Lightroom Performance - Still Waiting for Help

How full is your HD?

That usually causes most slowdowns!

The drive with the catalog has 577 Gb free of 931 Gb and it is an SSD drive
The drive with the photos  has 6.67Tb free of 7.99Tb. It is a USB 3.0 Drobo set up as Raid 5.

When I first load LR, the performance is acceptable. After I edit a few images (see above) it begins to get slower and slower. Dramatically worse with GPU on which seems to mitigate the disc space issue anyway.

Any other ideas. There are dozens of professional photographers (power users) suffering as I am and all of us would love to find a solution before we leave Adobe...

Try this link, some great advice here :) https://www.lightroomqueen.com she knows her stuff!

I hear that Lightroom 2017 is close. I also hear that it may not provide much improvement in speed. We wait...

Victoria is very positive and keen to help but she has no answer to this. For real, working professionals who have to churn through large numbers of images on a deadline, LR simply is terrible. I have two sides to my photography. One, my art photography, low volume, lots of attention to detail, it's great, the other, the high volume, fast turnaround business that supports the other, as well as my family, it's terrible and taking years from my life.

i have read far and wide about this...all the usual suspects (not enough memory, full hdd, wireless mouse, use 2nd drive, etc) are not the cause. some of these may contribute under certain circumstances but lr has a fundamental issue with performance, especially in develop mode. Test - go into library mode and do exposure adjustments (does not matter how much) for 100 photos. Then do the same in developmode. Which too (way) longer.

I did a couple of projects in captureone; layout was a bit different but had the basic lr features plus a couple of really cool ones (focus detect is awesome). But it does not have as good an integration with photoshop and can't touch lr's ability to export and publish. 

I hear v7 is coming out. One 3rd hand review i read is that its muchfaster. I hope so.

And yes turn off the gpu. Its been the cause of most of my lr crashes (and yes, i have the latest drivers).

As far as the numbering goes, they just didn't bump the year number at the same time as everyone else because they'd have had to bump the perpetual number at the same time.

The gradual slow down is a real mystery. For those working on high volume fast turnaround, the new smart preview checkbox is working out pretty well for most I've spoken to, although I agree it's not the perfect solution.

Before my wife died, she was passionate about taking pictures, and one thing I found, was as soon as a catalogue reaches 10K images the slowdown starts, so I would start her a new catalogue every year, so that the catalogue was as lean as possible, remember the way LightRoom works all the edits are stored in the catalogue, so I just figured keep it lean, I think Adobe needs to look at a way to deal with very large catalogues, maybe treat it a bit like email and have an archive area where very old shoots can be stored, to take the load off the main working work?

I'm not a technical authority today by any means, and am usually reluctant to contribute at that level. But, I have recently realized a significant improvement in the area of this thread's topic that I want to share.

I also battled the LR issue of degrading performance as I edited my way through a large image set - also having to kill LR periodically just to restart and recover some performance.

I was also battling not just performance, but complete unreliability of Topaz Labs - another processing-intensive software I use regularly in my workflow (or was trying to). In the course of the troubleshooting battle, I discovered more about the significance of the GPU in today's digital media processing software than I really cared to know.

First, my then-current GPU (a fairly old AMD R7 360 as I recall) had 2Gb of onboard memory. I discovered that Photoshop was controlling the lion's share of that, and when other software was trying to use the GPU at the same time, it was failing - either failing to get the GPU support it wanted (LR?), or failing altogether (Topaz).

I caved in and upgraded the GPU. I purchased a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with 4Gb of onboard memory. It not only has more memory, but is, of course, a more recent/advanced GPU.

The issues I was having with Topaz Labs software completely failing instantly went away. Performance in not only Topaz but also in Photoshop improved dramatically. But the most important discovery was that the degrading-performance issue in Lightroom has, so far, gone away. It's been a couple months or so now.

And that card cost me $85 after the seller's rebate. Small price to have paid.

I was preferring an AMD card at the time of the upgrade, and was disappointed to be "moving" to an Nvidia solution (for personal reasons I won't go into here). But, with further reading, I realize I maybe should be glad I did. Here is an article that I found interesting on the subject. It's nearly three years old, so I clearly don't know the status of Adobe's software today. My gut tells me it's probably not much changed. The comment in here on Adobe's use of the two technologies should be interesting to all.

http://create.pro/blog/opencl-vs-cuda/

Search on "Adobe CUDA vs OpenCL" and you'll find numerous indications of Adobe technology's far-superior performance on a CUDA-based GPU over AMD's OpenCL.

What I learned in my months battling this issue is that the GPU is playing a far more significant roll in the software that I use than I've ever realized (but then I'm an old fart). It's not all about the CPU and RAM any longer. The GPU manufacturers are pushing out new technologies for significant new onboard processing opportunities at an increasing rate. And, of course, the software companies are exploiting them and pushing more tasks out to the GPU. As a result of the rate of advancements, and rate of adoption in the software, GPUs will become outdated fast. Case in point was the Topaz Labs software which would not run on my system (alongside Photoshop) until I upgraded the GPU.

Lightroom is still way behind the power curve, comparatively, in terms of performance. But the degrading-performance issue seems to have gone away for me with a GPU upgrade.

