Lightroom CC 2015.7 - Very slow

[RTP]

Hi all,

New to the forums. I've joined with the specific intention of gaining more info on LR's inner workings and why it now seems to be slower than ever. Obviously there seems to be a general consensus that recent iterations have impacted performance, but I feel that my own personal experience is now beyond that.

Firstly my system specs are :

CPU - Sandy Bridge i7 -2700k Overclocked to 4.6GHz. 4 Cores.
RAM - 32Gb Running at 1333mhz
GPU - GTX 1080 Ti
Windows 10 Ultimate x 64

LR is installed on a separate SSD along with the Catalog and the CRC. ( Strangely some Adobe CC files are on my OS SSD - again separate )
RAW images are on seperate HDD - External USB 3.0.

I am experiencing poor performance in all areas. Specifically in library and develop image load times. This is heightened in develop when images have multiple adjustments. image hanging is also occurring.

Brief black screening and flicking between images is occurring.

Export / RAW to jpg conversion is now ridiculously slow.

CPU is running at 100% throughout every LR process, including develop.

OS Crive - separate SSD - operates at 80 -100% utilization while LR is being used. Not open, but when actively using features. The only Adobe files on my OS SSD are :

Adobe Creative Cloud , Adobe CC_bkp1 and Reader10.0. All in Program Files x86

Images are coming from full size Cannom Mk4 RAWS. This is a recent change and obviously the file sizes are much bigger than I've worked with before.

My concern is that my older CPU - 2011 - Might have reached its performance limit and is bottlenecking the system. Could it? Is it?

Any observations, thoughts or feedback would be VERY welcome as my workflow is being effected at a very busy time of the year for me.

Many thanks in advance.

Russell

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

There are a lot of possibilities but one thing you mention seems unusual, that your OS SSD drive and the CPU are both at 100%. It's extremely rare that an application manages to saturate both the disk and the CPU simultaneously, usually one is the constraining factor. Moreover, it's hard to saturate a SSD with Lightroom for any period of time other than perhaps for ingestion or file movement (as opposed to things involving image rendering).

Are you sure the disk saturation is coming from Adobe? Under task manager, if you start resources monitor, and go to the disk tab, you can watch what files are being accessed by which programs. You can also view the queue length, which is a far better indicator if a disk is busy (a queue length > 1 over a goodly time means something is waiting for IO to complete on average all the time).

This might give a clue if the drive is really busy, or if there is some background activity (memory management and caching is a possibility, though 32GB should be adequate).

The "Brief black screening and flickering" is something I experience after I use Lightroom heavily for a while. I am convinced there is still a bug buried somewhere in there, which over time builds up something -- I am hesitant to say memory leak as no indication of that, I think it's actually some hung threads. The other day I did a massive amount of metadata changes over 2-3 hours and it got bad enough it finally hung and had to be killed (I was trying to look at various debugging tools to see what was wrong, and I think waited too long before trying a restart). You might try restarting Lightroom to see if the behavior changes when you see that flickering.

You should also review this if you have not: Lightroom Performance - Debunking Myths | The Lightroom Queen

I would also upgrade to the lastest version. I am not sure there is anything in there to fix your issues, but it will keep people from saying "you should upgrade to the latest version" instead of concentrating on your symptoms. And there MAY be some bug fixes in there which will help, they were chasing a memory leak a few versions back, not sure when it was fixed.

My main suggestion that this point is (after reviewing the above, and if no help) to concentrate on one phase of use, and give us a bit more description. For example, if it's export some timing and observations -- are the disk and CPU both at 100% during an export? How large are the MK4 images and how large the exports, and how fast does it export a given number?

Or develop, or preview build, etc. I hear that you are having trouble in all phases, but it may be easier to talk about one phase at a time with some that-phase-specific observations.