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Reset Preferences to Fix LR Slowdown

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Dave Clark

Member
Premium Classic Member
Joined
Dec 27, 2007
Messages
49
Location
Poway, Ca
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
11.3.1
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
It has been known for years that LR slows down after some use and a way to correct the problem is to reset all the Preferences to the defaults. This works but results in the loss of preferences settings. Also, after some use, the slowdown returns.

I am amazed that this problem has existed for years and has not been addressed by Adobe. Is there any sign Adobe is interested in fixing this problem? Does anyone know what preferences need to be avoided to eliminate the slowdown. Actually the "slowdown" can actually be a total hangup.
 
"Does anyone know what preferences need to be avoided to eliminate the slowdown."

The preferences file stores much more state of the LR application than what the user explicitly sets in Preferences and various options throughout the app. In fact, explicit user preferences is just a very small part of the preferences file. LR's implementation of the preferences file has a serious design defect that causes the file to get corrupted, causing all sorts of misbehavior. (Note that this corruption usually occurs when LR exits normally.) Your only option is to reset preferences entirely.
 
Due to the design defect, I believe most instances of preferences corruption do occur during normal operation of LR.

Many people assume that the corruption occurs when LR terminates abnormally while writing the preferences file, truncating it. But LR wouldn't be able to read the preferences the next time it started, since on Windows the file is formatted as one giant Lua expression, and the Lua parser would fail.

See the thread starting here:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...a-more-serious-approach/idc-p/12668695#M25897
 
"Does anyone know what preferences need to be avoided to eliminate the slowdown."

The preferences file stores much more state of the LR application than what the user explicitly sets in Preferences and various options throughout the app. In fact, explicit user preferences is just a very small part of the preferences file. LR's implementation of the preferences file has a serious design defect that causes the file to get corrupted, causing all sorts of misbehavior. (Note that this corruption usually occurs when LR exits normally.) Your only option is to reset preferences entirely.
Is there any indication that Adobe is planning correct this defect? Given that it has been a known problem for many years it appears that users are expected to live with it.
 
Adobe indicated in 2019 they were investigating the issues, which was a good sign:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...a-more-serious-approach/idc-p/12668680#M25892

But there was never a follow-up.

There's been a huge amount of turnover on the LR engineering team over the years, and almost surely the original architects are long gone. If my evidence-informed hypothesis is correct about the nature of the original design defect, fixing it could be quite expensive, involving architecture and systems engineering skills that may be in short supply on the current team, and requiring careful line-by-line examination of nearly all the code in the user interface.

The product and engineering managers surely know how frequently "reset preferences" is incanted on the forums and the burden it imposes on users. I'm sure they would have fixed the issue years ago if they could (and it seems the incantations have been louder and more frequent in the past couple of months). Which further confirms in my mind the nature of the defect. But Adobe's business model involves cutting product development to the bone, enabled by their lack of serious competition in many of their creative product categories. And that issue is further exacerbated by Lightroom Classic's it's-not-a-legacy-product status ("I'm not dead yet").
 
Out of nerdly curiosity, I measured the average number of posts per day containing "reset preferences" in the Adobe Lightroom Classic forum, and it was almost twice as frequence during LR 11.0, 11.3, and 11.3.1:

1653860398746.png


See here for details:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...a-more-serious-approach/idc-p/12668692#M25896
 
This discussion spurred me to revisit my thinking about the design flaw in LR's preferences mechanism. In 2019, I had proposed a solution that would have been very expensive to implement. But then I realized there could be a simpler solution requiring absolutely minimal effort:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...-preferences-file-gets-written/idi-p/12981414

I hope the architect / technical lead for LR reads it.
 
Out of nerdly curiosity, I measured the average number of posts per day containing "reset preferences" in the Adobe Lightroom Classic forum, and it was almost twice as frequence during LR 11.0, 11.3, and 11.3.1:

View attachment 18703

See here for details:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...a-more-serious-approach/idc-p/12668692#M25896
John, I certainly notice a significant increase in how often I have to reset preferences. It used to be a few weeks or months. Now it seems to be a few days to maybe a couple of weeks. Last interval was 5 days. Maybe I am using settings that are problematic.
 
I certainly notice a significant increase in how often I have to reset preferences. It used to be a few weeks or months. Now it seems to be a few days to maybe a couple of weeks. Last interval was 5 days.
What kinds of symptoms are you experiencing that induce you to reset preferences?
 
I'm obviously not the OP but I'm just about to reset my preferences again after having only done it about a week ago. I'm running LrC latest version and fully up to date Windows 11. Anecdotaly, I haven't kept a record, I'd say the quality of Lightroom is getting worse. I've been a Lightroom user now for about 10 years. Here's my latest experience leading me to think I need to reset preferences:

1. Imported 23 new16MB RW2 files from my GM5.
2. From grid view press the D key to go to Develop module
3. Start to apply some basic adjustments to some photos.
4. After a very short time, maybe 5 minutes or so, I start to see the following behaviours:
a. Pressing the "\" key results in the Develop window just showing the background colour, no image is shown for the "Before" although the "Before" status message is displayed.​
b. Zooming in does nothing in the main Develop window although the zooming in action is displayed in the small navigator thumbnail i.e. the zoom outline is shown there.​
c. From the Develop module pressing G gets me to the Grid view but no images are shown, just the background colour. Using the Thumbnail zoom control makes no difference, still just the background colour is shown. Pressing E takes me to the Loupe view for the currently selected image (although I can't see in advance which one that might be). It is displayed correctly. Pressing G again does not take me to Grid view but just displays the image in Loupe view. Note that the icons at the bottom left indicate that I have navigated to Grid view.​
d. Whilst in the Deveklop module the processing ball constantly runs. Swapping between different modules and back to Develop and the processing ball is still spinning.​
e. In Develop module moving to the next image by pressing the right arrow key results in the next image being displayed in the Navigator window but the main develop image stays the same.​
f. I often get the not responding message in the title bar (not sure if that's the right terminology) and the spinning ball as well as an overall slowing in performance. I often have Task Manager running in the background and looking at the resourves in use when LrC seems to be "busy" shows minimal processor utilisation, <10%, overall memory usage at <75%, negligible/no GPU processor utilisation, < 5%. I have no idea what LrC is up to when it pretty much grinds to a halt. It certainly doesn't seem to be using an excess of resources.​

