# Classic 11.2 Slow boot up



## mcschlotz (Feb 27, 2022)

On an iMac, Monterey OS. All of a sudden I try to bring up LR and it takes a very long time at the splash screen (beach ball spinning), then finally the basic screen comes up but then takes forever to populate. Once finally in everything seems to run ok.  Catalog is approx 1.05gb and the previews data file is 20gb.  Internal SSD has 196gb of free space out of 500gb.  What I've tried so far: reboot the computer, reset the nvpram, reset LR system preferences and used disk utility to verify the drive. Nothing seems to fix the slowness.  Interesting side note: I can exit LR completely. Bring it back up and is opens a lot faster BUT, if I exit, go do something else on the iMac then come back to bring up LR it's back to a slow crawl opening. BTW my iMac is strictly SSD, not a fusion.


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## johnrellis (Feb 27, 2022)

Do the menu command File > Plug-in Manager. Scroll through the list of plugins -- if you see LogiOptions, select it and click Disable in the Status panel on the right. Logitech utilities silently install that plugin, and it's been buggy for years, causing errors and slow startups.


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## mcschlotz (Feb 27, 2022)

Checked, nope not there. Only two plug-ins I have enabled are from Jeff Friedl:  Folder publisher and LR/Mogrify2 both were enabled when LR was not slow to boot up.


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## johnrellis (Feb 27, 2022)

It's a longshot, but try disabling all plugins temporarily and then restarting. It's not unheard of for LR to start handling existing plugins differently (I'm a plugin developer).


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## mcschlotz (Feb 27, 2022)

Well, it was worth the try but still no improvement.


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## johnrellis (Feb 27, 2022)

Try starting up LR with some logging enabled. Start the Terminal app and copy/paste this long command line:

```
/Applications/Adobe\ Lightroom\ Classic/Adobe\ Lightroom\ Classic.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ Lightroom\ Classic -traceback >& ~/Desktop/lightroom.log
```

Once LR fully starts, exit it and attach here the file "lightroom.log" from your Desktop.  That might give clues as to what LR thinks it is doing during the startup.


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## mcschlotz (Feb 28, 2022)

Here is the log requested.


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## johnrellis (Mar 1, 2022)

Unfortunately, that log file looks normal and doesn't appear to contain any clues.


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## mcschlotz (Mar 1, 2022)

I can only imagine attempting to open up a conversation with Adobe on this.... ARGH!


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## Gnits (Mar 1, 2022)

I would attempt the following. 

1. Take a note of your catalogs current folder and filename. 
2. Create a new catalog.  Import a test set of images.  If the app behaves as expected then focus reverts to an issue with your existing catalog. 
3 . Use the test catalog in 2 above or create a new catalog you will use going forward.  Note the name and folder to avoid future confusion.  While inside the new catalog, use the Import Catalog feature  to import everything from your original catalog in 1 above. Make sure you have enough space for the new catalog and do not move the location of your images.  

This should  give you a squeeky clean new catalog. 

It is good practice before doing this to use the feature to check for missing files and resolve these before creating the new version of your catalog.  

With such a large catalog , you will probably need to run this overnight and adjust your settings so your machine does not go to sleep during the process. 

There is a possibility you may have a bunch of  obsolete links within your existing catalog, caused by power outages, uncontrolled aborts or software bugs at app or o/s level. 

The process above is non destructive as you are left with your original catalog, but gives you the potential to start fresh.  If issues arise during this process then you have some clue as to the next direction to explore.


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## johnrellis (Mar 1, 2022)

If Gnits' suggestion doesn't help, another longer shot thing to try: Do a clean uninstall/reinstall of all your Adobe apps, following the instructions here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/cc-cleaner-tool-installation-problems.html


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## mcschlotz (Mar 1, 2022)

Tried the new catalog approach. Absolutely no difference. Still takes forever to completely boot up.


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## Gnits (Mar 1, 2022)

ok.  Disappointed no progress.


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## mcschlotz (Mar 1, 2022)

Yeah, been using this since ver-1. First time seeing it become a real dog. A bit leery about the cleaner tool.  I've got LR configured the best way for me and afraid I'll loose a bunch of the configuration in the process..


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## Gnits (Mar 1, 2022)

I know someone else who has a similar problem on a Mac with a similar number of images in the catalog.

While I am not a Mac expert, I have basic Mac skills. Have not had the opportunity to do a catalog rebuild as above or likely to have the opportunity in the next week or two.

My instinct is that something to do within the internal database structure needs fine tuning to cope with the volume of records, but have no way of checking this out. 

I have seen the suggestion to rebuild the preferences files to solve strange behaviour. I assume Adobe stores working values and intermediate results in this file.  I am critical  of this design approach and even more critical that Adobe do not give us a tool to reset the preference file while protecting existing user settings. So, I am not keen to make this suggestion, but if it has not already been suggested already it might be a last resort.

The final suggestion I have is to clear all previews and allow Lr to rebuild them from scratch.  Maybe a corrupt preview file might be a cause. However, the procedure to create a new Catalog and import the original catalog into this should leave you with a refreshed preview file condition.

I would be tempted to log an official support call, as it appears you are close to exhausting all options.

