# is 4.0 slow or is it just me?



## liquidmonkey (May 11, 2012)

was using LR 3.something and then switched to 4.0.
things were a bit slow but i thought it might be my PC as things in general were getting bogged down (had not done reinstall in 2 years).
so did a reinstall but this time on a SSD  and thought, now its gonna blaze along...

nope. LR4.0 is still slow, especially when in the develop mode.
i'm quite bummed out as my system is quite good and with the new SSD i was expecting super fast results.


so is it just me?


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## Jim Wilde (May 11, 2012)

No, it's not just you. Quite a few people have encountered slow performance, especially in the first 4.0 release. Since then Adobe have released two 4.1 Release Candidates which have improved things for some people, but certainly not all. If you haven't already done so, it would be worth trying the latest 4.1 RC2 to see if it helps (and there are some bugs in 4.0 which are fixed in the RC).


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## liquidmonkey (May 11, 2012)

thanks for the info.


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## Jim Wilde (May 11, 2012)

I should add that, while some people *are *experiencing performance problems, many more (including me) are not. What makes it difficult for the Adobe engineers is trying to pin down the cause.....looking as system specs doesn't seem to offer any clues as some folks with more powerful configurations than mine have reported problems. In fact looking at your configuration it is very similar to my own, so why are you having trouble and I'm not? I must admit I don't envy Adobe trying to sort this issue....

If you do decide to try the 4.1 RC2 we'd be interested in knowing if it make a difference.


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## BigIronCruiser (May 15, 2012)

I now have LR 4.1 RC2, and when coupled with Nikon D800 RAW files, it almost puts tears in your eyes.  Importing and rendering files is definitely slow, but it's of little consequence since it's mostly a batch process.  What does matter, however, is the performance of the develop module where we work in an interactive manner.  In my case, it takes 8 seconds for the "Loading" message to go away when switching between images.  With a Core i7 and 8gb of memory with oodles of memory available, it should be nearly immediate.

During the 8 second "loading" process, the i7 cores are mostly idle except for being pushed up to roughly 85% for the final 1-2 seconds.

I also experience occasional hangs in the Develop module.  I get a white rectangle in the upper part of the LR window, and the hangs last anywhere from 5 seconds to infinity.  Other than generic editing (sliders, spot removal, etc), I haven't seen any specific sequence of events that causes LR to hang.  Even when LR is dead in the water, other apps work fine.

Any suggestions or thoughts?  And before anyone asks, I have an nVidia GT220 with the most recent driver installed, and a 1920x1200 monitor.


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## Jim Wilde (May 15, 2012)

Hi, welcome to the forum.

Where are you image files stored? And the catalog? And the ACR cache? Maybe there's a disk sub-system bottleneck?

Whilst I agree the 8 seconds seems overly long, I also think that your expectations of 'nearly immediate' are maybe a bit unrealistic. With my 21MP files the 'Loading' indicator probably takes about 3 seconds to turn off (which is now pretty consistent with LR3), so I wouldn't expect yours to be *less* than that, possibly 4-5 seconds maybe? As it happens I usually keep the loading indicator turned off, and instead I wait for the sliders to be activated....that's usually sub-second when moving from image to image, so that's the point where I can start work. How long before your sliders activate?


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## BigIronCruiser (May 15, 2012)

*LR Performance*

Thanks for the welcome.  There are some very knowledgeable people here, and some great information being shared.

Sliders in the Develop module become enabled in roughly 2-3 seconds with D700 and D800 RAW files.  "Loading" goes away in 4-5 seconds with D700 files, and 7-8 seconds with D800 files.  I turned off the "Loading" indicator, which definitely improves the "perceived" performance.  Thanks for mentioning it.

RAW files and the LR catalog are stored on a 1TB internal HDD with 75% free space.  ACR cache is on a 750GB internal HDD with 60% free space.

I'm not convinced that "nearly immediate" is such a stretch, and nobody should have to settle for temporary and/or permanent hangs.  Intel processor performance has at least quadrupled since LR was introduced in 2007, and most of us are now running 64-bit with lots of memory instead of 32-bit with limited memory.  Unfortunately, far too many people are suggesting that LR performance is going in the opposite direction.  Has LR become bloated?  Is it written in an inefficient programming language?  Are 40mb RAW files too much to handle?  Will it scream with Ivy Bridge processors?  Or, hopefully, is there a simple solution?


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## Jim Wilde (May 15, 2012)

Performance issues are a real problem to pin down, especially at the moment when there are clearly issues with LR4 for some people. But that is rather paralleling what happened with LR3 when it was first introduced, and it wasn't until 3.2 and later that real progress was made in getting consistent performance for most users. Having said that, for me LR3 was generally slower in many aspects than LR2 and I did a lot of comparison tests to validate that.....but I wasn't totally surprised at that in view of the new processing engine that LR3 introduced. 

Now here we are again with yet another new processing engine, if anything this is even more of a sea change than PV2010. Certain aspects have again slowed a bit more (export for example has gone from an average 3.25secs to just over 4secs for my full size 21mp files)....so is that inefficiency in coding, or just the new processing engine requiring more effort? Will 4.1 or 4.2 improve things? I do agree that you shouldn't settle for temporary and/or permanent hangs, and I wasn't suggesting that, and I hope that 4.1 will fix those kinds of problem.

"Nearly immediate" is too subjective for me, what we each understand by that could be poles apart. At the moment, as I said, sliders in Develop are activated sub-second, so that remains my benchmark on my particular system. I'm already aware that some aspects of my system could be improved, imports are slower than I would like but that's mainly due to the fact that I use the 'Make Second Copy' option to a USB2-connected external drive.....I plan to upgrade that to USB3 soon so that should make a difference. Would Ivy Bridge help? Probably a little, though I suspect not hugely.....I already struggle to drive my 1st gen i7 up to a consistent high level. The problem is that there's a lot of data being moved around (and your 800 makes the issue even more difficult) so faster drives on a faster bus (or maybe SSD) would be a better place to start for me if I felt in need of improving things.

For your particular issue, perhaps trying to separate the images from the catalog might help.....maybe try it with one folder first? I use a 4 internal drive setup, OS/Programs on one, catalogs on 2, ACR cache on 3, and images on 4....so in theory I've given myself the best shot with the hardware I've got.

Is LR now 'bloated'? I've seen many comments to that effect over at the Adobe U2U forum, mainly in the 600+ comments of the "LR4 is Slow" thread. There's also been some fairly firm rejections of that notion, mainly centred on the fact that the perceived 'bloat' in LR4 is in the new Book and Map modules.....but that's the point, they are modules and their existence in theory has no impact whatsoever on performance while in the Develop module.

Let us know if you decide to try separating images from catalog, I'd be interested in knowing if it has any effect.


