A computer for Lightroom

[lordfly]

99.9% of the time, I shoot RAW. Lightroom 3 on my 4-year old "gaming" PC is.. well, a bit sluggish.

Specs on my rig:
Pentium core 2 duo E6400 2.13 ghz
3072 MB DDR2 ram
NVIDIA Geforce 9800 GT

I know it's not the fastest machine on the planet, but it does everything else admirably well, for being four years old (with a few upgrades of course).

As it stands, though, working in RAW is kind of painful. Edits can sometimes take a second or two to be seen, and loading/flipping through several hundred pictures is torturous... 3-4 seconds per picture, and 5-6 seconds of loading it fully in the Lightroom window.

Aside from dropping some phat lewtz to upgrade my rig, is there anything I can do to make Lightroom more palatable?

 

[o hey tyler]

****in liquid nitrogen cool that shat and overclock it to the moon.

Also, get like 16 gigs of ram, that'll do ya.

Not really, but maybe a defrag and a run of Ccleaner will enhance your performance?

 

[Big Mike]

Do you allow LR to pre-load the image previews when you import? It takes longer to import but then makes it faster later.

Also, I recently saw a post (on another forum) by a friend of mine...

I know defragging your hard drive is always great for performance. But damn it's slow and takes a long time.

So I tried this tiny little microsoft utility called CONTIG:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb897428.aspx

Holy heck did it ever speed up loading times for Lightroom. It also speeds up all Library operations.

It just defrags specific files instead of your entire hard drive like most utilities do.

So all I did was drop CONTIG.EXE into my windows/system32 folder. Then I made a batch file named "contig.bat" with the following line:

Code:

contig -v "D:\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\LR10a\lr10a.lrcat"
pause

So you basically just enter your catalog file location, and then run the batch file whenever you want. I put the batch file right in my start menu for easy access. The "pause" at the end of the batch file lets me see what the program has done for me.

You'll notice the most difference if you have a large catalog that you've been using for a while. If you create a new catalog for each shoot or every couple of shoots, it probably won't do too much for you. I only use one or two catalog files per year, so the performance difference was HUGE for me.

 

[lordfly]

My HDD is already very well defragmented, and CCleaner is ran weekly.

I'll look into having it pre-load the images during import... that'll probably help tons.

 

[Big Mike]

Also consider using multiple, smaller catalogs, if that works for you.

 

[JG_Coleman]

Well, I'll just add that before you buy a new computer in hopes of using a blazing fast Lightroom... bear in mind that Lightroom does some pretty data-intensive work.

There's no doubt in my mind that a faster computer will allow Lightroom to perform better for you than it does now... but just be realistic with your expectations.

Rendering 1:1 previews, painting edits on a photograph which has had distortion correction applied, dropping a couple dozen spot heals in one image.... these are a few examples of situations in which Lightroom will always perform sluggishly in comparison to the responsiveness you might expect with other types of software. The incredible amount of data manipulation required for these operations make them some of the most intensive tasks that the ordinary PC user will ask of their machine. Lightroom needs to process tons of data to pull it off.

A better computer will certainly run Lightroom faster... but don't expect "instantaneous" responsiveness from Lightroom when conducting processor-intensive and memory-hungry operations... it's just not in the cards.

 

[lordfly]

I've heard murmurings on the 'net on having graphics chipsets able to do numbers-heavy calculations... is that something Lightroom can do? Or does it do it automatically if the possibility is there?

 

[JG_Coleman]

I've heard murmurings on the 'net on having graphics chipsets able to do numbers-heavy calculations... is that something Lightroom can do? Or does it do it automatically if the possibility is there?

I can't say that I specifically know of these chipsets... I'm guessing that you're referring to a graphics card, or something equivalent (?). For what it's worth, most 2D graphics processing doesn't really benefit much from enhanced graphical hardware.

The processing that Lightroom does is not based upon visual display. In other words, the act of displaying the edited rendition of the photograph is not the processor intensive aspect of Lightroom. This is in stark contrast to 3D games in which the task of processing a 3D environment can be off-loaded to a powerful graphics card to free up system resources.

Lightroom's processing tasks occur in system RAM and use the processor to run various algorithms on the image data... things like create previews, apply global edits, local adjustments, correct distortion, spot-heal, etc, etc.

An enhanced graphics card will do next to nothing to improve Lightroom's performance. In terms of hardware, its performance boils down purely to processor speed and system RAM.

For the most part, only 3D graphics (such as those in games or 3D modeling) really benefit from enhanced graphics hardware. Most 2D graphics are handled by the same hardware used by any other application, from a word processor to instant messaging. So achieving top speed is reliant on the same old things that will make any application run faster. Processor, RAM... even hard disk speed.

 

[SageMark]

****in liquid nitrogen cool that shat and overclock it to the moon.

Also, get like 16 gigs of ram, that'll do ya.

Not really, but maybe a defrag and a run of Ccleaner will enhance your performance?

 

[Vinny]

If your only running 3 Gb memory then you probably running 32 bit software. If not up the memory. All software has minimum requirements but you'll get minimum results. The processor needs memory to run and 3 Gb isn't too much for intensive work. When a processor runs out of memory it uses the hard drive to act as memory hard drive = slow.

My suggestion might be to try going to 64 bit OS and if you do that get more memory. The question then becomes how much money do you want to throw at a 4 YO machine ... my answer would be very little but that's just my opinion.

 

[lordfly]

3 GB is actually the max I can stuff on the motherboard. It has space for 4, but XP only has enough for 3 + video ram.