Lightroom grinding to a halt! any help appreciated

mjkent

mjkent

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Hi all,

The past 2 weeks when using Lightroom, it has been ok in the develop module to start with but the more I do, the slower it gets! So bad at times I can click on crop and have time to make a brew before the crop tool is available!

I have since taken my SSD out of my laptop as I suspected the CPU was slowing it down and put it in another laptop along with more ram (12gb) but it is still slower than it was maybe a month or more ago.

any ideas welcome because its driving me nuts!

Thanks,

Mike
 

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Try removing all imported photos and find and delete all catalogues.

But be careful not to delete LR itself

Worked for me.
 
Welcome to Lightroom. It rots the more changes you make.
Quit it and restart it periodically. (You don't mention which version you are using but the forums are chock full of people with the same complaints.)
 
I'm using what was lightroom cc and is now lightroom classic. I use to have no problems until recently. I have seen some forums suggesting to have multiple catalogues and I'll probably give it a go just to see if it helps
 
I don't think it's the scale of the catalogue, myself, I think it's the amount of changes being journalled waiting for commit to the database. You can ctrl-z and undo everything, even selections, clicking on sliders, the lot. I always find it's fast again after a restart though.

You can help it by putting the catalogue and the previews folders on their own filesystem (doesn't need its own drive, just its own filesystem), and definitely on SSD. It helps to allow background processes to complete before attempting to work too. (Manually trigger preview generation for example.) Periodically clean out the previews folders too, bin the lot, let it regenerate what it needs.

But, ultimately, its notorious for sucking. Sorry, not much you can do about that other than complain to Adobe. Like they care.
 
Since I 'upgraded' to Classic a few weeks ago mine grinds to a halt as well. Its just about usable so I'll have a good investigation when I have some free time but there do seem to be a very high number of reports of bad performance recently.
 
Make sure that your C drive has at least 20% free space.
For good performance at least 16 g of RAM.
Increase the size of your LR cache.
Optimize the catalog often. Try to turn off your GPU
When thing get really bad restart your computer
 
Lightroom has always had problems, it does a lot of I/O, just all the time, which means you absolutely must have a blisteringly fast I/O system with no bottlenecks anywhere. Oh and when it's doing something in the background it seems to lose the ability to do something in the foreground at the same time.
 
Not a solution, but quick questions, for those suffering a slow down which platform are you working on?
Also is it occurring more often when carrying out certain tasks?
Finally, are you running anything in the background?
 
troutfisher said:
This might be of use

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html
Click to expand...

This definitely. Some people are all over these threads saying lightroom is rubbish, but it has some requirements now that it's got a lot more features. It started slowing after version 4 because of this, but there's a lot you can do to help it. It's not always been rubbish and certainly isn't now if you follow the performance guidelines.

Put the lightroom catalogue and cache onto a separate, dedicated fast drive - preferably SSD. The speed of your hard drives really do affect performance, but then we are talking about dealing with larger and larger files these days.
I have SSD for the OS (windows 10), a small SSD for the catalogue and cache and another for this years raw files (possibly overkill). It really doesn't help if you've got everything on a single slow drive.

Full Renders on import are essesntial, 1:1. Otherwise when you switch it renders in the background and slows processes. It slows the import process but thats it, but then thats when you make your coffee if importing a large batch. :D
Standard preview size, make this close to what your screen resolution is to stop additional work

Follow these guidelines and Lightroom performance is fine. Trouble is, most people don't read the documentation, slap everything onto the same drive, then complain it's got poor performance.
 
Just gone back over an old post as we had this before..

My catalogue has 124K photos in it, size is 1.26Gb on a separate SSD drive. My preview cache is 43Gb, preview size is 1440 pixels, quality high, discard after 30 days. Face detection is turned off as I tend to run that on a set if required.
My raw cache is 20Gb, on the same ssd as the catalogue
I'm using my graphics processor - just a Geoforce GTX285, smart previews are turned off.

that was a couple of months ago - I now have more images
 
I wouldn't even say SSD is optional or "preferable", imho it's a requirement for the LR catalogue and previews cache.

What can I say? Ten years ago I used pixmantec rawshooter and could process a hundred images on a Q6600 processor in half the time it takes just to import them into lightroom and generate previews, even with a newish system chock full of SSD, core i7s and tons of ram, as per Adobe recommendations. And the thing that annoys me the most about LR is the fact that sometimes it's fine, and sometimes it's not. I suspect there is some activity that *some* people do routinely that tickles a condition in LR that leaves it performing badly until a restart. I really, really, wish I knew what that was so I could stop doing it.......!
 
What can I say? Ten years ago file sizes were tiny, expectations were less.

Import and render time is slow compared to other products, but this is manageable. Click import, run off to make a coffee. As you know from previous discussions around this it's not mind numbingly slow, 800 image import plus 1:1 preview render is around 11 minutes, but after that I don't see any slowdown.
On my old PC is used to see around 5-6 secs delay first time the develop module was opened, but that was version 5. I don't get that now on the new PC with Version 6, in fact don't notice any slow performance at all.
 
I don't see import as slow as I am doing basic selecting and rejecting while Lightroom is importing. If importing was faster, I would still be sat there for the same amount of time.
 
Byker28i said:
What can I say? Ten years ago file sizes were tiny, expectations were less.
Click to expand...

Importing the same images into LR 3 was much slower too, and LR has got slower since then, so your argument is moot which surely you could have predicted?

You do seem to get quite upset when people criticise LR performance. Why?

It's not import that bothers me per second, you only do that once, it's general interactive UI performance. Perhaps it's also just unpredictable because it's on Windows....?
 
Last edited:
drdocmatt said:
Importing the same images into LR 3 was much slower too, and LR has got slower since then, so your argument is moot which surely you could have predicted?

You do seem to get quite upset when people criticise LR performance. Why?
Click to expand...

I could also say that every thread about Lightroom you're on it straight away criticising the performance. Why?

I've been through the issues, followed the advice from Adobe and don't have problems with speed, so try to provide helpful advice to others rather than just moan. ;)
 
john.margetts said:
I don't see import as slow as I am doing basic selecting and rejecting while Lightroom is importing. If importing was faster, I would still be sat there for the same amount of time.
Click to expand...

Import is slow compared to other products, it is an area of complaint with Lightroom that is justified, it's half the speed of something like capture one, but if you accept that and just let it finish, it's fine after that. As a whole workflow tool I don't think there's anything that touches it.
 
Wow, I've put zero effort into optimising the performance of Lightroom and it has none of the issues I'm reading about here. Only issue I'm approaching is that the 750GB SSD of my MBP is nearly full, and I will have to explore a remote storage option soon (or update my MBP).
 
Byker28i said:
I could also say that every thread about Lightroom you're on it straight away criticising the performance. Why?

I've been through the issues, followed the advice from Adobe and don't have problems with speed, so try to provide helpful advice to others rather than just moan. ;)
Click to expand...
I try to give people the perspective that for some of us it seems that no matter what we do it doesn't get better, so to some extent I'm trying to save them pain too by pushing them through denial to acceptance ...

Anyway, I just landed a "black Friday" 500GB SSD at a pre-brexit price so I'll be rearranging some filesystems again when that arrives...
 
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