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## Victoria Bampton (May 15, 2012)

There are certainly some issues yet to be sorted, and they're proving tricky to track down.

I've heard a few people with that white rectangle issue - those are usually a graphics card/driver issue, so there may be some kind of a conflict going on there.  nVidia certainly seems to be coming up more often than other graphics card manufacturers.

Have you rendered previews before switching to Develop?  That may help your initial load time (to sliders available), because it preloads the ACR cache.

Personally I turn the loading overlay off in Develop.  Sliders freeing up is enough to get to work, and the loading overlay's just distracting.  If you want to turn that off, you'll find it under view menu > view options.

I know all of this is incredibly frustrating.  All I can say is the team are working really hard to track down and fix the issues, but it's looking like there are multiple different factors involved.


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## dmach8 (May 16, 2012)

Just pull up system info under help and then use a brush and sliders and watch the memory useage climb, then let it pause it never drops, even when moving to another dng file.Going back into the library doesnt release it .
This is after moving the sliders on 1 dng file and moving around a brush just to test then going back into library and moving around a few pictures then just sitting
Lightroom version: 4.1 RC 2 [825534]
Operating system: Windows 7 Home Premium Edition
Version: 6.1 [7601]
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Physical processor count: 4
Processor speed: 2.2 GHz
Built-in memory: 7854.0 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 7854.0 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 2386.2 MB (30.3%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 3090.4 MB
Memory cache size: 1292.9 MB
System DPI setting: 96 DPI
Desktop composition enabled: No
Displays: 1) 1920x1080


Application folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 RC2
Library Path: C:\Users\desktop\Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat
Settings Folder: C:\Users\desktop\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom


Adapter #1: Vendor : 8086
	Device : 46
	Subsystem : 9074104d
	Revision : 2
	Video Memory : 128
AudioDeviceIOBlockSize: 1024
AudioDeviceName: Speaker/HP (Realtek High Definition Audio)
AudioDeviceNumberOfChannels: 2
AudioDeviceSampleRate: 44100
Build: Uninitialized
Direct2DEnabled: false


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## sizzlingbadger (May 16, 2012)

I find LR4.1RC2 to be generally ok, its a bit sluggish changing modules sometimes and the WB slider lags severely for some reason.


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## LanceH (May 16, 2012)

Unfortunately I have to give LR4 RC2 two thumbs down.  slow performance makes it a drag to work with.  such a shame.  i'm sceptically hopeful they get this thing sorted out.  i'm still using LR3 at work and could never recommend "upgrading" to LR4 as it stands right now.


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## clee01l (May 16, 2012)

LanceH said:


> Unfortunately I have to give LR4 RC2 two thumbs down.  slow performance makes it a drag to work with.  such a shame.  i'm sceptically hopeful they get this thing sorted out.  i'm still using LR3 at work and could never recommend "upgrading" to LR4 as it stands right now.


I probably would not recommend for anyone with 4GB of RAM to upgrade to LR4.  In spite of any miminum H/W specs from Adobe, running LR in less than 8GB of RAM and less that 4 cores is going to result in slow performance. If you add more RAM to your system, you might sing a different tune.


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## LanceH (May 16, 2012)

clee01l said:


> I probably would not recommend for anyone with 4GB of RAM to upgrade to LR4.  In spite of any miminum H/W specs from Adobe, running LR in less than 8GB of RAM and less that 4 cores is going to result in slow performance. If you add more RAM to your system, you might sing a different tune.



Sounds plausible except for the fact that LR3 performs without the exasperating sluggishness of LR4.  I'm kinda done thinking the problem is on my end.  Things went to sh*t after installing LR4.


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## clee01l (May 16, 2012)

LanceH said:


> Sounds plausible except for the fact that LR3 performs without the exasperating sluggishness of LR4.  I'm kinda done thinking the problem is on my end.  Things went to sh*t after installing LR4.


You also need to consider the vastness of the changes between LR3 and LR4.  LR3 runs on XP and 32-bit OSes.  LR4 does not.  You can extrapolate those requirement limitations in LR4 into an increased demand for resources on 64-bit OSes and an increased appetite for CPU cycles and RAM.  

You can pour more water faster through 4 pipes than you can through 2 (cores).  And if you don't have the RAM, Windows will swap out inactive processes to a swap file.  Every time this process that was swapped is needed, the OS needs to make round trips to the HD to retrieve the information stored there. Even if your only active program is LR, it has many threads open and many processes in various states of activeness. LR will certainly be slower if some of the processes it needs are in the swapfile instead of in RAM.


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## LanceH (May 17, 2012)

clee01l said:


> You also need to consider the vastness of the changes between LR3 and LR4.  LR3 runs on XP and 32-bit OSes.  LR4 does not.  You can extrapolate those requirement limitations in LR4 into an increased demand for resources on 64-bit OSes and an increased appetite for CPU cycles and RAM.
> 
> You can pour more water faster through 4 pipes than you can through 2 (cores).  And if you don't have the RAM, Windows will swap out inactive processes to a swap file.  Every time this process that was swapped is needed, the OS needs to make round trips to the HD to retrieve the information stored there. Even if your only active program is LR, it has many threads open and many processes in various states of activeness. LR will certainly be slower if some of the processes it needs are in the swapfile instead of in RAM.



I gotta be honest with you here, and I'm not trying to be rude or anything.  But I find your defense and rationalizations for Lightroom 4 and it's performance issues to be kind of annoying.  I shouldn't have to "consider" anything beyond what Adobe says are the system requirements.  Admittedly 4 GB's is chump change these days but it is still twice the amount Adobe says one needs.  My computer at work also has a mere 4 GB's of RAM and it is blazing fast running LR3.  It's a bit hard to compare, these are not apples to apples, it is a 5 core and that certainly helps.  But still a far cry from the 8 GB's you say is the minimum (at least for LR4).  To be sure a faster computer with more RAM would increase performance everywhere, with everything.  That is kind of an obvious and generic recommendation. But my point, and I believe it is a totally valid point, is that _LR4 should not suck on my system compared to LR3_.  Period, end of story.  If more than 4 GB's of RAM is needed to drive this thing, Adobe should be honest and tell people that.  Instead, according to you, it seems they are lying through their teeth.  But that's just my opinion.  I've been using Adobe products (Photoshop & Lightroom) for many years.  I've been upgrading since Photoshop 6 and Lightroom 1 and never has there ever been such a mess as their is with LR4.  I still love the software and am a huge fan.  I'm not about to bail on them (where else is there to go?).  I just hope the good folks at Adobe don't follow your lead and blame the user's computer for problems with their software.  Hopefully 4.1 will be the what 4.0 should have been.


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## ukbrown (May 17, 2012)

Take a machine, install the OS and nothing else but LR4 and it will run in the specs that adobe give.  No if's no buts, no install of ANY other program on this system.  It will run fine.

