Help! LR questions...

MLeeK

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I am trying to make myself love Lightroom4 because of the new tools in it that I want to play with. I still have my LR issues, but...
So, how the hell do I speed it up? Its going to take me forever waiting for LR to update the image I am working on.
I am pretty sure it's not the computer. I have a 64 bit. 3G, dual core athlon processor running 6G ram. The hard drive is essentially empty of anything other than the programs on it. I have 300G of memory open on a 463G hard drive.
What is my problem??? Help??? I don't have this problem at all in ACR!!!
 
What about in lr3...did you have this issue?
 
I've barely used LR so I don't know if this will help, or if it's even possible, but try completely disabling the cache. With 6gb of memory you shouldn't need a cache unless you are editing some enormous files or unless LR is really a memory hog. I can easily edit 16 megapixel files in Capture NX2 with 6gb of memory and the cache disabled.
 
I never use LR, so I don't know! I think so? Maybe? I am an ACR kinda girl!
 
You're closer than me, I don't even use anything made by Adobe except Acrobat.

My computer has enough memory to process everything I do with images completely in memory so I normally disable caches. I don't know if it helps but so far it hasn't hurt anything. My philosophy is that since physical memory (RAM) is on the order of 500,000 times faster than virtual memory (disk memory) the more processing I can keep in physical memory the better.
 
You're closer than me, I don't even use anything made by Adobe except Acrobat.

My computer has enough memory to process everything I do with images completely in memory so I normally disable caches. I don't know if it helps but so far it hasn't hurt anything. My philosophy is that since physical memory (RAM) is on the order of 500,000 times faster than virtual memory (disk memory) the more processing I can keep in physical memory the better.
You TOTALLY confused me there. Lightroom is made by Adobe???
you said you disable the cache... One of the recommendations I find everywhere is to ENLARGE the cache to speed up? I am SOOO confused!

See, I knew there was a more than one reason I really didn't care for LR. I am going to go bald trying to figure this out!!!


I almost feel like it's keeping all of the filmstrip in the ram? does that make sense?
 
Can you change the swap rate on Windows? On Linux, it's usually called 'swappiness', or something like that. It controls how often information gets written to swap memory (cache). With the right settings, most programs will never write anything to swap unless the RAM is just completely full.

Also, how much swap space do you have? It's usually recommended that you have double the RAM, but if you have a lot of RAM that's probably overkill. You do need (want) it to be at least equal to the RAM though.

edit
The reason you want double the RAM is that so if the swap and RAM are both full, it can write the RAM to the swap to free up the RAM. If you have enough RAM that it never gets full, you don't really need double that on swap.
 
You TOTALLY confused me there. Lightroom is made by Adobe???
you said you disable the cache... One of the recommendations I find everywhere is to ENLARGE the cache to speed up? I am SOOO confused!

See, I knew there was a more than one reason I really didn't care for LR. I am going to go bald trying to figure this out!!!


I almost feel like it's keeping all of the filmstrip in the ram? does that make sense?
Uh, yeah, Lightroom is made by Adobe as far as I know.

The cache is on your hard disk. Average hard disk access time is about 7.5 milliseconds (1/1000 second) unless you have a solid state disk drive. Average RAM access time is about 150 nanoseconds (1/1,000,000,000 second). Any time you can force the software to keep everything in memory without caching it to disk things are going to run faster. The down side is that you may run into issues with the software running out of memory. With 6gb that shouldn't be a problem. I have 6gb on this machine and have never had any issues with image processing software running out of memory.

Can you change the swap rate on Windows? On Linux, it's usually called 'swappiness', or something like that. It controls how often information gets written to swap memory (cache). With the right settings, most programs will never write anything to swap unless the RAM is just completely full.

Also, how much swap space do you have? It's usually recommended that you have double the RAM, but if you have a lot of RAM that's probably overkill. You do need (want) it to be at least equal to the RAM though.

edit
The reason you want double the RAM is that so if the swap and RAM are both full, it can write the RAM to the swap to free up the RAM. If you have enough RAM that it never gets full, you don't really need double that on swap.
The swap rate in Windows can be tuned up to a point, I think. There aren't any user controls to do it though and to be honest I've never tried. There are some system registry settings that control the swap rate and threshold but they have to be edited manually. There is probably some aftermarket software that will do it though. They can be easily MONITORED but the standard Windows utility used to monitor the system performance doesn't have any controls to change the settings.

Windows creates the swap file when the system boots. The size of the swap file can be controlled through a GUI setting, and it is by default twice the RAM size. If the RAM changes it will change the size of the swap file the next time the system boots.
 
Well LR 4 still beta. That may affect something. I use a LR in my Desktop and laptop and is super fast. LR is good I like many of the features.

Like anything else it's not for everyone I guess

I like the database
 
You guys would have a HEART ATTACK at how slow this is moving. It's taken me the better part of an hour to export to jpeg about 75 images. Before that it took me probably 2 hours to adjust them. And the only actual adjustment I had to do beyond applying a preset I made was to double check white balance because of cycling lights! 75 images should take me about a half hour or less!!!
 
There has got to be a setting wrong somewhere, thats insane slow.
 
Is the computer due a disk defrag? A friend's LR slowed to a crawl and that was the fix
 
You guys would have a HEART ATTACK at how slow this is moving. It's taken me the better part of an hour to export to jpeg about 75 images. Before that it took me probably 2 hours to adjust them. And the only actual adjustment I had to do beyond applying a preset I made was to double check white balance because of cycling lights! 75 images should take me about a half hour or less!!!

If that's the case I'd uninstall it and reinstall it.

But before that, check and see if your security program is scanning each operation because it's a download. My AVG free did that to a couple programs.
 
I am not running virus program. My processing computer isn't on line and is only really used for processing. BUT I wonder if its maybe windows defender? I will have to look when I get home.
 
Is there some confusion here between the virtual memory cache and the LR cache? The LR cache is in a permanent directory on the hard drive (including a virtual hard drive filled from permanent storage every time the computer starts if you have one, or solid state hard drive), not in virtual memory on the hard drive. It is where LR stores previews of images in the catalog. If the LR cache is too small, old previews will be deleted and have to be remade next time the image is loaded. If the cache is set to zero, no previews are held in the LR cache, because there is no LR cache. It isn't a choice between virtual memory and physical memory.
 
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