It is official.....LR4 is slow.

I have been using LR since 2 was released. I downloaded LR4 the day it hit the market. And I am a HUGE fan of LR. It does most everything I need. Especially for handling large volumes of photos. 1000s of them from event photography. I regularly will shoot events with 10,000 photos and process all of the files in some way before uploading them to my smugmug site. I was excited for some of the new features of LR4. Mostly for soft proofing. And for the new adjustment powers.

Pros:

1. Soft proofing
2. Much better detail out of my RAW files in every way. Shadows, Highlights and even colors
3. I like the new slider functions
4. Much better masking for the adjustment brushes
5. Clarity looks much more like the high pass filter in PS this is really nice.

Cons:
Slow as hell for anything requiring an export. This means burning CDs or uploading to the internet straight out of LR. :flush


I didn't notice a significant speed issue when using LR to import and adjust photos. IF there is any lag here it is minimal. Where I notice this speed issue is on upload and export. How slow? Here is an example. To upload a 60pic gallery to Smugmug using Jeffery's uploader plugin was going to take 59min. Using LR3 with the same gallery and Jeffery's plugin 5min shown on the status bar. A 114 image gallery said it was going to take 4.5 hrs in LR4. LR3 plowed through this gallery in about 8min. So for some people these times might be OK. For me, I am uploading 4500 images from a motocross........... This is fricken ridiculous.


Trying to export to a folder is a similar experience. It is very slow. A 50 image gallery takes maybe 5min. Once done the Smugmug uploader can suck those files to the site in minutes. But this is also not a good solution because of the speed of the export.:deal A 600 image CD would take quite a long time.


I ended up abandoning ship on LR4 and going back to LR3 to upload this gallery. Luckily LR3 read the metadata of 4 and our number plate tags were intact. What a huge waste of time. I called my ISP, tech supported like crazy with SM, messed with computers. I tried it all for 2 days straight. I was freaking out because of this. It would have taken me 2 weeks to load this stuff and that would mean no sales. I will be done tonight with my trusty LR3.


Adobe should be ashamed. This speed is a joke. How is it OK for them to downgrade a software in this way. Yes there is some benefit to this program, but it doesn't outweigh killing one of the programs key uses. Why would I need to build a hotrod computer to get maybe? the same performance of 3? :rolleyes

Here is the system I am using it on
Win 7 64bit Lenovo x201 laptop
Intel Corei5 2.67GHz
8GB of RAM

I just did the same test with 114 Nikon RAW files (D300) converted into JPG on my travelling system. It took 8 minutes and 59 seconds to do the export

My configuration:

Samsung XP900-X3A Ultraportable
Corei5-2537M processor @2.3Ghz
4GB of RAM
Windows 7 64 bits
SSD system disk
Data files on external USB3 SSD drive

My figures are not so far from your LR3 figures. I think you have a problem with your LR4 installation. Are you sure that your plugins are compatible?

From what I'm reading, the results with LR4 are very variable - some running fine and others slow to dead. The differences in the systems seem to be with plugins (as Franglais mentioned). Try it without them. - Terry

Very interesting. I will need to do more testing. I could have some issues. I am going to try Smugmugs plugin to see how it goes. It could be that the new LR4 plugin is the culprit.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Franglais

I just did the same test with 114 Nikon RAW files (D300) converted into JPG on my travelling system. It took 8 minutes and 59 seconds to do the export

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When you say export. Was this to the Hard drive or to your website?

Export to the hard drive (SSD in this case). I never go direct to a web site anyway.

There are two processes here:

1. Transformation of the RAW file into a JPG by Lightroom.
2. Transfer of the result to your web site by plug-in

You are getting a huge slow-down in your overall process.

- This might be in the transformation part if you were running a beta version with debug code but you're not
- It might be from having a mix of incompatible modules that were forced to go through a slow compatability mode to communicate (32-bit and 64-bit software?)
- However - usually this sort of slowdown is caused by the system waiting for the network. It does a bit of conversion, sends a packet to the network then waits for a reply before carrying on the conversion

BTW something strange happened to my disk just after I did my test. I tried to delete my RAW files using Lightroom and it took ages. I don't think it was linked to your problem but I'll give it a check tomorrow

Either way, for me LR3 is running way faster. But, I am going to try some stuff with LR4 after I am done with this job. Yeah it is a 2 step deal. RAW-JPEG in a temp file. Then export to the website. LR does both sort of at the same time. So it does take longer than just an Export/Save to HD. I am tempted to get an SSD drive to try. They rip, the downside is they are small. I could only use it as a working drive.

I just did an export with LR4 of 451 D300 RAW's into JPG's on my "big" laptop (Core i7 8GB of RAM, 8 processing units). Input and output was to my USB3 SSD drive. It took about 19 minutes. I had time to observe the behavior of the system:

- RAM never got above 4GB and there was no pagefaulting so that's not a constraint
- Disk I/O hardly got above 10MB/s. That's low. On the same system I've had a USB3 hard drive writing over 100MB/sec for hours on end
- CPU usage varied between 30% and 80% all the time and never achieved 100%. All 8 processing units were hammering away. My guess is that the system was limited by contention between the processing units for system resources. Can't go any faster with this workload

I'm not sure that you're going to see any improvement in your performance by using a SSD (unless your existing hard drive is seriously fragmented). However I find that putting all the stuff I'm working on on a drive that doesn't fragment (SSD) I avoid degrading the performance of my system disk