What else do you run on your PC, let me look into the crystal ball........., too much if my pc is anything to go by

How much ram was the os reporting as free before you run LR, should say in task manager.  My PC is using 4.76 GB without LR running and I only have 6GB.

So 8GB is a good starting point based on the known unknowns


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## clee01l (May 17, 2012)

LanceH said:


> I gotta be honest with you here, and I'm not trying to be rude or anything.  But I find your defense and rationalizations for Lightroom 4 and it's performance issues to be kind of annoying.  I shouldn't have to "consider" anything beyond what Adobe says are the system requirements.


 It's based upon my experiences going back to LR2 ans a 32-bit Windows Vista laptop with 3GB. I've run LR on Win7-64 with 6GB and moe OSX  Lion with 16GB.  I'm not defending Adobe or LR.  Again my experience with LR4 on OSX and Win7 has been pretty much trouble free.  I think most people fall into that same satisfied silent group.  While there are a few outliers that make all the noise, they are the ones having problems.  And even though Adobe says LR will run in 2GB, they don't say it will run speedily or that you will be please with its performance.  Win7-64 consumes 3/4 GB just idling,  Throw-in a Virus Scanner, Email, browser and all of the unnecessary background tasks that most Windows programs insist upon installing and pretty soon you don't have enough RAM left to run RAM intensive programs like LR.

If you come to a user forum like this expecting guidance, you have to recognize that the recommendations that you receive are based upon other users experience.  They don't come from Adobe and no one here gets paid by Adobe to spout the 'party line'.


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## Victoria Bampton (May 17, 2012)

LanceH said:


> But my point, and I believe it is a totally valid point, is that _LR4 should not suck on my system compared to LR3_.  Period, end of story.  If more than 4 GB's of RAM is needed to drive this thing, Adobe should be honest and tell people that.



Photos set to PV2010 should not be much slower than LR3.  Photos set to PV2012 WILL be slower than LR3, even once they've worked out the current issues, because they're using much more complex processing - building more masks on the fly, etc.  

Minimum system requirements are just that - minimum.  It'll run - well, it'll walk.  It'll start and it'll do the job eventually, but you may fall asleep waiting for it.

All that said, there are undoubtedly some major issues going on with 4.0, and Adobe are working hard to track them down.  Many are specific to particular hardware/software/driver combinations, which makes them tough to replicate and therefore to fix.  They understand the frustrations and they're working hard to solve it though.


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## liquidmonkey (May 18, 2012)

well i just installed LR 4.1 RC2 and my performance did not really improve at all.
furthermore, i just did a fresh install of win7 64bit on a intel SSD 520 series. put those together with my 12gigs of RAM and changing between pictures should be quick, as in 1 second quick.
my pics are from a nikon d7000 and are in RAW format.

although i have LR4.0 in the SSD, i keep all my photos on a WD caviar BLACK 1TB 64MBcache HDD.

my system is not the best but its FAR ABOVE the requirements adobe wants.


so as it stands, given my setup, its takes roughly 5 seconds to move through from one photo to the next when in the library view. now if i let the current photo sit for a few minutes then moving to the next photo is fast, sub one second and thats to be expected as i think the program caches the next photo.
but if i move quickly from one photo to the next it takes 5 seconds before the 'loading' thing to goes away.

if going to the develop mode from a loaded photo, it also takes roughly 5 seconds.
going from one photo to the next in develop mode is the same, 5 seconds.
adjustments are quite fast and that is nice to see.

at the end of the day, i'm a little disappointed as the load times between photos and modules is just too slow and its really messing with my productivity.
if i had a crap machine with crap specs i'd understand, but i don't. the only thing i could upgrade is my graphics card and i might be doing that soon.

hopefully performance will improve soon as i love LR, although not too crazy about the new sliders but hey, thats a personal thing.


ps, i even set the 'process' of LR to 'high priority' but that had no effect at all.


any other suggestions for performance improvement are most welcome and i hope my description above has given adobe (if they are looking here??) some insight.


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## sizzlingbadger (May 18, 2012)

I have 4 cores and 12G ram, LR4 is still sluggish compared to LR3. Its not using all that RAM either, usually never much more than about 4G. It only uses all 4 cores when rendering previews / exporting. LR4 has performance issues and they will get ironed out over time as they did in 2 and 3 when they were released. It is a release candidate after all.

I have to agree with LanceH that LR4 has caused me the most pain, but in fairness to Adobe it is also the most 'changed' of any of the releases.

I haven't used the Books module much yet but it looks promising. The Maps module is all but useless for me as it requires a good internet connection to work.


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## liquidmonkey (May 19, 2012)

i'm going to try something and install lightroom 3 again and see how it performs.
what was the last version of lightroom 3?
was it 3.5?


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## Jim Wilde (May 19, 2012)

No, it was 3.6.


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## LanceH (May 19, 2012)

For what it's worth, another major issue I'm having with LR4 RC2 is that a relatively long session (for me) in LR, processing less than 100 photos, (which is nothing), LR will suck up every ounce of RAM to the point of bringing my whole system down.  Now before anyone chimes in with me not having enough RAM or some other nonsense, _this was never ever an issue with LR 3.6_.  Never happened not even once.  And this with Photoshop running, playing some tunes.  With LR 4 I have to work with LR only.  Then switch to Photoshop.  Forget playing MP3's while I work.  The difference between LR 3.6 and LR 4 is night and day performance wise.  The truth is, regarding RAM, is that 4 GB's is sufficient.  Hard for those of you with 16-24 GB systems to stomach I'm sure, but it's true.  The problem here is not a lack of RAM, never has been.  At least not until Adobe sees fit to raise the minimum requirement.  But then what about those with 8+ GB's of RAM (in this thread alone) having performance issues.  Hmmm.....


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## liquidmonkey (May 19, 2012)

so i just did a reinstall of LR 3.6 and things so far are very positive.
i'm using RAW photos from a nikon d7000.
loading photos in the library module takes 3 seconds MAX.
switching to develope takes 2 seconds.

going back to photos i've already looked at, is nearly instant, no more waiting.
if you have not done so, i recommend going back to LR 3.6 as its more stable and the performance is much much better and actually allows us to get some work done.

i love how adobe reduced the price of LR 4.0 and added some extra modules, i especially like the books module BUT sacrificing performance for an early release or added features is not a good way to go about things. will be watching these forums for word when LR 4.???? is stable and performs even better than 3.6.

over and out


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## liquidmonkey (May 11, 2012)

was using LR 3.something and then switched to 4.0.
things were a bit slow but i thought it might be my PC as things in general were getting bogged down (had not done reinstall in 2 years).
so did a reinstall but this time on a SSD  and thought, now its gonna blaze along...

nope. LR4.0 is still slow, especially when in the develop mode.
i'm quite bummed out as my system is quite good and with the new SSD i was expecting super fast results.


so is it just me?


