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Library module Surprising change of behavior

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BrJohan

Member
Joined
Nov 4, 2011
Messages
62
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
LrC 9.4
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
Since a month or so - under circumstances as described below - LrC enters a state of almost complete unresponsiveness.

All of a sudden the leftmost panelarea does not auto-hide when the mouse cursor is moved away. From then on, the only interactions it accepts is dropping down from the top menu. Whichever menu and menualternative I select, LrC's action is to hide the folded down alternatives. After some 15-20 minutes the leftmost panelarea goes black and remains black. I can click on the top-right-most 'X' which is followed by a LrC action. The dialogue window that normally gives me a chance to backup the catalog, appears completely empty. 'Normally', after have been away from LrC for at least one hour, its CPU-load is 0-0.2%. Now, when LrC 'lies in coma' CPU is 6-9% most of the time, intermittently dropping to 0-0.2% for a second or so. Disk activity is 0-0.1%, Memory 5-10 GB. Leaving LrC in this state over night makes no other difference than a completely white preview area. During this LrC-'lockdown' Windows behaves fairly normal, although somewhat less fast.

Attached is a screen clip showing a portion of LrC.

So, Taskkill or Task Manager is the only way to interact with LrC and must be used to kill the process.

The pre-history to this 'behavior' is this:

(LrC 9.4, Win10Home, 32GB Ram, intel i9 9900k CPU, 2080TI GPU, ~210000 images in catalog on SSD, HDD-troubles followed by restoration efforts from various backups, left me with missing photos and duplicate photos as well as with lots of work to completely restore the catalog.

So, I gave all missing photos a certain keyword and all duplicate photos another keyword. All photos carrying any of those two keywords went into a Smart collection. All photos in this collection (initially ~130000) got another keyword. The Smart collection was then added to a new Collection Set and then 'hidden'. From All Photos i preview the photos having this lastmentioned keyword and sorted by Capture Time and began removing surplus images via Rejecting. After rejection of 500-1000 photos I delete rejected photos. After 4-5 such deletions, I reran "Find all missing photos" and also again searched for duplicate photos, following with keyword-updating and Smart collection activities. After a few (3-5) such sessions, LrC suddenly goes from well-behaving to the state as described here above.

Thoughts and/dor suggestions are most welcome.
 

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The first place I would suggest looking is other apps running along side of LrC. Start Windows in Safe Mode and see if the problem persists. The problem is most likely not LrC but something local to your computer.
 
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Reasonable suggestion, but ...

... the computer where LrC is running is dedicated to photo work only, so no other apps than LrC, PS2020 and PhotoMechanic are running on it. Creative Cloud also of course. Occasionally I'm using Windows Explorer and Google Chrome for short-lived purposes. For scanning purposes SilverFast sometimes is used. DNG Converter is installed and used now and then. Windows Defender is the only safety software. Otherwise, only services - as usual - and not of any suspicious kind. are running.

As far as I can see, not a very trouble-causing situation. It is only when I'm using LrC as described that it behaves like this. Otherwise, it has never bothered me in any similar way in my ten years of using LR. However, never before have I used it in such a way

Next time I will start Windows in Safe Mode on that PC, to see if LrC behaves dirrerently..
 
Reasonable suggestion, but ...

... the computer where LrC is running is dedicated to photo work only, so no other apps than LrC, PS2020 and PhotoMechanic are running on it. Creative Cloud also of course. Occasionally I'm using Windows Explorer and Google Chrome for short-lived purposes. ....

Next time I will start Windows in Safe Mode on that PC, to see if LrC behaves dirrerently..

If you open Task manager, you will find a significant number of background apps running besides the foreground apps that you listed. Any one of these could be the culprit. Anti-malware apps are probably not on your list but I’ll bet you are running one.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
I found that Malwarebytes killed the performance on my fairly decent system. Gave up and de-installed it May be irrelevant, of course!
 
Windows Defender is my only - as far as I know - security software and I don't think it should be a suspect.
I've studied the complete list of running processes/tasks/services and found no obvious 'dangers'. (The list is attached.)
 

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I am confused about one aspect -- does it do each time after you go through your deletion cycle, or does it do this now immediately on restart because you did the deletion cycle once before?
 
In principle I have two kinds of cycles.

