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LR6.14 sudden incredibly slow performance; on Mac ~ possibly solved

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michaelp

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Joined
Aug 14, 2019
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106
Lightroom Version Number
6.14
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.14 Mojave
Running LR 6.14 on Mac mini 2018 (6 core, 3.0GHz, 8GB RAM). OS: Mojave 10.4.6. Monitor: LG 27UK850 UHD.

Until today I've been very happy with LR performance. As I don't have much RAM inevitably there is a Swap file in use especially with a few big apps open but with the Mac's SDD it is still pretty quick.

Suddenly today it became inexplicably and frustrating slow. Every operation, even launching the app, is slow.

Editing is painfully slow. Drawing say a radial filter, it will be 5 to 10s before anything appears on the screen. Altering its shape is a drag and hope and wait operation.

I Googled the issue, and tried all the suggestions I found, all to no effect.

So I had my small catalog of some 1,500 files and just over 1GB in size located on my main drive (SSD 250GB, 90GB free) with the files on an external USB drive (325GB free of 1TB).

I checked all the usual settings: cache = 25GB; no XMP; GPU on. Rebuilt all the 1:1 previews. Purged the cache. Rebooted the Mac. All to no effect.

So I created a new catalog, imported 18 photos, and also brought the RAW files onto my main drive. Behaviour exactly the same.

Struggled for a few hours more ... started this post and then thought I'd just try booting the Mac into Safe Mode.

Amazingly this appears to have fixed the issue. The original and new catalogs working equally fast.

Following a reboot back onto normal mode, behaviour appears to be back to normal.

So assuming the fix holds, I'm just posting this in case it helps anyone else with the same problem.

Apparently Safe Mode cleans some caches, so maybe this helped? Safe Mode: Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac
 
Thanks for posting. Something to file away.
 
Thanks for sharing Michael!
 
Very probably one of the hundreds of caches that are there on your mac was corrupted:
when you start in Safe Mode practically all caches are cleansed or emptied.
When you then start again "normal" most of the time everything is OK, corrupted caches cleaned.
 
I am travelling (light, only a macbookpro with me). I will be at home in two weeks, and look in the PC what it could be in Windows(10).
 
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