# LR4 latency/slow sliders issue



## Glenn Springer (Mar 21, 2012)

How come I don't see this topic here? It's on both the Adobé and NAPP forums. I'm badly affected. Grab a slider and it moves: once. Grab it again or try to change the adjustment, it takes 3-4 seconds to react. The program is totally unusable. I don't have any more time to spend on the development team at Adobe. So I've rolled back to LR3.6, took the hit on anything I had actually done in LR4 (exported psd's and reimported them to LR3) and I'm done. I posted the following on the Adobe forum. They have "acknowledged" the issue but that's it.
Like many others, a couple of new features in LR4 made me buy it, plus the attractive price. But the ability to email directly (without a proper address book) and a couple of slider changes are not worth the hours I've wasted trying to make it work or even issues that have not come to the forefront yet, like the apparent tweaking of the sRGB conversion algorithm. 

The unacceptable latency associated with the sliders is a deal breaker for me. And I don't know how, nor do I WANT to know how to change how many cores of my CPU Lightroom uses or how to clean my registry or any of that fancy stuff. I used to program in Fortran and Cobol and dBase and Assembler back in the Day but now I'm a USER. I just don't want to know. Which video card am I using? It says "ATI" under device manager. I spent over $1000 on this system a couple of years ago and got a quad core machine with 8Gb of RAM and that's all I want to know. It's not the latest and greatest, but Lightroom should work on it and going from LR3.6 to LR4 should be an UPgrade, not a DOWNgrade.

Because I don't do this for a living, I'm OK with reaching out to CS5 or some of the tone-mapping plugins to get to where I want an image to be. I was pretty happy with LR3.6. And I don't see any compelling changes in the CS6 previews to make me want to jump there either when the time comes (some of the content-aware cloning features are pretty cool, though, I must admit).

So I'm going to give Adobé a couple more days to respond with something constructive, then I'm going to call their customer service and see what I need to do to get a refund. If a lot of other people would do the same thing, maybe they would have to sit up and take notice.
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​PS: I haven't found how to add a signature here, but you can contact me at [email protected] and my blog is at www.faczen.blogspot.com


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## Kiwigeoff (Mar 21, 2012)

Glenn, we are sorry that you are experiencing issues with LR4.
Lightroomforums is not associated with Adobe and is managed by a group of people expert in Lightroom and committed to helping others getting the most from LR while learning themselves.
As such we don't tolerate negative comments about Adobe as they achieve little. 
If you choose to use this forum please use the style which you see others using. Thank you.

Signatures can only be added after you have made some posts, 10 or 12 I understand.


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## Happy Haggis (Mar 21, 2012)

Glenn, the people here are very knowledgeable and help when a genuine question is asked. The issue of slow performance in LR4 has been raised here and is included in Victoria's list here 
I understand your frustration, but this is really not the place to rant about Adobe.


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## Glenn Springer (Mar 21, 2012)

Kiwigeoff said:


> As such we don't tolerate negative comments about Adobe as they achieve little.
> If you choose to use this forum please use the style which you see others using. Thank you.



Got it. I was hoping others were experiencing the same issues and would have some suggestions or something constructive to say. 

I'm very committed to LR, I was a late adopter (LR2) but I love the program and don't know where I would be without it. I thought this would be a useful resource. 

I'll go away now, and go back to the NAPP and Adobe sites where they don't have their heads buried in the sand.

I suppose this post will never see the light of day.


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## LumixUser (Mar 21, 2012)

Glenn Springer said:


> Got it. I was hoping others were experiencing the same issues and would have some suggestions or something constructive to say.
> 
> I'm very committed to LR, I was a late adopter (LR2) but I love the program and don't know where I would be without it. I thought this would be a useful resource.
> 
> ...



Well, I don't know, why a little bit of rant about Adobe should not be tolerated here.

In general about the same thing happened, when Lightroom 3 was released. The majority were happy users with no performance issues (I belonged to them), and there were some thread appearing soon after the release, where people reported about performance issues such as sticky sliders. Sure, there were still some bugs in the software, but very likely a lot of performance issues were due to system configurations, which Adobe can never reproduce in any economically reasonable manner. Faulty hardware drivers, conflicts with other software, and even operating system bugs could be at play here. In order to check, if the new LR release has some issues on YOUR system, Adobe offers a 30 day test period to find that out. Even though I am very happy with LR4's performance, I will use that test period fully. As a former(?) software engineer you should have known that testing is mandatory practice before putting something into production.

With LR3 it took Adobe five point releases until 3.5 to nail the problems down and to offer a very performant and responsive Lightroom version.

In my observation, Lightroom 4 works perfectly acceptable. I upgraded my LR3 catalog with no issues. The performance related threads and reports are in my view less abundant than with LR3. My suggestion is to observe in the Lightroom forums the course of Lightroom, and try again, when it seems that performance issues have been resolved (either by bug fixes in the Lightroom code or by adding workarounds for issues, for which Adobe has no responsibility). You should also note that Adobe can only do something, if they can reproduce the problem and find the reason for the issue. Without that - and users need to give appropriate information about the issue - things can't be fixed. Some users therefore might be in the unfortunate situation, that Lightroom will stay slow.

EDIT: In your profile, I noticed that you use a Wacom tablet. Wacom drivers could create problems, if I recall the past. Did you check Lightroom after uninstalling the drivers? Do the problems occur while using tablet or the mouse - or in both cases? You see, that your problem description was possibly not detailed enough to get possible reasons over to the Adobe developers. Also, you use two monitors. Does the performance problems still exist, when you work with one monitor only?

