Lightroom's Processing Speed

Question

Can anyone tell me why Lightroom is so much slower processing images than Photoshop? I can remove dust spots much faster in photoshop. Everything seems to be slooow in Lightroom? Photoshop works fine. I have more than adequate RAM and hard drive space. I have been working with RAW files. Also I had the Beta of LR but have removed it since installing LR 1.0 I don't remember having problems with the Beta.

Answer 1

From any perspective, speed relies on many complex factors. It is abjectly relative and certainly subjective, espcially if taken as a measure of expectations.
The best comparisons are between similar apps on a given machine. Timed. Speed in the overall sense is measured by how fast the same operations can be performed on two similar apps on the same machine on real world examples.
Since LR and Bridge 2 beta 2 use virtually the same code for their develop features--although one is browser based and the other DB based--some important overall speed comparisons can be made.
Workflow speed is what counts for me. How long does it take me to open a directory of newly downloaded images, sort them, cull them, develop them, and ingest them into a DAM.
I did a test of forty NEFs yesterday, running them from a download Directory through Bridge, renaming, keywording, develop processing them, and ingesting them into Iview, then ingesting them into LR and making the same develop edits and other operations (that gives LR a slight edge because by then I knew just how I wanted each developed). Bridge + Iview was 60% faster. Why? Ingestion is very slow in LR, previews and all file operations (this required making 5 new client/subject folders in each app and sorting the files to them) much faster in Bridge, and ingestion into Iview was going on in the background through watched folders.
By the way, I ran the same test using IDimager as the DB based DAM and the results were virtually the same as with Iview.
For me, whether one app does one little step in workflow a bit faster or slower than another similar app is not critical, but the overall time to fully process a batch of images from start to finish is definitely the measure of 'speed'.
I think one can draw the conclusion that LR's speed--no matter what machine its on, is relatively 'slow' measured against the closest competition (on a PC--Macs are a different story) at this time. And it will be until Adobe rectifies the bottlenecks created by having everything dependent on I/O through Library. Nothing wrong with the concept--it just needs modifications, tuning, and optimization. We have read about the individual problems contributing to the bottlenecking, so I won't rehearse them. But, making the changes will take time. And the most important test of LR's 'speed' will be possible then.