Lightroom 11.3.1 so slow... (Mac Monterey)

[paulgodard]

Lightroom Version Number

11.3.1

Operating System

1. macOS 12 Monterey

I am on the latest version on LR 11.3.1 running on MBP 2017 2.9 Ghz quad i7 with 16 GB of RAM with Monterey 12.3 (upgraded 2 months ago).
I have quite a big catalogue of 50,000 images. The catalog is on my MacBookPro HD and the images are on an external 2TB USB 3 drive directly connected to the mac usb-c port.
A good week ago, I decided to take kind of sabatical and go through all my images... which means reorganizing the folders, moving files, changing metadata (rating), editing the images in develop module and exporting the images as PSD file (mostly from DNG) as well as exporting the metadata with LR/Tranmsporter.
It has been a nightmare. As soon as I work for a couple of hours, LR becomes EXTREMELY slow for most of the operations, especially editing (I have to wait a few sec everytime I have to move a slider) but also simply moving from one image to the next one.
What is strange is that when it is so slow, I don't see that LR is taking CPU more than 10%, sometimes more when exporting or saving metadata which normal. Not much going on there either, only mdworker is quite active at about 30%.
So I have checked the preferences... camera raw cache at 20 GB, graphic processor off, using smart previews, auto-write metadata off. I am also backing up and optimizing the catalog several times a day. I have 100 GB free space on the internal HD (20%)...

What else can I check to improve its performance?

Help would be greatly appreciate...

 

[Gnits]

I suggest you remove the drive with your images from Spotlight (Preferences, Spotlight) and also remove the catalog and previews from Spotlight. I temporarily also removed the system HD from Spotlight and added it in again 30 mins or so later. I understand this has the effect of rebuilding the Spotlight index. I also removed all the file types I did not want Spotlight to index. I see no point in having Spotlight index images when I am using Lightroom to do that job for me..

I did this for a friend, who had a maxed out iMac, whose system was crawling to a totally unacceptable level. This transformed the performance of Lightroom and also the overall performance of the system.

My read of this is Spotlight is trying to index large volumes of image files and somewhere in the process the index becomes overloaded or corrupt.

This may not solve your issue, but it is worth trying.

 

[paulgodard]

Thank you very much Gnits. I had listed some external drives before the clean upgrade to Monterey and I simply forgot to check that. Your advice of listing all the folders which contains images is also great. I have done it and I will test tomorrow to see the difference. It is past mid-night here!

 

[Roelof Moorlag]

Some other tips can be found here: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom/performance/

 

[Victoria Bampton]

A long shot, but one to rule out... security permissions: https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...s-to-lightroom-classic-on-macos/td-p/12913413

 

[mike_14]

I have quite a different Mac setup (M1 Pro Montery with SSD catalog and images on a NAS) than you, but also have a large catalog. I noticed a massive drop in performance over the past couple of days. Even adding or removing a keyword took up to a minute. I tried to optimize my catalog, but gave up after it ran for a couple of hours.

It then occurred to me that I had updated to 11.3.1 a couple of days prior and that's when things seemed to get sluggish. I rolled back to 11.3 and still had the same issue. I then rolled back to 11.2 and everything returned to normal speed. I ran an optimization in about 2 mins then ran a successful backup.

I feel like I dodged a bullet, as I've done a ton of updates since my last backup a week ago. This scare will get me backing up more frequently during periods of change. Auto-updates are now going to be off. I'm not planning to mess around with 11.3.1 again. If I get brave and try anything, I'll report back here.

I'm still fairly new to Lightroom. This site has helped me several times, so I figured it was time to join and give something back. I thought I'd share this in case an older version might help you or someone else as well.

Good luck!

 

[johnrellis]

I rolled back to 11.3 and still had the same issue. I then rolled back to 11.2 and everything returned to normal speed.

I think LR 11.3 and 11.3.1 are two of the buggiest LR releases in a very long time, with serious bugs inducing many people to roll back to 11.2. Let's hope 11.4 is much better.

 

[Stanley J]

I run LrC on an M1 Mac. At first it was lightening fast, however after a few months, launch time and some editing functions started to slow down. Under file menu(on my Mac) is Optimize Catalog. I ran that and LrC ran as fast as it did originally. I found this strange as I do run Optimize Catalog when I close LrC. ????

 

[Johan Elzenga]

I run LrC on an M1 Mac. At first it was lightening fast, however after a few months, launch time and some editing functions started to slow down. Under file menu(on my Mac) is Optimize Catalog. I ran that and LrC ran as fast as it did originally. I found this strange as I do run Optimize Catalog when I close LrC. ????

Interesting. I could imagine that the optimization that is part of the catalog backup procedure is not as thorough because it needs to be fairly speedy, but that is just a guess.

 

[edrudolph]

Thanks you @Gnits

I suggest you remove the drive with your images from Spotlight (Preferences, Spotlight) and also remove the catalog and previews from Spotlight. I temporarily also removed the system HD from Spotlight and added it in again 30 mins or so later. I understand this has the effect of rebuilding the Spotlight index. I also removed all the file types I did not want Spotlight to index. I see no point in having Spotlight index images when I am using Lightroom to do that job for me..

I did this for a friend, who had a maxed out iMac, whose system was crawling to a totally unacceptable level. This transformed the performance of Lightroom and also the overall performance of the system.

My read of this is Spotlight is trying to index large volumes of image files and somewhere in the process the index becomes overloaded or corrupt.

This may not solve your issue, but it is worth trying.

Thank you, @Gnits! I'd been experiencing extremely slow response when working in the Develop module after the size of my dng files increased from about 45MB to ~60MB in size. And was worrying that my iMac Pro with 128GB RAM and a 16GB GPU was going to need replacement. Opening Spotlight Preferences and unchecking Images seems to have restored the previous responsiveness.