It may be a few weeks before I get to investigate the case I mentioned at the start. If I find a solution or anything else which might help, I will post it here.


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## mcschlotz (Mar 3, 2022)

After all the failed attempts, I decided to blow away the previews file of my existing catalog, which was 28GB.  I also increased the cache file size from 40gb to 50gb.  Those two things have appeared to solve the problem. LR now boots up quickly.


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## Gnits (Mar 3, 2022)

Delighted you got a result.  I will try this out on another similar problem over the next week or two and will report back.

It would be great to get a definitive result.  I expect this scenario to repeat, especially as catalogs and previews are regularly heading for 1 million plus images, so having a pre known workaround would be super.


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## mcschlotz (Mar 4, 2022)

`Well, it looks like I spoke too soon.  The unbelievable slowness in booting up is back to where it was.


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## Gnits (Mar 4, 2022)

How disappointing.


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## Gnits (Mar 7, 2022)

See this post...  https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/threads/lrc-performance-update.44867/


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## mcschlotz (Mar 7, 2022)

Only publisher plug-in I have is by Jeffrey Friedl called 'folder publisher'. The publishers 'hard disk' section is empty. Jeffrey's writes out to one of my local drives. Regardless, I've tried bring up LR Classic with it active and with it disabled. Not much difference, unfortunately.


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## mcschlotz (Apr 4, 2022)

UPDATE: I might have stumbled upon the culprit.  Mac's spotlight indexing.  I turned it off and the next day turned it back on. Forced it to re-index and that seemed to resolve the LR slow boot ups.  So far it's been booting up as far as it use to.


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## Gnits (Apr 4, 2022)

You could be on to something here..... but I am nearly positive I have considered this for a friend I know who has an acute version of this performance problem.

I can remember excluding the Lightroom Catalog and preview files from the Spotlight search bandwidth. So maybe there is a need to rebuild the index.... worth digging deeper.

https://osxdaily.com/2011/12/30/exclude-drives-or-folders-from-spotlight-index-mac-os-x/

I still think it is worth excluding the catalog and previews from Spotlight.  If anyone has more in-depth responses to this please post.


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## mcschlotz (Apr 4, 2022)

Just for reference: my LR catalogs are on an external 1TB SSD. Current year photos are also on that same SSD.  The SSD is a ThunderBlade from OWC that has Read/Write speeds of ~ 1200 MB/s.  All previous years photos are on a Thunderbolt-3 Raid 5 box, also from OWC.  Spotlight is set to ignore both the ThunderBlade SSD and Raid 5 box.


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## Gnits (Apr 4, 2022)

I should get the chance to try resetting the Spotlight index on my friends Mac within the next week. I will report back on any developments.


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## mcschlotz (Feb 27, 2022)

On an iMac, Monterey OS. All of a sudden I try to bring up LR and it takes a very long time at the splash screen (beach ball spinning), then finally the basic screen comes up but then takes forever to populate. Once finally in everything seems to run ok.  Catalog is approx 1.05gb and the previews data file is 20gb.  Internal SSD has 196gb of free space out of 500gb.  What I've tried so far: reboot the computer, reset the nvpram, reset LR system preferences and used disk utility to verify the drive. Nothing seems to fix the slowness.  Interesting side note: I can exit LR completely. Bring it back up and is opens a lot faster BUT, if I exit, go do something else on the iMac then come back to bring up LR it's back to a slow crawl opening. BTW my iMac is strictly SSD, not a fusion.


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## mcschlotz (Apr 5, 2022)

Read up on the terminal command:  mdutil 
Here are two useful links:

https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2022/20220205_2007-AppleCoreRot-Spotlight-FailedSearching.html
https://www.howtoisolve.com/how-to-enable-disable-spotlight-search-on-mac-os-x-ei-capitan/


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## Gnits (Apr 5, 2022)

very useful…. will explore this at first opportunity, hopefully within the next week.

Appreciated.


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## Gnits (Apr 19, 2022)

Finally had a chance to explore impact of Spotlight in Lr performance on a friends Mac.

I removed the drives containing the Lr images from Spotlight. Also removed the main Mac HD and re added to Spotlight so it would reindex the main system drive only.

Impact on performance was massive.  Will need to monitor over the next few weeks.  

Main query I have is why this suddenly happened, as user already had a major library of images before sudden loss of performance over last month or two.

I took the opportunity to check if Publishing Services might have been a contributing factor, but there was zero images in any of the publissing collections.


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## Gnits (Apr 19, 2022)

Ps. I had previously removed the Lr Catalog and Previews folder from Spotlight. This was months and months ago. It was only when I removed the users library of images from Spotlight that performance reverted to a ‘massively improved’ status.

I would continue to exclude Lr Catalog and Preview folders from Spotlight as a general rule of thumb to protect overall performance of Lr for large library of images.

My personal system is on a Windows platform, so I must double check Windows indexing settings as they relate to my own library of images.


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## mcschlotz (Apr 29, 2022)

I will now call this a confirmed solution, at least for Mac users. My LR Classic boot up performance has remained quick ever since eliminating Spotlight from indexing the folders containing catalogs & previews.


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