed, just borderline unusablely slow). The engine running Capture One is far better, the performance is better, and thats the most important thing.
Oh, and it doesnt design photobooks, or uses map features or have a print engine. - It is a professional image application and not bloated. It makes good images.
I'm very disappointed with Adobes failure, and the conversation I've had with other professional users is similar.
I used to really enjoy Lightroom, I actually dropped CaptureOne Pro 3.7 back in the day to switch over to Lightroom because I saw potential in the software, however I think it's become too bloated and too focused on a less demanding, amateur market that doesnt notice the performance drags as much. Perhaps I'll look into LR when it gets gutted again someday and replaced with hopefully a proper engine.-
Thanks for reporting back James - I really appreciate it.
I don't agree with everything you said, but I do agree with a lot of it, and understand where you're coming from...
Enjoy,
Rob -
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