Aargh! What do I have to do to speed up this thing???

Question

Hi,
Hopefully someone can help me. I'm using the trial version of Lightroom 1.0 and have tried everything to speed this thing up but nothing is working. This application would be absolutely brilliant if it weren't so dog slow. The whole point is to speed up the workflow but at this rate the time wasted is thoroughly frustration.
Okay, what's happening. First, when I'm in the Library module culling photos, there are all kinds of little issues but the two big ones for me are when I delete a file, the entire library resets itself to I don't know what kind of sequence. Delete a file and Lightroom jumps to a different file order and lands on a file that wasn't the next one in the sequence. So I have to close Lightroom and reopen it to have the files sorted the way they originally were when I was working on them. This I just don't understand.
Also, in the Library module, going from file to file, I am always getting the "Working..." thing coming up so it takes several seconds for each pic to come up. WAY too slow. When in the Develop module, I am constantly getting the "Loading..." thing coming up. This slows everything down to a snail's pace and is frustrating!!
I have tried all the tips I could find here and on Lightroom Extra (fabulous site BTW!). I have turned XMP off, moved my Library to a faster drive, rendered standard previews to larger than my screen size on import, and rendered 1:1 previews. None of these changes have done anything for the speed. Why???
What else can I do? I have 2 megs of RAM and a fast enough system that I can easily run multiple other photo processing applications simultaneously without any speed problems at all. So what is the problem with Lightroom? I had been trying out Beta 4.1 with exactly the same issues. I thought Lightroom 1.0 would solve these but alas, I am in the same predicament. I have tried it on 2 different computers and have the same problem.
Can anyone help? What do I need to do to speed this thing up to workable speeds? I would really like to use this application and would be ready to buy it now if I could be sure this isn't the speed (or lack thereof) that I will be faced with on a regular basis.
Please help!
Thanks!

Answer 1

Go to sysinternals.com and download "Process Explorer". Install this to some reasonable location.
When Lr seems to be wedged, switch to Process Explorer and choose the Lightroom process in the top frame. This will show all the associated subprocess, threads, memory use, open files. Basically everything about this process.
You can save a snapshop of the Lightroom process, as well. In my work it helps if customers take a few snapshots over 1-2 minutes and send them in. I don't know if Adobe has their own way of doing this.
This app also helps you look for any other processes that might be there you are not aware of. So many apps and drivers install little "helper" processes that may interact poorly with other processes. I'd certainly turn off any "real time" virus protection if you have it enabled. No virus checker is ever 100% accurate, and running one is always a trade-off between security and convenience. At least keep it from scanning your Lightroom library directory. There may be other suspect apps that can be inspected with this tool.
Some notes based on what I've read so far:
- XP and OS X users please, please, please do NOT "defrag" your hard drive. You do not need to do it. Modern file systems already know how to lay down files optimally over time, as long as you have some free space and memory available. In fact, you may be making things _worse_ since a defrag may move files around from the "hot" areas that NTFS and HFS+ maintain to make file retrieval faster.
There are some rare cases where a defrag is necessary, but few of us here will hit those cases. Let the filesystem and OS do the job it is designed to do. Instead, take that time and go work on some photos!
- OS X users, what do you have in your Startup Items? Why? Windows users, why so many things in your Taskbar? Clean that cruft up. Many of these little apps that come with device drivers are poorly written little value-add widgets that do not give you much, may not be the best written app and may simply interact poorly with other apps. Minimize the chances of this happening by at least disabling or removing most of them while testing Lightroom for performance problems. This is part of moving from the known to the unknown to solve problems in a logical manner.
- Make sure you have enough free space on your main partition(s). Different filesystems have different requirements, but a modern OS needs a decent chunk of free space (it does NOT have to be contiguous) and a chunk of memory to maintain a proper caching file system. A hand-waving value is make sure you have some smaller percentage free /at least/. Of course, those of us with big drives have to worry less, even done to 1%!