Alan321 Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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A few random thoughts...
If you have a large image library and select a group of images for processing, based on some metadata other than when the images were stored, the selection may be spread all over the storage drive and there may well be a lot of head thrashing on a HDD that makes it far slower than an SSD. You are less likely to see this effect on a small test library where most reads are cached by the drive and/or the OS.
An operating system typically does a lot of caching independently of what Lr might do. Windows memory usage reporting doesn't show how much RAM is being used for that caching as clearly as it might. You may be using more RAM than you think when using Lr or anything else. Even so, Lr is much less greedy than Ps.
Nowadays even Windows compresses some stuff in RAM as OS X has been doing for some time.
Until a few years ago OS X used to cache all drives - even RAM drives. It might have been the smartest OS but it could still be pretty dumb. I don't know if that has changed but it was wasteful in terms of the amount of RAM used and its potential performance gains.
IMO the greatest single thing that Adobe could do to speed things up in Lr would be to process multiple files simultaneously, especially on SSD systems. My system was taking about 4 seconds per image to build all previews (1:1 and various smaller sizes for a 4k screen) and yet the CPU and SSD were well and truly underutilised. I think it was using the equivalent of only one processor core and any use of other cores was probably down to intel spreading its cpu load rather than clever programming by Adobe. How hard can it be to have several processes working independently on several files at the same time and queuing up the necessary database updates as they finish ? The worst that can happen is that the HDD gets overworked, but you'd soon hear that and set a lesser number of simultaneous processes.
Lots of programs make poor use of multiple CPU cores, but at least Canon DPP could be set to import three or four different groups of images to more fully utilise the performance capability of the computer. You cannot do that with Lr.
Somewhere along the way Lr has to update the previews before, during or after making any edits in the Develop or Library modules. There has to be some associated disk activity and the faster you move from image to image the more likely it is to slow you down. If, however, you spend minutes tweaking an image then losing a few seconds here and there is of little consequence.
If you ever use a RAM disk for anything then you should have a suitable battery backup system to prevent most power glitches that could cost you all of the data on the RAM disk. Laptops have that inherently but most people don't think of getting a UPS for their desktop/tower computers.
Another useful speed-up that Adobe could put into Lr is to simply display the values of the slider/button controls in the Library module. Then I would not have to use the Develop module so much and then Lr could use its previews to greater effect instead of loading data from the ACR cache or the original image files.
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