Lightroom 2.3 stops responding with keyword reorg (win 64bit - Vista)

Question

I am trying to re-organise my keywords - making them more heirarchical, and renaming some to keep things tidy. In doing this I'm constantly getting LR2.3 stop responding.
Some background info:
Now I have a fair few images in my current catalog - 40,000 (approx), which is stored on a dedicated WD raptor drive - which is the fastest drive I have. My CR2 raw files are split between my local disk (images being worked on), and a NAS device (older images). The Catalog is 1.3MB in size.
I would consider the quantity of images in my catalog and my setup to be something resembling that of a standard professional configuration, and I would have hoped that by version 2.3, the Lightroom code would have been better optimised to deal with the handling of large quantity metadata updates. I can only presume that Adobe have a lot more functional design and code optimisation on their to-do list for future revisions of LR - at least I'm desperately hoping so! The problem appears to be this:
In my keyword heirarchy, if I rename a top level keyword to something new, then it has to amend all image records in the database (catalog) - most of the 40,000 in my case, and I appreciate that this takes time to do. What LR doesn't do whilst these updates are taking place, is give any user feedback - it simply seems to stop functioning until it's ready to hand back user control to the operating system. The thing is, as you haven't got a clue what's going on, you just assume that the application has crashed - and for all I know it may have as all I see if I try to interact with lightroom during the hang is my task bar reporting that the application is "(not responding)". Looking at the Resource Monitor in Vista there seems to be a large network load during the time of the hanging - now I can't understand this as LR should simply be updating the records in the catalog which is on a local drive, and not having a need to access my raw files, many of which are on a network drive. If this is the cause of the slow down then it shows that there is a desperate need for revision of the functionality of Metadata updates within LR.
I'm just hoping that Adobe take stock and for future revisions of LR, concentrate on performance issues, and amending of functionality or code structure to better tune the handling of data, rather than just adding more tools and functionality to the release which slows the app even further. I'm just hoping that LR will fulfil my needs at a professional level at some point in the near future as this app is core to the running of my business - and at the moment it's having an impact on my ability to do exactly that!
Anyone else with performance issues like this?
Thanks, Paul A

Answer 1

This has nothing to do with network access. I have been running the Winessentials Process Monitor app to try to figure out what's going on and I firmly believe this to be an issue with the Lightroom code. Once LR stops responding, the Lightroom process seems to go into an endless loop consuming memory on each iteration (I.e. a memory leak). Process Explorer shows every file handle and (as the directory of images I am displaying holds locally stored images only) none of the file handles are for network based files - all local files. This is what it's using in a nutshell:
The catalog file (2 handles on this)
The Catalog journal file
the thubnail cache (2 handles on this)
a whole load of internet explorer data files inc: history.ie5\index.dat; cookies\index.dat; Content.ie5\index.dat (no idea why it requires IE data access)
a couple of truetype fonts
a few temporary files in the user temp folder
loads of windows device files
access to the C:\Program FilesCommon Files\Adobe\Adobe Version Cue CS4\Client\4.0.1 directory (even though I don't have version cue installed to my knowledge! - certainly no service running for this)
Private Bytes is now sitting at 1.9GB (RAM being used by LR) and its continually on the up.
During the hang, LR is trying to spawn a new thread and Process Explorer is reporting this as "Thread Lightroom.exe (6008): 6040" then moments later <Error Opening Thread>, then it loops, each time more memory is taken up.
Since updating this message the memory usage by LR is now at 2GB!
This has completely stopped responding now!
**UPDATE** After an hour of being non-responsive, LR burst back to life. I just amended one of the keyword tag options again (this tag matches against 21,000 images), removing the 'export with keywords' option, clicked OK and it's stopped responding again!
Paul A