It would be easy for me to continue to list the poor experiences I am currently enduring with LrC. I have always had "quirks" in the way that Lightroom runs across multiple laptops and operating system versions. For me, the latest iteration of LrC is really poor, quality wise. I run other photo editing software and have no such issues with those e.g. DxO Photolab 4, OM Workspace (although slow has none of the other issues I encounter with LrC).

For reference, I run a Surface Book 2, i7, 16GB RAM, NVidia GTX 1050 and Windows 11. I've been running LrC on this machine for almost three years and at the moment LrC is the worst it's been quality wise. I always keep my OS and applications up to date. Most of what I have described above has only been happening in the last few weeks.
 
A lot of those sound like GPU issues @stevedo . What's your GPU setting in Preferences? And which driver version?
 
GPU setting is set to Auto. Right now LrC is reporting through the performance tab in preferences that "Your system automatically supports full acceleration."

The NVIDIA GEForce Experience app reports that I am running version 512.96 of the Studio Driver dated 23/05/2022 and that it is up to date. I keep an accurate log of when I make updates to my system or installed apps. I updated the graphics driver from version 512.59 to version 512.96 on 25/05/2022. I last updated LrC from version 11.2.0 to version 11.3.1 on 30/04/2022.

I don't have these kinds of issues with any other apps on my machine including DxO and DaVinci Resolve 17 which I use for video editing.
 
I last updated LrC from version 11.2.0 to version 11.3.1 on 30/04/2022.

There's been a variety of performance bugs reported on 11.3 and 11.3.1, so you might also try rolling back to 11.2 for now.
 
What kinds of symptoms are you experiencing that induce you to reset preferences?
stevedo gave a list that agrees with my experience. Much of the problems are delays of a few seconds applying any edits (e.g. crops, develop settings, etc) that can grow to a minute or two, and eventually a full hangup. Cropping has lots of problems when cropping a selection of images. Some crop, some do not, some show the crop in the thumbnails, some do not (usually the first one), etc. I also try to optimize the catalog in the hope it will help, but often that process will hangup and eventually I have to use the Task Manager to force LR to exit. Sometimes just stopping and restarting LR when I see it is getting slow helps. When LR restarts some of the edit disagreements among files are corrected and they all agree. How often to reset preferences varies depending on how tolerant I am of delays, but it only takes a short time to see lots of aggravating problems.

Adobe and others want to sequence of steps that cause problems. In this case it is essentially impossible since it take a while for problems to build up. I may have culled and edited many thousands of files by the time the problems become intolerable.

FYI, I am using an Windows 10 64 bit, AMD Ryzhen 3900X, 65GB memory, GPU Nvidia 3090. I keep all drivers up to date including the latest Studio driver for the GPU. I have run the GPU in both Auto and Custom (use the GPU), with no apparent difference.
 
Adobe has said in the past, and then just last week, that they need examples of "corrupted" preference files along with as much detail as possible about the misbehavior that resetting fixed. And they are doing at least some investigation of my technical proposal for avoiding corruption.

So if you experience a problem where the user interface is just doing the wrong thing (i.e. not showing thumbnails when it should be) rather than a performance problem, please do this:

1. Right before resetting preferences, save a copy of the preferences file. (LR should do this automatically whenever you reset preferences...)

2. Send me the the saved preferences file along with a detailed description of what you observed that caused you to reset preferences, along with the output from Help > System Info. You can email at the support address for my plugins.

My intuition is that it's less worthwhile to do this for performance problems. With a problem in the user interface, the engineers know which settings in the preference are related to that part of the interface, and they can examine them for consistency to test my hypothesis about the source of corruption. But for performance problems, I think it's less likely the engineers will know which particular settings to look at.
 
Just an update from me following my previous post. After updating to the latest version of LrC, i.e. 11.4, on the 14th June my experience of LrC has greatly improved.

I am still running the same version of the graphics driver (latest version 512.96) as when I was experiencing a whole host of issues with LrC version 11.3.1 and can only conclude that the issues were LrC related. Fingers crossed that my current good experiences continue. Hopefully I haven't just jinxed myself :)
 
That's good news Steve, I hope that's done the trick.
 
John, I certainly notice a significant increase in how often I have to reset preferences. It used to be a few weeks or months. Now it seems to be a few days to maybe a couple of weeks. Last interval was 5 days. Maybe I am using settings that are problematic.
Am I lucky or just stupid or something. I have never had to reset preferences. I use LrC on a Windows 10 system.
 
Am I lucky
I think the users who have to reset preferences are extremely unlucky. If my understanding of the design flaw is correct, then it involves a race condition that rarely strikes on average. But over a huge user base, a "rare" percentage turns into lots of people reporting problems on the forums.

Also, given the nature of race conditions, if it strikes a particular user once, it may be more likely it will strike that user multiple times, since that user has something in her installation, computer, or usage patterns that is provoking the race condition.

(In my 12 years of using LR, I've only had to reset preferences perhaps 1 - 3 times. )
 
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