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## simax (May 20, 2012)

*LR 4 processing and RAM usage*

Firstly: Thank you Jim and Victoria for your untiring attempts to help out with this frustrating issue. Pity Adobe couldn't be quite so attentive to their customers' cries for help...

So apparently it's up to us to figure this one out: I hope Adobe engineers are at least lurking on this forum and benefitting from our R&D... 

Victoria mentions on this thread that using process version 2010 should demand less processing power: yes : I made it really simple. Removed LR4 beta, made a new catalogue with just a handful of RAW files (I am using LR4.0 ), closed all other programs and opened the Activity Monitor in Utilities on my Mac to see how much RAM was being eaten up:   processing tasks lag significantly when running the 2012 versions: really unacceptable delay when applying the retouch tool, and files taking a long long time to be exported (about 4x compared with LR3.6) But changing to process version 2010 gave me equivalent performance of LR3.6 _within_ LR4. Running process version 2010 I was using about 4GB of a possible 8GB when exporting a file: but running process 2012 the monitor showed 5GB being used: so clearly, and not surprisingly given its complexity, LR4 is using more RAM than 3.6 ....

But to be quite so slow ? I run a macbook pro with 8GB: so the extra RAM is there if LR4 demands it: but on my tests, it's not using it: there's 3GB of spare memory: I've been told by others that with 16GB LR 4 seems to be OK : where does that leave professionals like me who want to shoot on location tethered to a laptop and LR4 with max installable RAM of 8GB? I refuse to believe that it takes 16GB to run the latest version : especially as my activity monitor is  showing that the RAM, as is, is not maxed out. I agree with an earlier post that if Adobe say 2GB is enough then a 4GB machine running  a couple of other programs really should be adequate.  

There is clearly something inefficient about the new processing engine : my MACbook pro does have an Invidia graphics card and I have read elsewhere how updating this can be a factor. However, my software appears up to date and wouldn't this issue affect both LR3 _and_ 4 processing. 

So I hope this is something of a clue: that one action of working with process 2010 vs 2012 within Lightroom4 really makes such a difference that it must point to processing issues.

It's great to find this thread: and I hope it will get more posts: I know there are so many variables with different systems etc, but if people can post their experiences it may help the Adobe engineers get a grip on what's gone wrong here.


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## Victoria Bampton (May 20, 2012)

The Adobe engineers are listening to users, particularly on their own forums - don't worry that they're not replying much at the moment - they're using that time to try to fix the problems instead of chatting about them.  The engineers don't drop by here very often, but a number of members have ties to Adobe and are passing the results of the chatter back to them, don't worry.

The gobbling RAM - have you been using the adjustment brush or spot tools, by any chance?  They're looking like a prime suspect.

liquidmonkey, loading photos in Library shouldn't be taking that long if previews are already rendered - might be worth us looking at that one further.  I'd be interested to know if you have the same problem in a clean catalog having rendered previews - if not, trashing and rebuilding the previews may help.

4.1 final should be out soon with more fixes - hopefully that'll knock a few more issues out of these threads.

nVidia's looking like a possible factor on Windows - not so sure on Mac.


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## simax (May 20, 2012)

Thank you Victoria : yes: adjustment brush (the reason for upgrading to LR4 for me is the possibility of localised white balance adjustments : fantastic solution for interiors work in particular) and spot removal tools were my test operations : same area on same file for comparison, plus I ran a preset I have for exporting to a web sized (1000 pixel wide) file. All operations were slow on the 2012 version vs the 2010 process version. 

I have left a number of posts on the Adobe forums on this subject, as have others : check out :
*
http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2012/03/lightroom-4-hot-issues.html*  to see just how frustrating the speed question is. I consider what we are doing to be valuable, unpaid testing on a product that was released way prematurely. The engineers would be well advised to visit your forum and find out what's going on among their loyal users.


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## SandyG (Oct 17, 2012)

I've switched back to LR3 as despite adding more RAM etc LR4 was proving to be too slow....


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## clee01l (Oct 17, 2012)

SandyG said:


> I've switched back to LR3 as despite adding more RAM etc LR4 was proving to be too slow....


Sandy, Welcome to the forum. I'm sorry that you felt the need to downgrade. LR4.2 is much improved over the initial release of LR4.0. Is it perfect? No but it is I think most are now finding the performance acceptable.  Did you upgrade to LR4.2 before coming to this decision?

I am quite baffled how people with the same operating system can report quite different experiences with LR 4.x.  I got my iMac in February and did not find LR4.0 intolerably slow.  Improvements came with 4.1 and more came with 4.2.  This, despite upgrading cameras that produced 12-bit, 14 mp RAW  images to a 14 bit 36mp RAW image.  You don't say how much RAM you now have or how many cores your CPU has. Knowing these things would help me to understand why your experience is so different from mine and from others with systems less powerful than mine.


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## Gary Gray (Oct 20, 2012)

I'm new to this forum, however, been using Lightroom since version 1.0 on both the Mac and PC platforms.

Lightroom 4.2 and all previous versions of 4.x have been running horribly on my system.  Windows 7 Pro with 16 gigs ram, i5 processor, 6 terabytes @ 7200 rpm.

Been through the thing with renaming the preferences file and all the other "tips" people have been spouting across the internet.  The bottom line is LR 4.2 runs faster on my 5 year old Mac Pro with 8 gigs than my new windows platform.  The more I use it, the slower it gets.  Sometimes it just crashes.  Never had this problem with 3.x versions and earlier, with the exception of 1.0 release.

So, anyone actually know of a definite way to help this software go faster?


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 20, 2012)

Hi Gary, welcome to the forum!

Sorry to hear you're having a rough time with it.  I wish I could tell you a 'definite' way to get it running well.  It's a mystery to all of us - for most people, it's now running great at 4.2, but some people still appear to be having a nightmare with it.

Can you tell us what specifically is going slow?  What size monitor?  Has anything you've tried helped?  What have you tried?


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## Gary Gray (Oct 21, 2012)

Not really expecting anyone to have a magic cure for the slowness, just trying to lend a little support and feedback to those who've been having the same types of problems and validate their thoughts.   I've played around quite a bit on the Windows PC and what has seemed to help is to create a new user account and run it from that account.  It is quite a bit more zippy, but I hate that I have to recreate my look/feel and everything else involved with a new account on the PC.

As for hardware, I'm running a HP 2511x, flatscreen LCD monitor, I think it's a 24" model, fairly large.  The monitor isn't going to have any affect on speed though, but I can't rule out a video card as a contributer to the problem.  I've got an Asus motherboard with a built-in Intel chipset running DVI to the monitor.  These motherboard embedded graphics systems tend to slow things down a bit from my experience, as they usually have to grab system memory for graphics use.  But I"m not short of system memory, I've got 16 gigabytes of that.  I'll probably be slapping in a higher power graphics card in the next few weeks, which I'm certain will help as well.


