I've had my Mac Pro tower (a Quad Corei intel with 8GB of RAM) for about 5 years.. used lightroom since its beginning. At first it was really fast, scrolling between photos were snappy etc.
Now with LR 4, using a Canon 5Dmk2, photos are taking for EVER to import, and then switching between each photo is taking a few seconds to load, and trying to zoom in and do spot removal etc is taking forever and stalls and all in all a pain.
My question:
Is it b/c my processor is slow? or is it b/c i lack RAM?
I'm considering whether i need a 12 core mac pro tower, or a iMac is good but load it up to 32GB Or RAM.
Of course a 12 core tower with 32gb ram is great but there's the cost issue. so.
I run LR on a current iMac i7 with 16GB of RAM (from OWC) and find the performance to be reasonable but not "fast" with 5DII and 6D files. From what I've read, the processor makes a big difference for switching between images and preview building.
I have an "elderly" 2009 Mac Pro tower with 2.66GHz Quad processor, 24GB RAM and SSD with system and apps installed and it flies through my 5D2 RAWs in Aperture 3x and CS5.5. A year ago I only had 8GB RAM and the original stock HD and it really crawled when it hit the scratch disk.
Three 8GB matched RAM sticks are currently $285 at OWC. Last year they were $175 but $285 is still reasonable considering a new Mac will also need a RAW upgrade. The SanDisk Extreme SSD 480 GB was $275 at Amazon, albeit the price fluctuates almost daily from $250 to $375.
My system and apps are all on the SSD as well as the libraries. However the actual RAW files are on a two disk RAID (two 3TB Barracuda) as you can't buy a large enough SSD to store RAW images and video. Going from 8GB to 24GB of RAM made the most difference. The SSD is 4 or 5 times faster for startup and app opening but of relatively small benefit running the app. The RAID helps a lot but you have to disable HD sleep for serious PP, otherwise the sequenced spin-up of two or more drives can be maddening...
Shot in the dark: How much free space do you have on your HD?
If your machine starts paging because 8GB of RAM isn't enough, and your system HD doesn't have much space left on it (say, less than 10 to 20%), things end in a crawl.
You need to make a strategic assessment of your upgrade path though. IF Apple is ever going to replace the Mac Pro it's going to happen soonish. But that's a big hit. If you're going to try to get a few more years out of the system, RAM + SSD might be worth the interim cost. And at least the SSD can be carried over to the new machine whenever you do upgrade.
That said, keep in mind that SSDs wear more quickly than HDD (probably more of an issue if you're editing HD video), and with SSD it's even more important to keep substantial free space available on the disk (like 20% at least) or your SSD's speed drops considerably as it tries to movie things around for leveling/garbage routines. Lastly, make sure you've got a hell of a backup plan: SSD reliability is a lot better than it was, but when they fail... they fail.
Ok I'm on win 7 (have been considering a mac switch) but I would concor that the ram is the thing that has the most effect on LR performance .
My i5 2500k maching has 16gig with a 128gig SSD . And it runs LR4 at an ok speed . But I did a couple of tests
1: took 8 gig out of the machine . Big hit in lr4 performance .
2: took SSD out and replaced with a spinning 1tb drive with my SSD ghosted onto it (ok its not a fast drive ) . With the full 16gig its usable but lr4 is slower . With 8 gig lr4 is much slower . And really don't think about running cs6 at the same time .
Yesterday I downloaded the beta of lr5 . Much much quicker . Its where it should have been when lr4 came out . I've not tried it with 8 gig though .
And yes while an SSD can be considered a luxury , its a great addition to you machine . Big ones cost lots but 128 gig ones are really good value . Only have the OS and a and a couple of programs you use most (LR P&S office) on there and you have enough space . 256gig makes things even better (and they are getting cheaper now )
My lord RAM is expensive on the Mac side. When I built my machine last year (i5 2500K @ 4.4 GHz, 16GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 4.5TB of HDDs), I think I spent $80 for the 16GB of RAM.
The SSD makes a huge difference in general system performance, boot times, loading programs, etc. However, if you have a lot of RAM, you won't be swapping to hard disk during most operations (or any, really) and so you won't see a speedup of OPERATION of Lightroom with an SSD unless you're using it to actually store your photos.
The RAM can do a good deal, but rendering image previews still takes a while, even with a very fast machine with lots of RAM. If you don't want the delay, you can have Lightroom create 1:1 image previews upon import. It'll take a little longer to import, but then when reviewing images, it should be very fast.
