# Windows flashing, not responding - then all OK - repeat



## Linwood Ferguson (Sep 23, 2012)

I'm running LR 4.2RC, and this problem is more prevalent there, but I have had it in other versions.  in 4.2RC it is happening a LOT.

It is difficult to convey what really happens, so I hope it is OK to post a link to a brief video which I took with a cell phone while it was going nuts.  I then clicked around with the mouse, got it back to normal, switched to another image and started cropped - nuts again.  But on video.

I've got the latest Windows, updated to the latest NVIDIA drivers (it's a decent but not excessive card), pretty vanilla PC setup, an I7-950 (not overclocked), 6 GB memory, dual raid 1 fast drives (i.e. separate raid sets for OS and data).  Generally an aging but solid PC that was a top performer a couple years ago.

Closing lightroom and restarted makes no difference; it will do this sometimes after hours of editing, sometimes on the first image.  It seems to happen most often after changing to a new image and starting to edit it (as opposed to while on a single image for a long time).  IT is mostly in develop mode (I can't say 100%, but I do not recall any instances it was not).

The images that fail are both from a D4 and a D800, and nothing unusual with them.  All stills, no video.

Anyone have any ideas, it is starting to drive me nuts? 

http://www.captivephotons.com/Other/Test-Shots/2290161_KPG5tc#!i=2104527801&k=Kz7d4VM&lb=1&s=A" title="LR 4.2RC Going nuts"


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 23, 2012)

Great video Linwood.  Ok, I've got someone else on the Adobe forums with a similar issue (unless that's you?!?!).  What happens if you only have one monitor plugged in?


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## Linwood Ferguson (Sep 23, 2012)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Great video Linwood.  Ok, I've got someone else on the Adobe forums with a similar issue (unless that's you?!?!).  What happens if you only have one monitor plugged in?



I mentioned it in the 4.2RC topic, someone else mentioned it was happening to them, not sure which you read.

I'll remove one and do some editing and report back.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Sep 23, 2012)

To the last -- sorry, my posting was only in Lightroom Forums, not Adobe.

OK, I pulled a monitor, rebooted, and edited for an hour or so with one monitor.  LR was incredibly fast - minimal delay, sliders did not seem "stickey", much, much faster.  And no white bands and flashing.

Exited, plugged in second monitor, edited in my usual fashion (loupe displayed on second monitor), much slower again, and after maybe 10 minutes it started flashing.

So the second monitor is definitely an issue for me.  How did you know? 

I hate the idea of going to one monitor -- really gotten spoiled.  Do you know of issues with the second monitor?    Or better yet, workarounds?


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## Linwood Ferguson (Sep 23, 2012)

More: I turned off the secondary display (without exiting LR) and it failed again in a few minutes.

So I restarted LR without turning the secondary display on (but with the secondary monitor plugged in and active in Windows).  I swear it is slower than when only one monitor was attached, but not so slow (by a long shot) as when both are active in LR.  

Going to run for a while now with two monitors, but with the secondary display off, see if it fails.  It's always hard to prove a negative.


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## kaymann (Sep 23, 2012)

Two things I would try:

(Actually three but people usually get offended when I mention the "V" word so I won't even suggest ensure your Win install is virus free).

1) Leave two monitors plugged in but cycle through DDR3 memory, as it could be a bad stick or two or three so you have to go through all combos. Also if you are not comfortable do not do this yourself.
2) Beg borrow or buy to swap out the NVidia card (try above first).

Sounds like bad memory to me...

However the appearance of the additional window on the screen is more viral....


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## Linwood Ferguson (Sep 23, 2012)

OK, well, it was a nice theory.  I ran for a while with two monitors connected but only one in use with LR.  Still happened.

So I unplugged the second monitor again, and worked for a while.  Faster again, but after a while I got the white bands again.

To Keymann - yes, viruses are always a risk, but photography is my hobby, computers my trade.  It's clean.  

But bad memory -- that's a stretch.  Probably more practical I'll leave memory diagnostics running over night.   But with respect to the video card and memory -- it seems rather odd that it would affect only lightroom - Photoshop CS6, all Office products, accounting programs, web browsers - all work fine.