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## clee01l (Oct 21, 2012)

> what has seemed to help is to create a new user account and run it from that account. It is quite a bit more zippy,


You may want to de-crapify your existing user account.  Typically over time you tend to add in lots of helper apps that sit there in the background waiting for some event so they can do their job.  Virus Scanners, Mail clients, poorly managed browsers like some older versions of Firefox can eat up CPU cycles and RAM.  By creating a new user you are in a sense starting fresh.  So in these instances, the problem isn't really LR, but all of the other unnecessary crap running in the back ground as a systen service or as a "run at start-up" application.   There are also Windows services that don't need to run or are irrelevant to your needs.


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 21, 2012)

Gary Gray said:


> what has seemed to help is to create a new user account and run it from that account.  It is quite a bit more zippy



There's one other thing you could try, along those lines - some people have found that trashing LR's preferences, moving/renaming their presets folder to rule out corrupted presets, and purging the camera raw cache have helped.  Since those items are specific to the user account, they could explain why your clean user account is working better too.


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## Gary Gray (Oct 22, 2012)

Following up.   Using a new user account showed some initial improvement, however, there are still issues with Lightroom 4.2, mainly when using it for an extended period.  By that I'm talking about an editing session that last more than 20-30 minutes.  It's not sucking up more memory over time, but it does grab clock cycles from the CPU and doesn't want to let go, even when doing nothing.  I've had a few instances where I'd start a batch conversion of RAW files to DNG files, say 2000 photos or so, and then I'd go to bed and let it run.  When I checked it in the morning, I found that about 600 conversions were complete and the program was just sitting there doing nothing.  I no longer use it to convert to DNG, I use Adobe's external DNG converter which is about 100 times faster.

I also had one instance the other day where LR 4.2 corrupted an entire catalog of about 25,000 images after performing an optimization.  No harm done to the master images, but I had to recreate the catalog and rebuild all the collection sets in the original catalog.  This is what happens when you don't back up your catalog files, which I've never done.  I only back up the actual RAW images.  No point in making catalog backups, so I've always thought, as with each new version of LR, your catalog files are obsolete anyway.


I've ordered a new graphics card for the computer.  Once I get it, I'll post on what if any effect it's had on LR 4.2 performance.


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## Unbroken Chain (Oct 24, 2012)

This conversation makes me nervous.  My computer has 4 GB of RAM.  I am about to purchase my first digital SLR and will presumably be processing hudreds of RAW files at a time.  Am I going to have problems?

So far I have only used LR to process scanned slides as JPEG and TIF files.  Currently, I notice slight (meaning tolerable) performance problems 1) on import, 2) using the adjustment brush and spot removal tools, and 3) using the luminance noise reduction sliders.  Everything else seems fine.

UC


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 24, 2012)

Then you'll probably find the same with your raw files UC.  You could download a few samples of raw files to see how they perform on your machine.  What processor do you have?  That's probably more important than the amount of ram.


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## wianb (Oct 24, 2012)

Probably of no help whatsoever but I have no "speed" issues with LR4.2. I do have a bit of OCD when it comes to keeping the computer clean of rubbish. Nothing but the bare essentials running in the background, no shortcuts on the desktop, religiously clear out the ACR cache and never ever allow Windows update to update the graphics card driver.
I can have both LR and PS6 running and both are "slick & quick".


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## Gary Gray (Oct 25, 2012)

Was reading something interesting this evening.  A fellow posted on some forum that he was experiencing LR 4 performance issues and he tried disabling hyper-threading on his i7 core processor and that it improved his performance dramatically.  This was done in the computer bios.  Now, I'm running an i5 core system and I don't have a method of turning off hyper-threading, so I'm unable to test this theory.

But, this is in line with what I've seen regarding LR.  LR-4 does not appear to be taking advantage of multiple cores when processing images or performing multiple tasks.  This was supposed to be an advantage of LR with earlier versions, the ability to make use of multiple cores, so I'm curious as to Adobe's methodology on the new version.  I know a great deal of the code in LR 4 is a total rewrite, so somewhere in there sits the problem me thinks.

New video card arrives tomorrow.  We'll have a go at it in the afternoon and see what that does for the performance.  Doesn't explain poor performance on converting RAW files to DNG with the external converter runs like lightening.

BTW... I'm curious...  Is this a British hosted forum?  I haven't been paying attention, but it has that feel to it, or maybe I'm just sniffing too much glue.


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 25, 2012)

Hi Gary.  I run the site, and yes, you're quite right, I'm based in the UK.  The server's in the US as the majority of our members are based in the US.  I'd love to know how you could tell!!

LR4 is still supposed to be taking advantage of multiple cores (in areas that would benefit, i.e. Develop, preview creation, Export, etc), but there have been a few reports of it not working correctly in some cases.  Some people were finding it was only hitting one core, which was obviously painfully slow.


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## Jim Wilde (Oct 25, 2012)

I have an i7 CPU, 4 cores with HT enabled, thus a total of 8 threads. Here are a couple of screenshots of the Task Manager during a couple of known "high CPU activity tasks".......first one taken during 1:1 Preview rendering of a bunch of images:



Second one taken during an Export process:



As you can see, LR4.2 makes excellent use of a Hyper-threaded multi-core system. Have you looked at Task Manager on your system while doing such tasks to see if the profile is similar? On a healthy system it should be, but if LR is limping along without using all cores (when it needs all cores, which isn't all the time) that clearly would indicate a problem somewhere on the system.

I note that you've already tried many things, but did you ever try (on your original user account) booting up in Safe Mode and then running ONLY Lightroom for an extended period, just to see if there are maybe some other background (non-essential) services which are interfering with Lightroom?

As to this forum being hosted out of Britain, I'm not sure where the server(s) are. I had thought they were West Coast of the USA somewhere, but don't know for sure. Victoria will be able to tell you that (EDIT: I see she already has!). As to the "feel" of the forum, not sure quite what you mean when you say it has a "British feel"....yes Victoria is British (I think, though she's certainly based in Britain), but the Gurus come from all round the world. But we all work very hard at keeping the atmosphere in here light and friendly....is that being British? I've seen some British forums where "light and friendly" isn't quite how I'd describe them, lol.


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## Gary Gray (Oct 25, 2012)

Brits and Americans speak the same language, but not in the same way.  Brits have a bit more formality and accuracy in their grammar than my typical local.  I'm an American who is genetically 95% British (English actually, we did a genetic test for our family tree research this past summer.)  For some reason, my internal social magnet keeps me pointed at anything British.  This is just another example, my finding this forum and electing to utilize it.  I'm certain it was my reading Victoria's posts that convinced me to sign up here.  Subliminal.

My video card just arrived on the front porch so I'm going to see if it helps the slowness with LR4.