I understand exactly.

I upgraded my computer recently in an effort to improve Lightroom speed. When I did, I purchased the biggest and fastest video card from the NVidia line (see below). I have discussed this with Adobe and even was willing to try a different Graphics card, but one of their developers told me my card was more than ok! This card has both Open CL and CUDA. I do not have the problem with Photoshop - Only Lightroom.

I wish I had the speed improvement you mentioned.

Displays: 1) 1920x1080, 2) 1920x1080

Graphics Processor Info: 
GeForce GTX TITAN X/PCIe/SSE2

Check OpenGL support: Passed
Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 384.76
Renderer: GeForce GTX TITAN X/PCIe/SSE2
LanguageVersion: 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler

Adapter #1: Vendor : 10de
Device : 17c2
Subsystem : 29903842
Revision : a1
Video Memory : 12244
Adapter #2: Vendor : 1414
Device : 8c
Subsystem : 0
Revision : 0
Video Memory : 0

Direct2DEnabled: false
GL_ACCUM_ALPHA_BITS: 16
GL_ACCUM_BLUE_BITS: 16
GL_ACCUM_GREEN_BITS: 16
GL_ACCUM_RED_BITS: 16
GL_ALPHA_BITS: 0
GL_BLUE_BITS: 8
GL_DEPTH_BITS: 24
GL_GREEN_BITS: 8
GL_MAX_3D_TEXTURE_SIZE: 2048
GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE: 16384
GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS: 4
GL_MAX_VIEWPORT_DIMS: 16384,16384
GL_RED_BITS: 8
GL_RENDERER: GeForce GTX TITAN X/PCIe/SSE2
GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION: 4.50 NVIDIA
GL_STENCIL_BITS: 8
GL_VENDOR: NVIDIA Corporation
GL_VERSION: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 384.76
GPUDeviceEnabled: false
OGLEnabled: true

I wish I had the speed improvement you mentioned.

I wish I understood why I seemed to get it, then, and why you haven't! This is what is so bizarre. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to consistent performance with any reasonably comparable configuration.

Displays: 1) 3840x2160, 2) 1920x1080

Graphics Processor Info: 
GeForce GTX 1050 Ti/PCIe/SSE2

Check OpenGL support: Passed
Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 384.76
Renderer: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
LanguageVersion: 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler

Adapter #1: Vendor : 10de
Device : 1c82
Subsystem : 62583842
Revision : a1
Video Memory : 4014

Adapter #2: Vendor : 1414
Device : 8c
Subsystem : 0
Revision : 0
Video Memory : 0

Direct2DEnabled: false
GL_ACCUM_ALPHA_BITS: 16
GL_ACCUM_BLUE_BITS: 16
GL_ACCUM_GREEN_BITS: 16
GL_ACCUM_RED_BITS: 16
GL_ALPHA_BITS: 0
GL_BLUE_BITS: 8
GL_DEPTH_BITS: 24
GL_GREEN_BITS: 8
GL_MAX_3D_TEXTURE_SIZE: 16384
GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE: 32768
GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS: 4
GL_MAX_VIEWPORT_DIMS: 32768,32768
GL_RED_BITS: 8
GL_RENDERER: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION: 4.50 NVIDIA
GL_STENCIL_BITS: 8
GL_VENDOR: NVIDIA Corporation
GL_VERSION: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 384.76
GPUDeviceEnabled: false
OGLEnabled: true

when I have two monitors and the 2nd is in loupe view, develop mode and i increase the brightness (
+) by 1 tick, and it takes literally 8 seconds for the 2nd monitor to update the display (whereas fresh run its 1s with 80k images in my catalog)...its not the hdd, its not the video card, its not the mouse, its not the amount of ram, its not the catalog size, its not cuda_vs_open gl, its not the number of cpu cores. its intrinsic in lr.

I sure wish Adobe would address and figure this out!

Anecdotally, Joel, just to add to your frustration, and my bewilderment...

I'm editing photos from a recent shoot as we speak (or write), and just chuckled to myself after adding well over 50 spot removals to a single image in LR Develop with no performance concern. Before this upgrade to my GPU, I could not have done that; LR would have started to crater - even after a fresh restart - after a bare few. I had to go to Photoshop.

Also- as you did, I built this Windows 10 desktop I'm using back in the spring specifically for my biz purpose. No other software gets on here. With both of us running the same op system, with the same driver on recent GPUs - I don't get it.

BTW, it's the paint chips and bugs on the auto show cars  that's so hard on the spot remover. :-)  And I'm ecstatic to be able to have the use of it to such an extent!

I just did the exact same thing about 2 months ago. I upgraded my graphics card to the Nvida GTX1050ti. I have the exact same issue. Performance decreases as I go. When I first installed the card and fired up Lightroom it was awesome. Had GPU acceleration on, editing was speeding along. Now I can edit for a little while but then performance degrades. 

It has to be Lightroom itself. Something is eating into the performance. I'm back to the same or worse performance I had prior to getting the graphics card. The rest of the hardware is fine. 32gb RAM, SSD drives, fast CPU etc etc. 

They need to sort this out. I'm really annoyed that I purchased a much better graphics card to find performance drop and my workflow slowing down to a crawl.