Speaking of memory -- why won't lightroom use much memory?   I've never seen it over 2.5G, and mostly it seems to sit below 2G, this despite having lots of memory available and running 64 bit.  CS6 on the other hand will just suck it all up, it was over 5G yesterday editing a large TIF.  I even de-installed and re-installed 4.2RC just to make sure it was really the 64 bit version (ok, it showed as 64 bit in task manager, but just in case... ).  Never seen a help-about that wouldn't tell you something like that, but LR doesn't say (tells me the baby names, but not the version )

Postscript:went back to two monitors - fails very quickly that way.  I should add that it never COMPLETELY fails, meaning that if I click a few times and/or just wait it comes back to normal.  Never an access violation, never a corruption of the file.  It's as though some background thread is run amok, and if you get its attention it comes back.


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## kaymann (Sep 24, 2012)

Absolutely right, if you are not getting wierd results in CS6 then memory is much less likely a culprit and I am sorry I missed that in your original post.

And I can see that I was right mentioning the V word caused offense that was not intended at all. Please accept my appologies.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Sep 24, 2012)

kaymann said:


> Absolutely right, if you are not getting wierd results in CS6 then memory is much less likely a culprit and I am sorry I missed that in your original post.
> 
> And I can see that I was right mentioning the V word caused offense that was not intended at all. Please accept my appologies.



Well, I don't think I mentioned CS6 at first, sorry.  And as to offence, nonsense.  One problem with things like viruses is that it's so hard to prove you have none, and it's really getting to the point where they are scarily stealth.  But the nice thing is so far there are very few that specifically attack Lightroom.  

I do have a question - does Lightroom use any hardware graphics acceleration?   Your comment on the video card got me looking at it.  I had already upgraded the firmware to see if it mattered (almost a 2 year jump - no change).  But I noticed the ability to turn off PHYSX and gave it a try.  So far it hasn't died again.  Since it is intermittent it is very hard to know whether it is coincidence or not, but I had understood that Photoshop used graphics harder directly, but thought Lightroom did not.  Anyone know for sure? 

It also is interesting -- when doing some operations the window where the image is blacks out briefly, and comes back.  It "feels" like the same kind of hang that otherwise did the white bands and went nuts, meaning during similar operations.  No idea if related, but makes me wonder if some event was happening before, that still happens, but now it recovers.

But going to leave it this way for a while and see.


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## Brad Snyder (Sep 24, 2012)

No GPU acceleration, yet.
You're also correct, in that Lr does not max-out available memory. As to why that is so, I dunno'. There are a substantial number of trade-offs to be made between various disk systems, memory systems, the CPU, and their various respective capacities and throughputs.  And in your situation, the relatively simple task of just pushing pixels to the screen seems to cause trouble. I presume there's a bit of one-size-fits-all going on (high end vs low end, Mac vs PC, etc) , but that's just idle speculation.

I know folks with dual Xeon 12-core machines with 96+ GB memory, SSD raid arrays, the best iron money can buy, and they still encounter performance issues, like the rest of us.


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 24, 2012)

Interesting, thanks for investigating that Linwood!  What is PHYSX?


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## Linwood Ferguson (Sep 24, 2012)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Interesting, thanks for investigating that Linwood!  What is PHYSX?



It appears to be a control that allows software to interact directly with the card to do certain kind of screen updates as opposed to going through the usual Windows screen handling.  I'm not sure if that's a brand specific name or some kind of standard; the setting is in the card setup.  It's a GTS 250, for those who care, which at the time I bought was a decent but not gamer-quality graphics card.

Still slow but hasn't done the white-flashing thing again yet.


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## DaveS (Sep 24, 2012)

Physx is an nVidia api that allows the graphics gpu (graphics card) to be used to offload physics calculations (generally used in games).  The gpu can do large parallel calculations very quickly.   Lightroom doesn't use the api, so that setting shouldn't have an impact on it.  Mind you, with computers often shouldn't isn't as definite as one might think.


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## Kiwigeoff (Sep 26, 2012)

Does your finding suggest that the graphics card is off? Can you try a different card?


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## Linwood Ferguson (Sep 26, 2012)

Kiwigeoff said:


> Does your finding suggest that the graphics card is off? Can you try a different card?



Perhaps later, I left this morning for 2.5 weeks on the road so cannot test for a while.  I don't recall if I have another card at home.

I did do a couple more days of occasional editing with the system set with physx turned off.   It was slightly different, in that my wife brought back a bunch of D80 images, whereas before I had been doing larger D800 and D4 images.  But while working on the D80 images (with the card hardware accelerator turned off) it never failed.  

I wonder if, even though LR doesn't directly access the card accelerator, if Windows in some fashion does, and the interaction with LR is ... well, somehow different than all the other programs that work fine.   I'm going to leave it off when I return for a while, and see if it continues to work.   Maybe others with flaky behavior might try turning off hardware acceleration as well.  I don't know that it made any difference in performance otherwise (I am not a gamer, nor do I do video).