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## Gary Gray (Oct 27, 2012)

Update to my performance issues with LR 4.2.

I've installed an Asus GT-440 video card into the system.  It improved the overall video performance by about 20% compared to the Intel Chipset built in to the motherboard.  This isn't a killer Graphics card, but a solid budget PCI 2.1 card and it's behaving exactily as it should.  This takes the onboard graphics using system memory and bogging down performance out of the equation.

And, as expected, LR is behaving a little better with screen redraws and other graphics manipulations such as zooming and moving from image to image.  But.... this doesn't have much effect on some of the other issues in LR 4.2

There is still quite a bit of sluggishness in develop module changes when moving sliders around for image adjustments.  Mosly, a delay in response and jerky when it does respond.

I've also noticed with my testing that LR 4.2 does not like large catalogs.  I have one catalog that contains 30,000 images.  Other catalogs are between 10-20,000 images.  This is normal and I never had much trouble with LR 3.x in this regard.  It runs much better when I use a smaller test catalog of less than 2000 images.

Another serious issue I've been having with LR 4.x is converting RAW to DNG and I've done quite a bit of testing over the past two days.   If I try to export RAW files as DNG files to another directory, or if I try converting RAW files to DNG files in an existing directory, LR will get slower and slower and slower as more files are converted or exported and eventually it will slow to a halt, somewhere around 500 files into the process.  I've noticed this before and I can't get it to behave any differently no matter what I do, no matter what size catalog I'm using.

I played around a little more with converting RAW files to DNG using the Adobe's External DNG converter application.  Interestingly, the latest DNG converter is having a problem on the Windows 7 Pro PC as well.  It crashes with an insufficient memory error somewhere around 500 files into the conversion.

I went back and loaded version 5.6 and that version of the external DNG converter runs like a champ with my existing RAW files.
I've also gone back to Lightroom 3.6 and tried converting large numbers of RAW files to DNG and it works like a champ.

There is no question in my mind that the problem is with the software.  Extensive diagnostics on my CPU, memory and hard drives indicate that my system is performing flawlessly.  The problem is with Adobe Lightroom 4.2 code and there is also something wrong with the current stand-alone converters.

Why this problem isn't manifesting itself on the majority of PC's out there, I have no clue.   It all works great on my Mac Pro on OSX Lion and on my Windows 7 Home Premium laptop with 8 gigs of memory.  My desktop PC should run it better than the Mac Pro does as the processor is much more up to date and I have 16 gigs of ram.

Since I work with DNG files and have to convert my RAW files, I'm staying with the older converter and avoiding Lightroom 4.2 for anything involving converting or exporting DNG files until Adobe gets this resolved.  If they can't resolve it, I'll revert back to 3.6 and sell my license for 4.2 to somebody who can run it.


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 28, 2012)

That's a great bit of detective work Gary.  Make sure you post your results on the Official Feature Request/Bug Report Forum, particularly your notes about the DNG conversion.


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## Gary Gray (Oct 28, 2012)

Yes, Victoria.  I did post a bug report on the Adobe forum.



Victoria Bampton said:


> That's a great bit of detective work Gary.  Make sure you post your results on the Official Feature Request/Bug Report Forum, particularly your notes about the DNG conversion.


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## dan.g (Nov 4, 2012)

Hi!

 I've found this forum this morning searching for tips to improve Lightroom's speed... There are a couple of things that I'd like to share, since some info was pretty hard to get... Earlier this week I've upgraded a few things in my main machine (from a E6800 with 4gigs of ram to a i7 3770 with 16gigs of ram) and I did not notice even a single speed increment in lightroom - importing, exporting, using gradients, spot tool, local adjustments - you name it, it was just as slow. I've installed a clean copy of win7, drivers, new catalog, but the speed was annoyingly slow. To render 1:1 previews it required several hours for 400 raw files (about 20megs each - canon 600d). During preview rendering, cpu barely touched 20% usage, there was a lot of free memory... Exporting to jpeg was excruciating slow also (more than an hour for 400 files). 

 Anyway, I've found out that nvidia card was stalling the system - incredible, but true. So, the first thing to do was to set lightroom to use the integrated gpu (using lucidlogix virtu mvp). Well, this time to import same files from the hdd took about 8 minutes, to export them took about 10 minutes. Still, I was confused how a pretty good gpu (nvidia 8800 gt) is able to decelerate lightroom. I think I've found the answer and it's quite stupid: nvidia drivers are set (by default) to use 3d vision so, for whatever bug, it stalls lightroom. If you have an nvidia card, try to deactivate 3d vision (start -> all programs -> nvidia corporation -> disable 3d vision) and you regain your system's speed. I've tried to reactivate 3d vision (I don't have glasses, so I just clicked the options until it finished the activation procedure) and surprisingly enough, it doesn't stall my system anymore.

 After all this saga, I can say that a dedicated graphics card does not help while using lightroom, more than that, the integrated gpu is a little bit speedier (about 20 seconds faster when importing 400 files, same when exporting -- but take that with a grain of salt - i didn't run the test more than once per gpu so i maybe wrong here).

 all drivers were downloaded this week from their respective manufacturer's site, windows was up-to-date.

 hope this helps somebody, it seems to me that most lightroom speed problems are caused by nvidia cards...


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## Brad Snyder (Nov 4, 2012)

dan.g, welcome to the forums.

Thanks for the info. That's not the first time that nVidia eccentricities have been singled out for potential Lightroom issues. 
Good sleuthing, thanks for sharing!


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## Colin S (Nov 4, 2012)

Dan, I have a fairly similar system to yours, i7 3770, 16gb, and a GTX 550 nvidia card ( with 3D on).  Importing and 1:1 rendering of files from my 7D of about 24mb each takes about 2 seconds per frame from my hdd.    Exporting of jpgs can vary according to how much work has been done on the RAW files, but is pretty swift.  I'm one of probably the vast majority of LR users that finds that 4.2 carries out all of the processes that I ask of it effectively instantaneously.  

If you read through the forums you'd think that LR was a particularly flaky program, but of course those posting problems are not a random sample of users, but the ones for whom a problem has arrisen, usually due to a system glitch or setting problem.  By far the vast majority of users, at least all of the ones that I know personnally, just click on the LR icon, do their processing and click on close, for me it just works, with no drama.  

So for me the answer to this thread title is, no LR 4.2 is not slow of itself, but can be slowed by a system or setting error.

Colin


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## dan.g (Nov 4, 2012)

Hi Brad, 

Hi Colin,

Thanks for the welcome!

Importing a file used to be (on my new system) about 20s per file (with 1:1 preview) if i remember correctly. Since I've fixed the speed issue, I'm not willing to go back to a restore point just to measure the time it took to import a file, hope you understand this . Right now it's anywhere between 1-2 seconds per file which is blazing fast, probably will get a little bit faster when I'll get a SSD for caching the data HDD.

