Lightroom 4.1 Running SLOW!

[Serious_Paul]

I am currently running Adobe Lightroom 4.1 on:

MacBook Pro 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM

With 2 Hard Disk Drives: one 60GB SSD (Which is used only to run applications from) and a 750GB 7200RPM HDD which holds all the data and serves as the cache disk.

I have noticed for some time now that even with what you would think would be perfectly sufficient specs on a machine, that my MB Pro pathetically struggles to run LR. The performance is reminiscent of running Adobe Photoshop on a first-run Pentium Processor with 512MB of ram lol. WTF?

Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do to improve performance? Does anyone else experience a similar issue? I'd appreciate any help that you all might be able to offer! Thanks!

[Chris Burch]

No help to off but mine is running insanely slow on Windows 7 with 12GB of RAM and a Core i7 processor.  Everything is slow, too...rendering of previews, applying changes, switching between photos, import/export.  It's becoming unusable.

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Mine is running about expected with my 3 year old PC.  8gb ram, first generation i7 processor, Samsung 250 gb SSD, older video card.
 
If you want to see slow, try DXO.
 
It does take a while to render my 100+ mb images from my D800, but nothing I can't manage.  Canon images from my 5D MK II or MK III are much faster.
 
I expect that Adobe is working on speeding it up, but until they do, I really do not have a issue editing 1500 images from a shoot.

[Serious_Paul]

Well at least I'm not the only one experiencing this problem. 

[e-d0uble]

I'm not a fan of griping about software produced by a loathsome company like adobe..  It's like saying "Darn those Nazis were real poopy-heads"..  Regardless, I noticed that every iteration of this 4.xx version of lightroom is dog slow on my Core i7@ 1.73GHz with 8G of ram and GeForce GT 435M.  Sadly, this 4.1 version is no better.. It seems to really lag when I hook the laptop up to an external monitor.  The 3.x versions of lightroom were far faster.

[stevenrrmanir]

bloatware, and POS software that slows down your machine... why the sudden degradation in performance?

I hope some other company out there will release something useful, because this POS is NOT worth it!

software companies should be optimizing their software instead of expecting people to buy the latest PCs with the fastest videocard and 1 million GB of RAM...

i7, 12GB RAM is still not enough?

if you want to do something about it, write Adobe and tell them that you intend to return the software back because it has rendered your work, the requirement specs on the package are MISLEADING and INACCURATE and you want your money back!

without the threat of financial loss, they don't give a rat's arse

[RichATL]

The slowdown has been an issue since the Beta...
I even made a video about it a few weeks back.

Lightroom 4 is SLOWWWWWWW!	Small | Large

The bottlenecking is most prevalent on rendering previews, and exporting web galleries...

Constant beratement of Adobe has yielded ZERO results...

I've been a LR user since the very first incarnation (pre-LR1), and this is by far the biggest screw up thus far.
and there seems to be no fix in sight, except for a complete teardown and re-build.

[gary]

Don't feel alone I have LR4.1 on both my I Mac and Mac Book pro and it has been so slow it allows for time to make coffee  between operations, very very frustration, not sure they will ever get it right. I am very disappointed that they didn't update LR3.6 to 7 to include the 5D mkiii, as that was much quicker.   

[Viggo]

I have a 3,6ghz i5 with 16gb ram and it's veeeeryyy slooooow here also.

I got it to run better for a couple of hours yesterday, after a reinstall and remembering to manually select Camera Raw 7.1 (since it doesn't to that just by updating, ridicolous!) And I could run the sliders realtime, and the changes happen instantly on screen and I felt like I wasn't in 1984 anymore. But then hour and a half maybe, in a catalog with 1600 pictures, it stopped and went back to doing nothing, zooming in takes about 10-14 seconds, and all the sliders just won't move, then I wait 5-6 seconds at best and they suddenly move a lot, then stop again... I also tried a smaller catalog, but it made absolutely no difference.

Adobe has seriously gone downhill lately. I hope they will charge double the money again and begin to make it work again. I have a bunch of friends gone back to Lr 3.6 because they don't have the time or patience (who can blame 'em) to sit and watch Lr 4.1. It's like watching a 90 year old run a stadium marathon, it was fun to watch the first few meters, than you just want to lay down and die.....

[Ew]

Just when I was becoming frustrated with Aperture's speed and considering jumping ship (again) ....

[Marsu42]

Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do to improve performance? Does anyone else experience a similar issue? I'd appreciate any help that you all might be able to offer! Thanks!

I already wrote this in another LR4 rant thread: disable nr and esp. sharpening until you're finished with the picture, it speeds up 1:1 rendering tremendously. And optimize your (large) catalog frequently.

However, LR4.1 is slow anyway, esp. the betas - my feeling is that the performance worsens the longer the program runs, so shutting it down and restarting it helps. However, after a restart it takes some time to initialize smart collections, don't have too many of them because they drag performance down, too.

The general problem is that Adobe rushed the LR4 release because they wanted their new process version 2012 to be used, but there are many issues like the broken autotone and they even keep introducing features without testing in a release candidate which should be a no-go.

[fiend]

The slowdown has been an issue since the Beta...
I even made a video about it a few weeks back.
Lightroom 4 is SLOWWWWWWW!

The bottlenecking is most prevalent on rendering previews, and exporting web galleries...

Constant beratement of Adobe has yielded ZERO results...

I've been a LR user since the very first incarnation (pre-LR1), and this is by far the biggest screw up thus far.
and there seems to be no fix in sight, except for a complete teardown and re-build.

I know Lightroom 4.1 is slow as hell, but you compare COPY and COPY AS DNG. That's not a fair comparison because your computer converts the .cr2 -> .dng in the process on COPY AS DNG

[RichATL]

I know Lightroom 4.1 is slow as hell, but you compare COPY and COPY AS DNG. That's not a fair comparison because your computer converts the .cr2 -> .dng in the process on COPY AS DNG

Because I was using files from my 5d3 I had to convert them to DNG first (not recorded or measured)
I then imported to both LR3 and 4.1RC2  (which is what is in the video and measured) via "copy as DNG"
I did not measure how long it takes to import CR2s.  Just DNG and JPEG.  Percentage wise they are both the same percentage slower than LR3

Which in theory shouldn't take any longer than just plain "copy", but I wanted to make sure that it knew it was working towards DNGs and to render the packaged previews over again.

a note on turning off sharpening and noise reduction to speed things up.
...it wasn't necessary in LR3...so it shouldn't be necessary now...
but it will help things when viewing, but does nothing on import...
The sharpening and noise reduction are only applied (accurately) to the preview when zoomed to 1:1

[mws]

I agree. I just upgraded from LR 3 to 4.1. I'm on a fairly decent MacBook Pro (2.2 GHz i7 w/ 8GB RAM), and it's almost unusable.

Adobe better get on this and quick. I'm just a hobbyist, if I was a pro and had to deal with this, I would be pissed.

[jeffh@seamark.com]

Try opening a new catalog more often and starting fresh.  Works for me.  I love LR.