Running with two monitors however is definitely slower.  Worth it, but a LOT slower.   I wonder if that's why some see 4.2RC as faster, and some do not?

Wish Adobe would pay attention to performance, serious attention.


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## OldFrank (Sep 27, 2012)

This is a bit way out, but you seem to know your way around your computer. Is it possible that you have some other software running in the background (possibly loaded at startup) that runs differently with the dual monitor active. These things are hard to make sense of and can be a real problem to troubleshoot. It has been several years ago in XP that I had a similar problem. It turned out to be one of the automatic update managers running in the background. If this doesn't make sense ignore it. 

You might watch the Performance tab of the Task Manager for some indication of CPU usage under both 1 and 2 monitor configurations.

frank


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## Linwood Ferguson (Sep 27, 2012)

OldFrank said:


> This is a bit way out, but you seem to know your way around your computer. Is it possible that you have some other software running in the background (possibly loaded at startup) that runs differently with the dual monitor active. These things are hard to make sense of and can be a real problem to troubleshoot. It has been several years ago in XP that I had a similar problem. It turned out to be one of the automatic update managers running in the background. If this doesn't make sense ignore it.
> 
> You might watch the Performance tab of the Task Manager for some indication of CPU usage under both 1 and 2 monitor configurations.
> 
> frank



Anything is possible, but I doubt it.  I did spend quite a bit of time staring at the task manager while LR was going nuts, and nothing jumped out at me.  It was paging a lot, but lots of available memory so they were soft faults generally, and the only significant application taking time was lightroom (a few other windows related tasks that always follow a lot of screen activity).  I am running Sypder calibration on one monitor (the other is hardware LUT's on an NEC).  When I ran on only one monitor it was the NEC and Spyder was turned off.  I can try it (in a couple weeks) with Spyder turned off with two, but it seems a bit unlikely as it does not do anything on an ongoing basis (I do not use it for ambient light adjustment, and no colorimeter is plugged in).

Are others not seeing a significant slow down in dual monitor mode?    Specifically when one monitor has Develop up and one has Loupe for the same image?


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## Jim Wilde (Sep 27, 2012)

Ferguson said:


> Are others not seeing a significant slow down in dual monitor mode?    Specifically when one monitor has Develop up and one has Loupe for the same image?



It really depends what you mean by "significant slow down". Using 2 monitors instead on one in Develop, I can't really notice any particular slow-down in image updating in response to slider movements, *on the monitor with the Develop module active*. But with the Loupe image on the second monitor, there is a noticeable delay in updating that one.....sometimes up to a second delay. Checking against LR3, there is a similar image refresh delay on the second monitor, but here it's only maybe half a second....so not much difference, but definitely a difference.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Sep 27, 2012)

TNG said:


> It really depends what you mean by "significant slow down". Using 2 monitors instead on one in Develop, I can't really notice any particular slow-down in image updating in response to slider movements, *on the monitor with the Develop module active*. But with the Loupe image on the second monitor, there is a noticeable delay in updating that one.....sometimes up to a second delay. Checking against LR3, there is a similar image refresh delay on the second monitor, but here it's only maybe half a second....so not much difference, but definitely a difference.



I'll get some actual times when I can get back, but in my experience with that configuration, if I go to move (say) the Clarity slider, it may take 3-5 seconds before the slider will even move.  Or if I click on the crop icon, it may be at least that long (often longer) before the crop devices appear on the develop screen, and even longer still before my cursor will turn into the hand and/or crop tool.

It remained this slow when I turned off the accelerator feature, but at least now it did not get hung in the video flashing mode.

I can't say how fast, but it was "much" faster when only one monitor was connected on boot.  When I can get back will experiment further. 

I take it this is not what you are seeing?


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## Jim Wilde (Sep 27, 2012)

Ferguson said:


> I take it this is not what you are seeing?



No, there is no delay on slider movement in either single or dual monitor mode. Crop tool selection is also instant.

You may be encountering two unrelated problems here....the 'performance' issue which is still affecting some users (if you haven't already done so, you might try the 4.2RC), and the flashing screen problem....which to be honest at first glance looked much more of a hardware problem than a Lightroom problem, but never having seen anything remotely like that it's a difficult one to call.

Do you have "Auto write to XMP" enabled?


