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Archive 2017 · Adobe officially admits speeding up Lightroom is 'top priority'

  
 
melcat
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p.2 #1 · p.2 #1 · Adobe officially admits speeding up Lightroom is 'top priority'


It can't help that around 60% of Lightroom¹ is implemented in a dynamic language called Lua². It calls into the native C++ Camera Raw to process the raw files, and probably some other things. Clearly from the linked blog post Adobe's medium term strategy is going to be to isolate some areas of performance concern and recode them in C++ (or maybe Objective C on macOS).

That will probably produce some results fairly quickly, but not for any generalized sluggishness. If you consider the similar Javascript language, which is the one web sites download into the browser to do complex processing, performance was abysmal until first Google, and then Apple and Microsoft, wrote specialized high-performance just-in-time compilers for Javascript. Those were major projects that took several years and would have cost each company millions. I don't know that Adobe has the capability and willingness to do that for Lua, although the presentation I linked to in the footnote does say they "tweaked" the standard Lua distribution. (From a quick look at the plug-in SDK it looks like they forked it.)

Even if you fix the implementation, the language is still less rich in data tyoes. I notice for example that Lua has only one floating point type. which must be set at compliation time as either 32 or 64 bit. Normally one would want both for image processing (indeed Apple now provide all three of 16, 32 and 64 bit on iOS).

Disclaimer: I don't and have never used Lightroom, despite now having a license.

¹ See, e.g., this presentation.
² See the Lua reference manual.



Jul 21, 2017 at 10:30 PM
Michael White
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p.2 #2 · p.2 #2 · Adobe officially admits speeding up Lightroom is 'top priority'


when they speed it up you will need the latest greatest hardware to make it work


Jul 22, 2017 at 03:00 AM
Alan321
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p.2 #3 · p.2 #3 · Adobe officially admits speeding up Lightroom is 'top priority'


Maybe they just need to use a non-Microsoft compiler


Jul 24, 2017 at 09:39 AM
Alan321
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p.2 #4 · p.2 #4 · Adobe officially admits speeding up Lightroom is 'top priority'


Michael White wrote:
when they speed it up you will need the latest greatest hardware to make it work


Only to make it work at its best. Nowadays even old hardware has a multi-core cpu and can easily have an SSD added for speedy drive access. Therefore better code will run better even without a new computer.

Adobe just don't want to mess with their code in case they break something. It took them ages to go from 32 bit to 64 bit, for example. Sometimes I think they still have 8-bit or 16-bit code in there.

It has to be a no-brainer to split some tasks across multiple cpu cores. e.g. compressing or decompressing a huge file should not be a single-core task. Likewise, if a single or dual core cpu can convert a raw file into an RGB mage then surely a six-or-more-core cpu can handle several files at once. Ditto for creating smart previews in bulk. In fact, why do we even need to create and store smart preview files just to speed up image processing when Lr already has previews to work with?



Jul 24, 2017 at 10:00 AM
PhilPDX
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p.2 #5 · p.2 #5 · Adobe officially admits speeding up Lightroom is 'top priority'


Alan321 wrote:
... if a single or dual core cpu can convert a raw file into an RGB mage then surely a six-or-more-core cpu can handle several files at once.


Reading the file is the bottleneck; not the parallel handling afterwards.




Jul 24, 2017 at 03:47 PM
Alan321
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p.2 #6 · p.2 #6 · Adobe officially admits speeding up Lightroom is 'top priority'


Alan321 wrote:
... if a single or dual core cpu can convert a raw file into an RGB mage then surely a six-or-more-core cpu can handle several files at once.

PhilPDX wrote:
Reading the file is the bottleneck; not the parallel handling afterwards.


I'm not convinced, because if it were true then there would minimal gain from having a faster CPU, and a huge gain from using an SSD (for Lr).

Also, Ps can write and read gigantic files way faster than it can compress or decompress them, because it is using only one CPU core to do the compression. If it split the file into one chunk per CPU core and compressed each one simultaneously then there would be several files not quite as small in total as the single file, but they'd be produced a lot faster.



Jul 26, 2017 at 01:21 AM
Oscarsmadness
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p.2 #7 · p.2 #7 · Adobe officially admits speeding up Lightroom is 'top priority'


EB-1 wrote:
I wish Adobe would make it a priority to fix that current mess of Acrobat.
Why did they take a decent version and create a new one that is so much worse?

EBH


Acrobat has fallen flat.

There is a reason I'm sticking to my LR5 with a perpetual license, installed on a 2012 base model iMac. It's slow and yucky, but not any slower and yuckier than the 2016 5K iMac with a SSD I used to use. If I have to buy new software, I'm likely doing PM or some other alternative to Adobe



Jul 26, 2017 at 01:51 AM
PhilPDX
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p.2 #8 · p.2 #8 · Adobe officially admits speeding up Lightroom is 'top priority'


Alan321 wrote:
I'm not convinced, because if it were true then there would minimal gain from having a faster CPU, and a huge gain from using an SSD (for Lr).


Reading from an HD or SSD is sequential. Only one head at a time can read from a hard drive (unless some manufacturer has decided to install the same the circuitry for each and every head in a multi platter drive; that I don't know). Once the data is in the RAM, you can handle several tasks simultaneously. That doesn't mean though, that Adobe has mastered the art of parallel programming yet. Multi-threading: yes.

-Phil




Jul 26, 2017 at 08:15 AM
dhphoto
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p.2 #9 · p.2 #9 · Adobe officially admits speeding up Lightroom is 'top priority'


Oscarsmadness wrote:
Acrobat has fallen flat.

There is a reason I'm sticking to my LR5 with a perpetual license, installed on a 2012 base model iMac. It's slow and yucky, but not any slower and yuckier than the 2016 5K iMac with a SSD I used to use. If I have to buy new software, I'm likely doing PM or some other alternative to Adobe


I use LR6 standalone version and it's a much better program and faster than LR5. It has a host of new features I wouldn't want to be without as well.

The upgrade doesn't cost much either.



Jul 26, 2017 at 09:33 AM
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