Dan


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## liquidmonkey (May 11, 2012)

was using LR 3.something and then switched to 4.0.
things were a bit slow but i thought it might be my PC as things in general were getting bogged down (had not done reinstall in 2 years).
so did a reinstall but this time on a SSD  and thought, now its gonna blaze along...

nope. LR4.0 is still slow, especially when in the develop mode.
i'm quite bummed out as my system is quite good and with the new SSD i was expecting super fast results.


so is it just me?


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 4, 2012)

Welcome Dan.  What a great first post!


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## dan.g (Nov 4, 2012)

Hi Victoria, thanks for the welcome!

I forgot to mention that some of the info about nvidia drivers (disabling 3d vision for instance) I've found searching google. I think it was a post on flicker that mentioned it. So, basically I've just put a few things together, no more than that. Also, there are some tips on the web to set nvidia's drivers in performance mode in nvidia control panel or to add a profile for lightroom in which to disable most of the options. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have an effect, best thing to do is to disable 3d vision and maybe re-enable it later -- seems to work. I cannot confirm that re-enabling works properly since I don't have goggles, but it would be nice if someone can confirm this.


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## bmphoto (Nov 14, 2012)

Hi, I am sharing my experiences for the good of the collective.

Machine
i7 2600K running at 4.5Ghz, ~50 C at full load
GA Z68X-UD3R-B3 MB. All non essential services are off.
8GB of Ripjaws Z 2133 ram with improved timmings. I had 16 but removed it to increase net speed and reduce potential errors.
256 GB Samsung 830 SSD.
2 x Gigabyte Radeon 6850 HD in x-fire (yes I tried only one of them too) 
Windows 7 64 bit.
Dell U2711. image view constrained by increasing size of application menus etc.

ALSO: 
MBP i5 2.5GHz late 2009 model. 8GB Ram

Basically I have tweaked everything that can be tweaked and squeezed every ounce of performance that I am able to out of my machine and it benchmarks pretty high.

However, every time I try to use the noise slider, I get a slowdown and the application becomes sluggish about 2 seconds between noise slider movement and reaction. I spent a while trying to see where the issue was and several hundred dollars on cooling and better RAM and SSD to try and get things faster, no luck. After some stuffing around I noticed that the noise sliders were better (~.5 second, I can live with) as long as nothing else in the dev module was touched, specifically the shadow, highlight and clarity adjustments. *Having any one of these or combination of them set to as little as +/-1 point caused the noise sliders to behave very badly*. Subsequent edits became painful as the expected effect of noise suppression took its toll (I do noise last anyway so subsequent edits are less of an issue).

I also notice that thread/cpu utilisation was quite surprising, I only have 6 cores operating during a noise adjustment and my net cpu usage does not go above 40%, even with thread priority set to high. Interestingly my core usage improves slightly if I clamp the core multiplier at 45 (i.e get rid of speedstepping etc). 

I have spoken to others who do have similar problems (another i2600K user) and others who don't - they seem to be i3770 users on Asus Z77 boards but again this is anecdotal. Im not comfortable enough in that statement to spend my own money so neither should a reader of this post. HOWEVER, it may be a useful starting point and at least may help people ascertain the existence of a specific bug more scientifically...

Hope this helps and looking for some help back,
Desperately,
Ben


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## bmphoto (Nov 14, 2012)

With so many people claiming such variable results, it has to be some interaction at hardware level thats being exacerbated by a code issue.

What would be extremely helpful for all concerned, especially adobe team is if we could all start detailing what our hardware platform is, not just i7 on Z68 but tell us what your board model and revision is what your cpu specifically is, even stepping number may help. Its really hard to nail a bug if you cant see it.

Also not sure what happened to my original post which detailed my specs and experiences....lol??

[Mod Note: Welcome to the forums!  Original Post was stuck in moderation. Don't know why, usually we moderate new members with <10 posts, with a link included, as an antispam measure]


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## Katherine Mann (Nov 14, 2012)

I just installed Lightroom 4.3 RC this afternoon and have found an appreciative difference in the speed of the program. Perhaps I had just messed it up in 4.2, but I'm much happier now.


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 14, 2012)

Welcome to the forum Ben.  I've noted some issues with noise reduction too, although not to that degree.


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## bmphoto (Nov 14, 2012)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Welcome to the forum Ben.  I've noted some issues with noise reduction too, although not to that degree.



Hi, thanks. Can you quantify the degree to which you have seen it?


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## Jim Wilde (Nov 14, 2012)

I've been playing around with this for the last couple of days. 

To be honest, I am generally quite happy with the performance of my system running LR4, albeit there are a couple of areas where it is noticeably slower than LR3 (though we have sort of been conditioned to expect that, because of the differnces brought about with PV2012). Like Bob Frost reported in response to one of your posts in the "slow performance" thread on the U2U site, I've also been doing some comparison tests using the more cpu-intensive tasks (render 1:1 previews, exports), and can confirm his findings there, i.e. the more processing applied to images, the longer those tasks take, sometimes significantly so. Interestingly, and this is specific to the 4.3RC only, turning OFF hyper-threading returned quicker times than with it enabled.....on all previous releases, having HT enabled always resulted in slightly better timings.

But returning to the specific issue of applying luminance NR, I can confirm your findings almost exactly, i.e. after applying certain edits (clarity, highlights, shadows for sure) there's then a noticeable 'lag' when applying luminance NR (almost 2 seconds sometimes). I hadn't really noticed it before (not been needing NR recently), although there does seem to have been one improvement in that AFTER applying NR there is no lag when going back to apply further develop adjustments (in previous versions some of the sliders got a little 'sticky' after applying NR, but not so much now).

This issue with NR seems entirely related to PV2012.....if I take an image back to PV2010 within LR4.3 the NR lag disappears.

Bottom line, I really don't think there's an issue with your system if this is the only performance problem you are experiencing......I think it's a programming issue which hopefully is being addressed.


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 14, 2012)

bmphoto said:


> Hi, thanks. Can you quantify the degree to which you have seen it?



My tests around noise reduction have primarily been around image to image switching time, from the time you select the photo to the time the sliders are available.  I noted that it was fastest at luminance 0 and color 25.  Luminance 0 and color 0 were actually worse.  And higher values were significantly slower.  Even PV2010 in LR4 is slower than PV2010 in LR3 on that too.


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## bmphoto (Nov 14, 2012)

Jim,
Ace, thanks. This is probably the most encouraging post IO have received so far. It is putting the brakes on the purchase of a new MB/CPU combination. I had assumed that there are fewer dissatisfied customers than satisfied ones and on that basis it would be worth rolling the dice on new hardware.

Your test along with information from others is making me reconsider. Essentially all the others that I have spoken to either dont shoot in the same dark and stinky conditions that I do or dony have high mp cameras and so don't have the noise issue.