You criticized that Adobe has "only" acknowledged the problems. What could you realistically expect more? LR4 is only about two weeks out. Acknowledging a bug is already a huge step! We can't know how quick it is, to provide a well tested solution, for what they have acknowledged. They probably work on it, so some patience is needed.


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## Brad Snyder (Mar 22, 2012)

We don't mind folks venting a bit. Glenn's first post up there is fine. He's unhappy, and he politely expressed his frustration.

Where we draw the line is on-going bashing. That's boring and counter-productive, and not conducive to the polite reasoned exchange of ideas we promote here. Many of the gurus here have spent years working with the project team in public forums, the Community Support area, and have developed relationships of long-standing. So we ask for a certain amount of respect for the crew that tries their best to deliver a product of value.


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## Stain (Mar 22, 2012)

I have to say that I am frustrated to with LR4. It is maybe my fault but I didn't use the trail version I just bought LR 4 and upgrade catalogs (without any problems at all)...


Me to have the problems with unresponsive sliders in develop module, every time I change the module I see the spining beach ball, and for me the bigest one, the LR 4 eat all of my 24GB of RAM and start using Page out's while there is around 19GB of inactive memory! I use MacPro 2.4GHz 8-core intel xenon 24GB RAM 4 x 1TB HDD... yes I use two monitors and I have instaled wacom tablet...


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## bobrobert (Mar 22, 2012)

Quote

Got it. I was hoping others were experiencing the same issues and would have some suggestions or something constructive to say. 

Unquote

I have tried processing with the second monitor turned on and off and I don't see a difference. The sliders seem to jump in increments of +5 and -5 which is a bit coarse but if you click on the numerical then up and down arrows means better fine control. In a nutshell I don't have any complaints but an up-date might mean it is faster?


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## freemind (Mar 22, 2012)

Brad Snyder said:


> Where we draw the line is on-going bashing. That's boring and counter-productive, and not conducive to the polite reasoned exchange of ideas we promote here. Many of the gurus here have spent years working with the project team in public forums, the Community Support area, and have developed relationships of long-standing. So we ask for a certain amount of respect for the crew that tries their best to deliver a product of value.



I think the programmers at Adobe are doing their very best. It's the management that puts to much pressure on them.

Just my two cents on it...


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## LumixUser (Mar 22, 2012)

freemind said:


> I think the programmers at Adobe are doing their very best. It's the management that puts to much pressure on them.
> 
> Just my two cents on it...



No, it is the diversity of computer systems, which currently run. You simply can't count for any possible hardware and software combination plus user faults in your testing process, it would not be economical for a software at the price level of Lightroom. Thus, a lot of hard to reproduce bugs will only get discovered in the real production world. That is nothing new and unusual. People should use their 30 day trial period and make a purchase decision, afterwards. If everything is fine, buy it. If important stuff does not work or is slow, don't buy and observe via the usual forums, if things get sorted out. In the meanwhile continue to use Lightroom 3.6 .


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## Victoria Bampton (Mar 23, 2012)

Thank you everyone for respecting the rules and keeping the friendly atmosphere.

The frustration is completely understandable, and we have no problem with that being expressed in a constructive manner.  Believe me, we're all frustrated too - even those of us that aren't affected.

We're not burying our heads in the sand, and there are threads here about the performance problems and some possible ways of improving it.  Unfortunately the reality is that there are some bugs in 4.0 which are affecting some users, and Adobe need to fix those issues.

All I can say right now is they're aware of the issue and working on a fix, but I don't have a timescale to share.  I hope it won't be too long, as I know the performance issues are causing major problems for some of you guys.


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## Stain (Mar 24, 2012)

Thanks for your response Victoria, I belive that most of the major bug's will be fixed as soon as possible. As I said before, it is my foul to buy LR4 without using the trail period, and just upgrade my catalogs to new version, and delete all LR3 catalog versions... ( I have time machine running  so if I want to go back I can...)


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## ukbrown (Mar 24, 2012)

@lumixuser, if you are right which you are in a PC centric world, then LR4 on a MAC should be working fine..... Does it or does it still have slow downs on a MAC (there aren't that many supported MACS and they all have the same h/w?? that's what i think anyway as a PC user )

I am slightly more cynical.  Any release of software that has a major revision with a 0 (e.g. 4.0) will still have bugs and should really be avoided by non technical users.

In the words of Pournelle "good enough is good enough"


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## Victoria Bampton (Mar 25, 2012)

There are some performance issues in the Mac version, mainly surrounding the secondary window, but nothing like Windows users are seeing.


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## LumixUser (Mar 25, 2012)

ukbrown said:


> @lumixuser, if you are right which you are in a PC centric world, then LR4 on a MAC should be working fine..... Does it or does it still have slow downs on a MAC (there aren't that many supported MACS and they all have the same h/w?? that's what i think anyway as a PC user )
> 
> I am slightly more cynical.  Any release of software that has a major revision with a 0 (e.g. 4.0) will still have bugs and should really be avoided by non technical users.
> 
> In the words of Pournelle "good enough is good enough"



I disagree regarding the .0 versions statement. Every potential LR4 user/buyer can use the opportunity to test drive the software, which I am doing right now. The deal breaking performance issues should be obvious to any trial user within a few days.

I haven't found any deal breaking issues yet, so my view is that LR4 is a very recommendable software. People who claim that their recommendation can influence local photo club members and that they are not going to recommend LR4 are mistaken, because they may cause club members not to profit from LR4's many benefits. The recommendation should be at least to try it (and never to buy it without testing it first). 

The generalization that .0 versions are generally to avoid is nonsense as well. I have used all .0 Lightroom versions without problems since 1.0 ! .0 versions naturally contain undiscovered bugs, but most often they do not affect the majority of the users or they aren't real deal breakers for a large amount of users.


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