A quad-core computer with 8GB RAM shouldn't have any problem with Lighroom, unless there is something wrong with it. I would check consistency of your installation, check/rebuild your Lightroom catalog, etc.
RAM upgrade definitely won't cost you $1200, you just need to source RAM modules elsewhere. I don't think anybody needs 12cores or 32 GB RAM to run Lightroom at decent speed. My lighroom works just fine for 24megapixel images on my humble dual-core i5 and 4GB RAM (I do have everything on SSD though). Lightroom process on my computer rarely goes over 2 GB.
Create empty Lr catalog to see if you can isolate the source of problem.
Jman13 wrote:
My lord RAM is expensive on the Mac side. When I built my machine last year (i5 2500K @ 4.4 GHz, 16GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 4.5TB of HDDs), I think I spent $80 for the 16GB of RAM.
Macs use the RAM same and processors as PCs. RAM price is directly related to shopping skill and market timing, and has nothing to do with the OS. But, yes, that was a crazy high RAM price the OP quoted.
It's insane prices right? i got it quoted from Crucial.com, usually THE place to buy apple RAM.
I think it's just b/c my computer is old? b/c the current Mac Pro prices out to 400 for 32GB.
Gochugogi wrote:
Macs use the RAM same and processors as PCs. RAM price is directly related to shopping skill and market timing, and has nothing to do with the OS. But, yes, that was a crazy high RAM price the OP quoted.
yeah, just before i built my win pc (i5 etc) i just wanted to up the ram in my existing PC . but the generation of ram that it was made it very expensive in the sizes i wanted. i cant remember what the actual ram was but I could pick up smaller sticks for next to nothing but these were what I had in my machine already , but larger sticks to make 16gb were silly money . it was only a little bit more expensive to buy a new Mobo i5 2500k and 16gig of ram .
OK the 128gig SSD was an extra expense on top but it was well worth it .
In a nutshell though, LR has a long rendering pipeline and in most cases will be CPU bottlenecked. It does not use any graphics card acceleration, but does use multiple cores well and thrives on clockspeed. The jury is still out with respect to hyperthreading. So a K-Series i5 or i7, overclocked to 4.3Ghz+ is the best bang for the buck. An overclocked 6-core (i7-3930K) provides some additional muscle, but at a price. It is debatable whether it is worth the extra.
I haven't noticed any need for large amounts of RAM (never seen LR even take up 2Gb), and personally i have not noticed any big improvements when hosting catalogues, caches and images on an SSD.
LR4 tends to feel a little sluggish when zooming in to 100% magnification in the develop module and panning around - redraw is slow. Even with a quad core at 4.3Ghz i have visible lag for redraw, and others tell the same story. Things really slow up when noise reduction is applied in conjunction with highlight, clarity and shadow adjustments (and possibly local adjustments too). Otherwise speed is acceptable, though not great. So to keep LR4 moving along decently, apply NR at the end of your workflow.
I would comment that i also have Capture One Pro 7, and it exhibits some similar slowness. It seems this is the price we must pay for high quality, all-in-one, non-destructive editing: Long rendering pipelines need fast CPU's.
My old 2006 mac pro (1,1) was upgraded to 16 Gb, 2x 5355 cpu's and a 128 Gb SSD
CPU's and memory were bought 2nd hand. These upgrades extend the lifespan/usability of this rather old machine. With this hardware you are stuck to "Lion". I hope that next generations of LR will run on this OS....
The data are on a separate sata3 Raid subsystem. LR4 performance is acceptable for me.
I highly doubt that it could be the RAM; 8 GB is still a solid amount. Of course, you can find out how much is in use by going to Task Manager and looking at the process. If it's not close to capacity, RAM is likely not the problem.
To get a bit more detail, you can enable the columns for page faults and page fault delta. These are the number of times that the process has had to swap pages of memory between the RAM and the disk. Look at the delta when Lightroom is running slowly; if this is high, RAM is the problem. If not, RAM isn't the problem.
Most likely it's the CPU. I have a similar-generation processor, and it really lags. I seem to remember older versions being faster, so maybe they've implemented more complex algorithms, but then again, maybe I'm misremembering it. Does the CPU usage in Task Manager max out?
Also, I have an SSD, and that really doesn't help that much. The fact it that even when you have a 30 MB Raw file, it just doesn't take that long to read 30 MB from any HDD, and once you've read it once, the OS's buffer cache keeps it in memory for a while.