I have now poted this as a bug for the adobe team. I would be interested to hear if any other users here have experienced (exactly) the same thing or not.

Thanks heaps.
Ben




TNG said:


> I've been playing around with this for the last couple of days.
> 
> To be honest, I am generally quite happy with the performance of my system running LR4, albeit there are a couple of areas where it is noticeably slower than LR3 (though we have sort of been conditioned to expect that, because of the differnces brought about with PV2012). Like Bob Frost reported in response to one of your posts in the "slow performance" thread on the U2U site, I've also been doing some comparison tests using the more cpu-intensive tasks (render 1:1 previews, exports), and can confirm his findings there, i.e. the more processing applied to images, the longer those tasks take, sometimes significantly so. Interestingly, and this is specific to the 4.3RC only, turning OFF hyper-threading returned quicker times than with it enabled.....on all previous releases, having HT enabled always resulted in slightly better timings.
> 
> ...


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## bmphoto (Nov 15, 2012)

Victoria, thank you. I suppose the right thing to do is submit a bug report to Adobe.


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## lovestruck (Nov 15, 2012)

I have recently upgraded to LR4.2 and installed Windows 8 at the same time and although have not noticed Lightroom being slow the Nik Software plugins have been very jerky and slow and I also noticed the fonts looked different too..which all puzzled me as I was using the same version of the Nik plugins in LR 3.6.

After reading Dans post about the nVidia card I looked at the control panel and although my older card does not have the 3D vision he describes it does have 3D settings which I have disabled and lo and behold the Nik Software is back to the same as it was before.

I have noticed some of the Windows Icons looking a bit flat since taking away the 3D but I think I can live with that as long as nothing else will be detrimentally affected..
So a big thanks to Dan and to this great forum that always seems to have the answers!!


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## Gary Gray (Nov 26, 2012)

Follow up on previous posts.  I've loaded the Lightroom release candidate 4.3 and can say that it is a noticable improvement over v 4.2 in the develop module with the sluggish performance.

As for previous issues I discovered with conversions to DNG files, I've found that converting to DNG 4.6 or better compatibility seems to have the best overall results with lightroom not grinding to a halt after more then 400 conversions (version 4.2)  Version 4.3 RC seem to not grind to a halt at all now.

Another issue I've investigated and this didn't occur to me until recently, anti-virus software.  I've found that using Bit-defender anti-virus will definately give you a performance hit using Lightroom.  I tried the free stuff, AVG,Avast, Avira (why do these all start with A?) etc..., and they all work better in combination with Lightroom than Bit-Defender.  The best results I've obtained with anti-virus software and Lightroom performance is by using Microsoft Security Essentials and the MS AV tools, so I'm sticking with that for now.

I would say that by switching to MS Anti-virus protection, running LR 4.3 RC and upgrading the Video Card, I've managed to double the performance of LR on my i5 Core / 16Gig memory PC.  Plus the issues I've had regarding conversion to DNG files from RAW seem to be resolved with 4.3 RC.

Gary


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## dan.g (Nov 26, 2012)

@lovestruck: glad that this helped you . it seems that nvidia drivers are buggy to some degree. I (still) hope that lightroom 5 will have CUDA/OpenCL support...

@Gary Gray: I think you can add exceptions to antivirus software so it won't bother the system too much. I've added .cr2 and other raw extensions to exception list in bitdefender and it performs a little bit faster. But since my license is gonna expire soon, I might give MS Anti-virus a run. Thanks for trying and sharing different solutions, it really means a lot!


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 26, 2012)

That's really helpful to hear Gary, thanks.


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## RAlfieri (Dec 11, 2012)

I did not experience performance issues until the latest update to 4.2. Now everything seems to crawl, and I have a new "honkin'" box with 16 GB of RAM and Intel i7 with 8 processors. I also recently installed BitDefender and things got worse.

@Gary: Thanks for the heads-up. I should have thought to add everything involving Lightroom as an exclusion. That helped quite a bit.

Now if I can just get around my export to a catalog crash problem... 

Regards,
Rob


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## Jimmsp (Dec 11, 2012)

These comments make me wonder how to set the virus protection software I have ( Norton Internet Security) to optimize LR 4.
Is this a topic for the adobe forum? or a new thread?
Jim


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## Victoria Bampton (Dec 12, 2012)

I'd exclude at least the catalog, the previews and ideally the photos too.  I assume things like cache and program files are excluded by default?


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## LRList001 (Dec 23, 2012)

Well, this thread was a bit of a revelation.  It was taking me around 10 seconds to move from one image to the next in develop, so I cleared the ACR and Video cache and there was a startling performance improvement, down to about about 1 second, most of the time (but far from always).  However, it is obvious that something is wrong in the code (even in 4.3) as it is going wrong.  Even before I cleared the caches (and afterwards) the 1:1 view on monitor 2 gets stuck in an intermediate resolution (or perhaps I means it stops the progressive refinement), what I mean is that the image is at the correct size but is not at the correct resolution, the pixelation is partially smoothed but not fully.  No amount of waiting fixes this.  Changing to 1:2 and back to 1:1 fixes it immediately, but switching images or exiting and re-starting LR does not.  I would say that the image caching algorithm Adobe is using isn't working properly, but I am only guessing.  Why LR doesn't use more RAM I don't know, there is plenty spare.  Anyway I joined to asked a question which I will try to post in the right forum.


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## TSM (Jan 11, 2013)

Hi there!

I'm looking to upgrade my PC for better work with Lightroom 4 v4.3 and Lightroom 5, who knows when. I'm shooting only uncompressed 16-bit Nikon D700 RAW's. I'm not making a living out of photography, but it's my biggest passion and I'm looking to make an investment that would close this tech circle I'm into right now. I have an old system that can't keep up with Lightroom 4, to the point that it has become frustrating to edit.
I kinda blazed through this thread, looking for feedback from users with a similar setup to what I have in my wishlist:
CPU: Intel i7 3770
Memory: 16GB RAM
HDD: something with 64MB Cache & 7200RPM
SSD: Samsung 840 250GB

After talking with some IT guys, it came to question whether I really need and i7, as I can go for the much cheaper i5 3570k, overclock it and save some money.

Does anyone know how much bang for the buck can the i7 deliver vs. the i5 3570k in Lightroom 4?

Very much appreciated, and sorry if I'm going offtopic, but I didn't want to create a new one.


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## Gary Gray (Apr 3, 2013)

Anecdotal, my i7 8 gig memory laptop benchmarks roughly the same as my i5 16 gig memory desktop.  I think a better video card will provide a more noticeable performance boost than the different processor.  The i7 has a better cache and more cores for hyperthreading.  What that adds up to in the real world is very little from what I've seen using photoshop, lightroom and other video applications.


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