Why is LightRoom so slow?

[ehume]

My daughter recently installed LightRoom 6 to handle the RAW files (24+ MB each!) from a Canon Rebel 7Ti. The system has an i7 4790k with 16GB RAM and a GTX 970 graphics card. The OS drive is a 1st gen 750GB Samsung SSD. IIRC it is an 840 EVO, slightly more than 2/3 full. The OS is Win 10. She has complained to me that it is slow, and has had me wait for the changes to show up when she makes them. It does take a while.

I'll admit I have not let myself get drawn into the Adobe ecosystem, so I know nothing about how any of it works. The sizes of the RAW images, for example, are estimates, because the images are "imported" directly into LR, and don't show up as files.

Have I misconfigured her system? Has the OS SSD gotten too old? Does the GTX 970 lack horsepower? We are puzzled.

 

[CuriousMike]

LR is slow. It just is. It's slow to import. It's slow to do certain masking changes. It's just... slow.
It loves single-threaded performance. It loves Intel.
You have the right CPU - if there's any overclocking headroom, that will help but maybe not the help that is supremely noticeable.

Multi-cores help if you're batch exporting a bunch of images - but unfortunately that's not a common occurrence.

Puget Systems has done some Adobe profiling in the past - you might google "Puget Lightroom" and see what articles come up.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-Lightroom-Classic-CC-141

 

[ehume]

Thanks, Mike.

 

[lxskllr]

You might want to look at darktable...

https://www.darktable.org/

I don't know much about it aside from it being somewhat similar to lightroom. It likely won't be exactly like lightroom, and maybe doesn't have the features you need, but it's free to try, only costing you time.

 

[mxnerd]

Speed Up Lightroom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJXuh65KTJU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUvdGnp3tIs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHpmk3R7Ifk

==

https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-lightroom/

 

[ehume]

Thanks mxnerd. I watched all three videos and they are dynamite. I copied your reply and forwarded it to my daughter.

 

[PliotronX]

I do know that the 840 TLC (evo/non evo) series suffered from read speed degradation and required firmware updates. Not sure if its a disk subsystem bottleneck though because Adobe software is not all that well optimized..

 

[ehume]

hi,

Some Lightroom users find that increasing the Camera Raw cache to 20 GB or more can dramatically speed performance in the Develop module,” Adobe writes. To increase your Lightroom's cache size, go to the Preferences window, click the File Handling tab, and enter a new value in Camera Raw Cache Settings.

Thanks!

 

[bfun_x1]

LR is slow. It just is. It's slow to import. It's slow to do certain masking changes. It's just... slow.
It loves single-threaded performance. It loves Intel.
You have the right CPU - if there's any overclocking headroom, that will help but maybe not the help that is supremely noticeable.

Multi-cores help if you're batch exporting a bunch of images - but unfortunately that's not a common occurrence.

Puget Systems has done some Adobe profiling in the past - you might google "Puget Lightroom" and see what articles come up.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-Lightroom-Classic-CC-141

LR is the only program I've ever used where changing the clock speed made a perceivable speed difference. Running LR6 on a 3570k at 3.4GHz actually caused me to think several of my pictures were out of focus because it would take several seconds to draw the images after I opened them. OCing to 4.2 made a huge difference. It probably shaved 3 to 4 seconds off opening each image which was considerable when I was going through 100s of images. Now I have a 2600X and the open transition is < 1 second which is acceptable. Importing images is still a slow but I expect that has more to do with drive speed.

 

[ehume]

LR is the only program I've ever used where changing the clock speed made a perceivable speed difference. Running LR6 on a 3570k at 3.4GHz actually caused me to think several of my pictures were out of focus because it would take several seconds to draw the images after I opened them. OCing to 4.2 made a huge difference. It probably shaved 3 to 4 seconds off opening each image which was considerable when I was going through 100s of images. Now I have a 2600X and the open transition is < 1 second which is acceptable. Importing images is still a slow but I expect that has more to do with drive speed.

Thanks. The six-core i7 8700k, overclocked to 4.8 GHz should be better than her four-core 4790k clocked to 4 GHz. Yes?

 

[CuriousMike]

Clock speed. LR loves clock speed.
The 4790 at 4.8 would do better than the 8700 at 4.0

 

[bfun_x1]

Thanks. The six-core i7 8700k, overclocked to 4.8 GHz should be better than her four-core 4790k clocked to 4 GHz. Yes?

In theory, but I don't know for sure. On the 3570k the transitions at 3.4GHz probably took 4 to 6 seconds. At 4.2 it probably dropped to 1.5 seconds. It think giving your 4790k a small OC would be an easy test.

Checkout some of those other fixes as well. You might have a legitimate problem somewhere else. I'm also using LR 6 and it has a very annoying bug that requires it to be re-installed after certain Windows updates.

 

[bigi]

LR scales well up to 4 cores. More is just a waste. I run mine with catalog and cache on Intel 750 PCI-E SSD. I have 64GB of RAM and 1080Ti.

LR is slow, period. I just got it barely to work to justify its use. I downgraded from D810 to Sony RX10, so my RAW files are MUCH smaller.

Can't imagine using RL with 50-100 Mpix cameras and their huge raw files.