Lightroom - Not lightening fast!

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Tunbridge

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Stephen
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I’ve been using lightroom 4 for the first time this week working through Scott Kelby’s book and I’m loving it.

However what I’m not loving is how my laptop is handling it!

The main issue is when you want to zoom in on an image and lightroom generates a preview. I understand I can do this during import but don’t want to slow that process down (so have it set as minimal as per Scott’s recommendation) – what I need is some better hardware (I think?)!

I’m currently using a Dell Studio 17 laptop, its got 2GB RAM and is an Intel T3200 CPU @ 2.0GHz.

I currently have to sit looking at the “LOADING” message for about 20 secs for each image if I want to look at it more closely. How long is it taking other people…particularly those using Macs?

My ideal upgrade is the new iMac (as I want a bigger screen and don’t need to be portable), however its still not out! How much quicker will it be than what I’ve got?
 
I always render and generate the previews on import. I'd rather take the hit on import than when editing, as lets face it, with lots of images you,hit import and walk away or do something else for a while.

I rebuilt my machine with windows 7 64 bit and loaded it with ram (16gb) which made a difference over 4gb, most noticeable when opening into photoshop as well. 2gb seems a little low?

Also with a laptop you'll be limited by disk space and speed. What disk do you have fitted? On my desktop I'm running quite a few hybrid disks, with the Lightroom cache and catalogs on different disks to the program files and the raw files. That also makes a difference.
 
2GB won't be enough really, I tried it on my elderly desktop with 2GB and it was painful.
4GB on laptop is OK.
The desktop is on Windows 7 and can use a flash drive as extra RAM - a 2GB one plugged in permanently helps a bit.
 
I suspected the RAM would me holding me back but disc space will also become a problem shortly as I've only got 320GB and I'm shooting RAW now on a D7000 instead of jpg on a D3000.
 
As you suspected RAM is your issue here. On the HDD space issue, we're all guilty of keeping shots that are let's be honest, crap. Delete them asap or get urself an external HDD, storage has never been cheaper.
 
It's not just your ram holding you back but your CPU as well (and I'd suspect a slow hard disk). Your CPU is old, and wasn't that fast when it was new.

To give you an idea a modern CPU such as the i7-3770 scores around 9,400 on the passmark benchmark. Your CPU scores around 1,000. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+Dual+T3200+@+2.00GHz

Upgrading to any modern PC with more memory and faster CPU you'll see significant improvements in speed :)
 
Think the ultimate solution will be a 21" iMac as the extra screen size will be welcome and they have 8GB of RAM plus 1TB of storage.

Cheers everyone for confirming my thoughts.
 
Ok for ultimate performance (imho) you need the following.

64 Bit OS with lots of memory
Multiple cores, Lightroom likes to have some grunt these days
Multiple fast disks

Strangely graphics card doesn't seem important.

My machine is getting a little old now but still performs well. I have a pair of dual core Xeon 5160 (3Ghz) cpu's, with 16Gb ram.
But I think my best performance increase is that as mentioned before I have multiple hard drives with the various parts of lightroom split across them.

I have 4 Weston Digital 600Gb Velocirators, with one for the OS, one for the lightroom catalogue, one for the lightroom cache and one for this years (or latest) Raw files. These are stonkingly fast disks (10K rpm) and so perform really well.
I then also have another pair of 2Tb for jpeg exports and previous years raw files (thinking I'd access them less).

All in all I have around 120K images in my catalogue and never have any issues with performance.

Don't forget backup either. I have a pair of 3Tb WD mybooks that run as backups.

The other think to note is that I only have the Apps I need installed, so very few. No games, no crap, this PC is kept clean so no issues.

Hope that helps, but if you are thinking of moving forwards these are some of the things to consider. I've probably gone over the top but it works well for me.
 
The "loading..." on mine at least is when i try to zoom to an image and it generates the 1:1 preview. This on my desktop (quad core Q2200 @ 2.6GHz) and my laptop (2.2ghz i5) takes between 10-15 seconds per image.
Ways ive found around this are to generate 1:1 on import if you have the time and space or just after picking/reject an initial lot, select that picked batch and generate 1:1 of that selection.

Although RAM makes a big difference to performance in LR generally the exporting and preview generation is nearly entirely CPU limited.

FWIW i massively speeded up both machines here by installing an SSD system drive and keeping the LR catalogue and preview folders on this instead of the slow traditional drive where the actual photos reside.
 
as others have said, LR is very CPU intensive, and although increasing your RAM will help, its the processor slows things down. One other thing may help, in the file handling preferences increase the Camera Raw Cache Size from its default of 1 to 20 GB
 
Cheers guys, the new iMac is avaiable to order on Friday so I'm going to go for one of them.
The base spec isn't cheap at £1099 but will I regret not spending the extra on the faster model which is £1249? And its going to be another £150ish on top of that to go from 8GB of RAM to 16GB. Is it worth the extra, the leap forward from my current laptop should already be massive?
 
Base spec of anything will struggle more than a mid range ;)

As for the memory....Crucial want £54 for 16GB of memory to fit an iMac. Apple publish details of how to replace it yourself and save £100.
 
JonathanRyan said:
Base spec of anything will struggle more than a mid range ;)

As for the memory....Crucial want £54 for 16GB of memory to fit an iMac. Apple publish details of how to replace it yourself and save £100.
Click to expand...

The new iMac is supposed to be totally sealed so you can't upgrade the RAM!

Hence my thinking that doing it now would be the wisest move. Just didn't want to spend the money on it if it wasn't going to make that much difference. The new fusion drives would help too I'm sure but its all relative and compared to my current set up it will be a significant improvement.
 
Tunbridge said:
The new iMac is supposed to be totally sealed so you can't upgrade the RAM!
Click to expand...

I've been a long time fan of Apple, but every day they annoy me more and more. There's some legislation in the UK that's supposed to stop this (like they care).

A long time ago, my wife said to me that Apple would be as evil as M$ once they were big enough.....
 
JonathanRyan said:
I've been a long time fan of Apple, but every day they annoy me more and more.
Click to expand...

I'm the same but they haven't annoyed me enough to stop me giving them my money (not yet anyway). I'm fully aware that I'm paying a premium for design but I don't mind that as they are things of beauty.

The iPhone 5 is a case in point but I still upgraded my iPhone 4 to one :bonk:
 
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