LrC slow (Develop and Export) despite good specs

[ptwojtasiak]

Lightroom Version Number

11.0.1

Operating System

1. Windows 10

First of all - thanks for having me in the forum

A friend visited me and we compared our pee-pee's - he has a brand new Macbook Pro, I have a windows machine (specs below). We decided to try and export the same catalogue of files and see where it gets us. So... without further ado, my specs:

Intel Xeon E5-1650 v3 @3.5GHz
32 GB of DDR4 ram @ 1064 MHz
Nvidia Geforce RTX 2060 6GB
Win10 Pro
100 GB of free space on system disk
M.2 hard drive

The infamous Macbook Pro:

Apple M1 Max CPU
64GB ram
MacOS 12.0.1

The test subject was a group of 150 5d mk4 RAW files, fully postprocessed, exported as JPGs of full quality and 240 dpi.

My PC did this in 6 minutes 49 seconds.
The Mac did it in 1 minute 29 seconds.

Aside from that, LR on the Mac just runs smooth - the sliders react immediately, the effects are seen just as they are applied, everything seems to run the way it should.
My LR is choppy, takes a few seconds to apply some of the more intense adjustments and loads the computer heavily when importing or exporting (loud cooler noises etc.).
I don't even dare to compare import times.

So, my question is twofold.
1. Is my computer correctly optimized and is this the performance I should expect from such specs? If not, what is my bottleneck?
2. Are the Macs really that much faster and should I consider purchasing, say, an iMac mini and use it as my Lightroom workhorse?

Thanks for your input!

 

[clee01l]

There are lots of "things" that could get in the way on Windows. How about anti-malware running that investigates every file that Lightroom Classic touches? Another might be the GPU drivers. Too little free space for temporary files in working storage though 100 GB would seem to be enough.

I have an M1 iMac w 16GB. And it is noticeably faster than the 32GB intel iMac that it replaced

 

[Colin Grant]

I second Cletus in his Mac experience. I too have a 16 gig M1 iMac and it is faster than my previous 32 gig intel Mac.

 

[Gnits]

I think it is hard work keeping 100Gb of free space on a system drive. There are always loads of scenarios trying to grab that space.
Check the size of the pagefile. You may have competition between Pagefile, Camera Raw Cache, Photoshop Scratch disks, etc.
Where have you got the Camera Raw cache folder.
Do you have your catalog on the M2 drive.
When was the last time the Catalog was optimised.
Is your system a Pc or a Laptop. I assume desktop, but just checking. I bought whatI thought was a seriously high specified laptop, with M2 drive and decent graphics card and it crawled. Had to get rid of it.
Is there any reason the cpu is been throttled, such as overheating.
I am not an expert on Zeon, but think it is geared for multi core / server style processing. I suspect that a lot of Lr processing is done in a single core, with only a few operations taking full advantage of the cores available.

Usually, there is not a single answer to these types of questions.

 

[PhilBurton]

First of all - thanks for having me in the forum

A friend visited me and we compared our pee-pee's - he has a brand new Macbook Pro, I have a windows machine (specs below). We decided to try and export the same catalogue of files and see where it gets us. So... without further ado, my specs:

Intel Xeon E5-1650 v3 @3.5GHz
32 GB of DDR4 ram @ 1064 MHz
Nvidia Geforce RTX 2060 6GB
Win10 Pro
100 GB of free space on system disk
M.2 hard drive

...

My PC did this in 6 minutes 49 seconds.
The Mac did it in 1 minute 29 seconds.

Aside from that, LR on the Mac just runs smooth - the sliders react immediately, the effects are seen just as they are applied, everything seems to run the way it should.
My LR is choppy, takes a few seconds to apply some of the more intense adjustments and loads the computer heavily when importing or exporting (loud cooler noises etc.).
I don't even dare to compare import times.

So, my question is twofold.
1. Is my computer correctly optimized and is this the performance I should expect from such specs? If not, what is my bottleneck?
2. Are the Macs really that much faster and should I consider purchasing, say, an iMac mini and use it as my Lightroom workhorse?

Thanks for your input!

I think you are comparing a 7 year old design intended mainly for server workloads, with a current-gen, highly optimized new CPU design. From an Intel web page. As one indication, your CPU has "22 mmm lithography," which is the "line width" between circuit elements on the CPU. Current general Intel processors have 10 mm lightography. Often a new CPU generation is based on a smaller lightography size, and is usually more optimized than the previous generation.