The innermost is: [Reject some hundreds of photos. Delete rejected photos....] repeated at most five times.
The outermost is: [Find missing and duplicate photos. Assign keywords and update the smart collection. Preview missing and duplicate photos. Perform inner cycle] repeated until LrC becomes unresponsive which happens in the 'inner' cycle.

There is no gradual decrease in performance prior to the 'decease'. When the left panelarea does not auto-hide, I now know that nothing more can be done, exept killing LrC from the outside.
 
What happened with Lightroom When you ran Windows in safe mode? In Task manager, can you monitor Lightroom's CPU usage as you do the operations that cause LrC to freeze?
Can you attach the contents of the Sys Info dialog (LrC menu {Help}{System Info...}). to your next reply?
 
I have over the years seen similar behavior and usually after long periods of use. Some people have claimed memory leaks and such but I know the signs of that and it wasn't. Generally speaking I have not seen it in the last couple of versions, though not necessarily because it was fixed, I may have simply stopped doing the precise thing that triggered it. I was always convinced it was improper thread synchronization. It was never reliably repeatable so I never had luck getting Adobe interested (to be fair, over the last 3 years or so Adobe has found and fixed a few issues that made lightroom get slower over time, though usually attributed to things that were inconsistent with what I saw). When it did happen to me it was usually working on lots of long changes, editing, but more frequently lots of changes to metadata, generally keywording (back at that time I was keywording baseball with each players name, which took a lot of time and changes).

But it has not happened in a couple years.

When it did happen to me it was not like a light switch just suddenly hung, it usually showed some increased slowness but then got exponentially worse quickly until it would hang, much like yours with panels unresponsive and often white. I now routinely, either every hour or two, or anytime things seem to slow down when I am making lots of changes, exit and restart lightroom. I do not KNOW it helps, but it takes only a minute or so. Adobe would say I'm silly, but consider trying it.

I also went through the usual of turning off GPU and turning it on; it did not help me, but it is absolutely worth trying.

If you cannot find an external cause (keep doing what Cletus suggests!), try modifying what you do a bit. Find duplicates more without deleting, do the deletes in bigger batches, mark them rejected instead of deleting and delete later, separately; or other kind of changes, take the smart collections out of the mix if you can. If you could pin this to a certain repeatable activity and it is not an external cause, Adobe COULD fix it and many would be very thankful for flushing out a bug.

My GUESS is your particular cycle is hitting a bug somewhere in LR. But your description is too complicated, IMO, for a bug report to Adobe, you need to pin it down more (or get a LOT of people to have it happen) to get them interested.

Otherwise, regretfully, your best bet is to experimentally find a way to avoid it.

Or... it's something on your system. Don't stop looking there because I suggest it may be a bug. I never actually could find a bug, I just outlived whatever it was; that is not a great solution, though better than at least one alternative.

Oh... and run integrity check regularly on your catalog and keep it backed up. It's never good to have to kill lightroom while running. I never had it damage a catalog, but it could.
 
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I have over the years seen similar behavior and usually after long periods of use. Some people have claimed memory leaks and such but I know the signs of that and it wasn't. Generally speaking I have not seen it in the last couple of versions, though not necessarily because it was fixed,
This does not seem to me to be a. LrC memory leak either. I can not recall an obvious memory leak in an recent release of LrC. Usually memory leaks will show up in the dot zero, dot one or dot two releases but by a version such as 9.4, Adobe has usually classed down and fixed any new memory leaks that have appeared with the current version.
The reason that I question other running tasks and not Lightroom is that these apps might have memory leaks and all it take is for another app to try to write in a memory area reserved for Lightroom to impact LrC.

Because I sync from the cloud, I usually run my LrC 24X7 but it is always a good practice to reboot the computer daily to squelch and memory leaks that are building up from the multitude of apps that are always running.
 
Because I sync from the cloud, I usually run my LrC 24X7 but it is always a good practice to reboot the computer daily to squelch and memory leaks that are building up from the multitude of apps that are always running.
It also frees up threading locks.

My theory has always been that the myriad of threads in LR are not reliably freeing semaphores, and so things that normally run in parallel increasingly over time get single streamed, and maybe eventually a deadlock. At least back in the day, as I said, have not seen it in a long time, but the evidence for me was, at that time, while it was hung, no other resource was constrained -- lots of memory, lots of disk bandwidth, no sign of network traffic, lots of available CPU. But stalled, but not 100% stalled, doing stuff in reaction to events (like window occlusion or selection), but not progressing.