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## Linwood Ferguson (Sep 27, 2012)

TNG said:


> No, there is no delay on slider movement in either single or dual monitor mode. Crop tool selection is also instant.
> 
> You may be encountering two unrelated problems here....the 'performance' issue which is still affecting some users (if you haven't already done so, you might try the 4.2RC), and the flashing screen problem....which to be honest at first glance looked much more of a hardware problem than a Lightroom problem, but never having seen anything remotely like that it's a difficult one to call.
> 
> Do you have "Auto write to XMP" enabled?



I also think it may be two different issues.

I do have auto-write to XMP.  I consider it a good backup should I ever lose information in the catalog.  I also have had to use it when I would delete a photo and decide later I wanted it back -- if it is on either a backup or in the wastebasket it's easy to get back, synch, and the edits are all still there (just lost history which is moot).

I realize that's a bit of disk effort, but since most of my issues relate to develop mode not while in library mode (e.g. and making mass changes), do  you really think it relevant?    When I return, I can certainly turn off for a while and try.  

By the way, I do not see disk queues building during any of this, it all seems CPU related.  

PS. Yes, am on 4.2RC.


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## Jim Wilde (Sep 27, 2012)

Ferguson said:


> .......do  you really think it relevant?



Probably not, just clutching at straws really. Wouldn't hurt to disable it for a short while to see if it makes a difference.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Oct 30, 2012)

I ranted to follow up on this.  I was delayed returning so it's a bit old.  By the time I got back 4.2 was released to final so I installed it.

With 4.2 my performance is better, not great, but better.

The flashing will still occur with the video PHYSX turned on (i.e. hardware acceleration on), but does not in the form shown with it off.  I assume that's a sign of a card/hardware issue somewhere (I am running the latest drivers).

The flashing is triggered (or at least coincident with) something Lightroom did on both 4.2RC and 4.2 released - every once in a while, triggered by nothing in particular that I can see, for about 3 seconds it hangs, stops responding, and gets a white horizontal band across the image.  After that period it returns to normal.  This is usually accompanied by an increase in CPU usage (I can tell as the fans speed up).

I am convinced that with PHYSX turned on, it gets "stuck" in this state, with it off it comes out naturally in a few seconds.

I have yet to see this withOUT dual monitor being turned on (but that's not a fair test as I usually have it turned on, brief trials without it did not show this problem).

Even when working 4.2 is lethargic at best, but it does seem better than the RC version.  I've probably spent 15 hours on it in the last two weeks steady editing.   The biggest hassle is when opening a new image without a 1:1 preview, it takes about 6 seconds before it is ready for me to edit (before the "loading" goes away, the sliders are fully active, and (for example) the crop tool will energize and work).   A d800 preview takes about 12 seconds to build.  With 1:1 built it takes about 3-4 seconds to go from Library to Develop and be ready to work.  Once it gets there for that image it is fine, so editing one image is fairly fast once you get into it, but (for example) flipping through a hundred images to recrop or change color means  you spend about 6 seconds each waiting for it to be ready, then you can make the change, flip to the next, wait 6 seconds... 

Auto-write XMP doesn't make a perceivable difference.

Are others seeing these times? 

Interestingly a D4 image is only a bit faster to build a 1:1 (about 9-10 seconds), but is much faster to be ready to edit (consistently about 3 seconds without 1:1 prebuilt).

The worst is displaying the compare display on the secondary monitor and zooming 1:1.  Without a preview built, it's usually about 15 seconds for the first image to be ready and at 30 seconds elapsed before the second.  With a quad core I had hoped for more overlap, e.g. about 15 total, but it appears CPU saturated during most of the time.

Anyway, the flashing -- I think hardware.

The slowness is better in 4.2 vs. 4.2RC, but not great.  I do however think it is also better than 4.1

Thanks for all the advice.   Sure wish Adobe would put more concerted effort into performance.   I'm really thinking about culling on ViewNX rather than Lightroom just because of how quick it renders.  If I come home with 1000 images and want to delete 900 of them, Lightroom's preview build time is just horrible in comparison.


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## sloscheider (Nov 9, 2012)

I have seen something very similar in Mozilla Firefox, only when I have a second monitor plugged in AND if I disable "Use hardware acceleration when available" it goes away.  Menu's wont display properly, they are there but flicker and flash and it's very difficult to click on a menu item.  I know it's not LightRoom but I thought it's worth noting since I wouldn't expect a web browser to make use of acceleration either...  I am just using the stock gpu built into an i3 and i5 but have seen the problem on both systems.  No problems with LR though...


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