But... not recently.

But CLassic is old code, very complicated code, very asynchronous code, maintained by a lot of people coming and going over time; that's often the most fertile ground for un-repeatable issues to crop up that are highly dependant on the exact sequence of events.
 
Some ten minutes ago I went to my "Photo-PC" and started LrC, did a few file rejections and deleted them. Before exiti ng from LrC, I saved the SysInfo into LRSysInfo.txt. Then I restarted the PC into SafeMode with Networking, started LrC, did some rejections and deleted them before saving SysInfo into LRSysInfoSM.txt. Both of these SysInfo are attached.

As night is approaching here in Sweden, I will go on rejecting and deleting for half an hour or so, and then continue my sequence (as described) of repeated activities tomorrow to see what happens - or not. Expect me to report no later than Monday evening here.

During extended sessions in LrC, I optimize the catalog at least once per day and in a case like this (with no imports or image modifications), I 'm restarting and backing-up LrC with an interval of three days or so.
 

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The only sys info deference's I see is that the GPU information is missing in Safe Mode. This suggests that Windows in Safe Mode does not use the GPU as an additional processor.

Does running in Safe mode foe a long time exhibit the issue you first reported? I am suggesting that if not, you should restart in normal mode with the Lightroom setting"User Graphic Processor" set to "Off" and see if that does not give the same results as running in Safe Mode.
 
... now I have (still in Safe Mode) rejected some 800 photos, then Deleted them before searching for remaining duplicates (as always using the plug-in "Find Duplicates 2"). Next step was to select the collection "All Duplicates" and then selecting all photos in Preview area. Left and right panelgroups as always with me in auto-hide mode. Went on to unhide the rightmost in order to assign a certain keyword to all those duplicates. Immediately after the panels became visible, LrC went into a state that is almost the same as previously reported. One difference: This time the Close-X (top-right) gave me a dialogue that asked "The application does not respond. Do you want to close it or do you want to wait for it to respond" (or something similar). My answer was 'Close'. Before my Close-X action, I started Cmd ordering it to execute "tasklist > SMAlltasks.txt" (attached). I also looked into TaskManager and observed this: TotalCPU was 7% and Total Memory was 41%, LrC CPU was 7,2% and LrC Memory was 18.18 GB.

Regarding GPU usage, when I (later today) am going to continue my LrC-activities, I will disable the usage of GPU in LrC.
 

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It looks like GPU usage doesn't matter. During my continued work getting rid of duplicates and missing photos today, I made another little change.

After searching for Duplicates and Missing photos, I collected all duplicates OR missing photos into a smart collection (just as before), assigned a keyword (DUPL_OR_MISS) to all collected photos, but ... instead of 'hiding' the smart collection by adding it to a collection set and collapsing the set, ... this time I deleted the smart collection before viewing them from All photos having the DUPL_OR_MISS keyword.

And, ... lo and behold, I have been able to go on rejecting, deleting, re-searching, smart-collection-creating and - yhis time - subsequent deleting for an amount of cycles that is significantly larger than what I previously could, before LrC went 'astray'.

Hypothesis: A smart collection that is fairly large (in my case ~150000 photos when I commenced my 'cleaning' activities, now reduced to ~65000 photos) and - while being active - is exposed to repeated batches of large-scale deletions, could in some way be 'exhausted'.

Any thoughts?
 
[QUOTE="BrJohan, post: 1274203, member: 22493"

Any thoughts?[/QUOTE]A Smart Collection only exists as a SQL query that is updated when ever changes occur. The fact that you had 150,000 image in a smart collection and delete on means that Lightroom proceeds to rebuild the collection each time. Finding 65,000 qualifying images out of a large catalog is going to take a bit of number crunching behind the scenes.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
Just to clarify.
When first starting to delete duplicates and associated missing photos, my catalog handled some 270000 photos. The initial number of photos that were either duplicates or missing, was ~150000 as found by and located in a smart collection. Now, after numerous hours of investigations, rejections and deletions, the catalog 'contains' about 185000 photos, of which some 65000 remains to be examined and partly rejected & deleted.
 
Finding 65,000 qualifying images out of a large catalog of 185,000 images is going to take a bit of number crunching behind the scenes. Lightroom needs to look at each of the 185,000 image to see if it meets the Smart Collection criteria. If you need to retain the dynamic smart collection contents after running. It is best to copy those images over to a static collection.
 
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