This may not work for you, especially if your on a Mac.

Overclocking i7 to 4.3 GHz = No noticeable improvement
New catalogue = Small but noticeable improvement
Move cache onto SSD = Another small but noticeable improvement
Getting into BIOS, under the memory settings and setting the performance profile from turbo to 'Extreme' (Im not talking about the XMP profile) = Enormous boost ~50% better.

This is interesting because one of the things that is often overlooked is the RAM bottleneck. With everyone citing huge clock speeds and crap performance, it struck me that the CPU was possibility spending a lot of time idle.

I use a Gigabyte Ivybridge board running MacOS. Using Ripjaws X 2133 RAM with not especially good timings but I chose it because I figured that accessing huge contiguous blocks of data might be the ticket here so burst speed would be useful. The trade off here is that the access timings are a bit slow and this could potentially contribute negatively towards slider lag.

I am now reasonably happy with its performance and its workable for me. I don't feel the need to spend any more money on this but if someone had some cash to burn I would be keen to see what happens if someone got some really good, fast RAM with sh1t hot timings just 8GB or so for a test.

You cant (that I am aware of) make this kind of change on an apple box.

Thanks for the tip Ben. I might have to try and get into the BIOS and do the same... LR4 is usless to me at the moment.

Though its been so bad on mine that I'm not sure I'd be happy with even 50% better...

From turbo to extreme? Are those settings motherboard vendor specific, or are they generic to ALL i5/i7 boards? What exactly do these settings adjust? Speed, latency? If you are already running the RAM at recommended (even overclocked settings), this could cause issues.

hmm .. let me see if my bios has this setting .. brb

Only certain mobos will have this. It was the first thing I did when I built the computer.

i don't have it

Most modern mobos will have it. Typically found on higher end boards or gaming focused boards. My mid-range Asus boards have memory profile settings.

I've been running 24 GB of CL 7 RAM overclocked and LR 4.1 has treated me pretty well but is still slower than LR 3 ever was. Windows 7 and i7 950 at 3.8. Haven't done any testing using different configurations, only have LR 4.1 on my main rig at the moment.

Thanks for the suggestion, might be time to do some tinkering with my settings to optimize.

By the way, has anyone else experienced a lock-up or crash with LR 4.1? It has happened to me twice in the past week. Not a huge deal. I'm mostly curious.

My overclock has been rock solid for over a year now running more demanding applications and torture tests. Of course, I know different programs can bring out the effects of an unstable clock despite being subjectively less demanding.

good to know. deleting the preferences file sped up my lr 4.1 by 200%

andrewho wrote:
good to know. deleting the preferences file sped up my lr 4.1 by 200%


What file is that Andrew?

I don't have any "Turbo" nor "Extreme" in BIOS.

I AM able to make adjustments to these settings:

DRAM Frequency, 1066-2133
CAS# Latency (tCL), 4-15
RAS# to CAS# Delay (tRP), 3-15
RAS# Active Time (tRAS), 3-15

I wonder if I could have the same effect as what the original poster is talking about if I messed with these settings

Try putting it on the "ludicrous" setting and it'll blow your socks off.

D. Diggler wrote:
I don't have any "Turbo" nor "Extreme" in BIOS.

I AM able to make adjustments to these settings:

DRAM Frequency, 1066-2133
CAS# Latency (tCL), 4-15
RAS# to CAS# Delay (tRP), 3-15
RAS# Active Time (tRAS), 3-15

I wonder if I could have the same effect as what the original poster is talking about if I messed with these settings

You're best to put it on "auto" and leave it alone. If are you an experienced overclocker and know how much headroom your RAM has, you can play with the settings yourself to squeeze a tiny bit more performance out of your machine (1-3% typically). That said, one wrong move and you can make your machine very unstable in a hurry - and for very little benefit in performance.

RAM speed and timings usually make very little difference in overall performance, which is why this thread surprised me so much.

I bumped my DRAM Frequency up one level from stock and my computer wouldn't boot.

THANKS, MORGAN. Just kidding. I was able to get it to boot by backing down to the stock setting.

I also have my doubts on this report: altering ram speeds will typically give small single digit improvements in overall speed, and may well significantly decrease stability.

I would challenge the OP to do some benchmark testing and revert back and forth on these settings to confirm, as I think it's likely either coincidence or inaccurate.

In short, with 30 years of computer experience, I've never seen anyone claim 50% speed increases in any application based on a small ram speed tweak, it just doesn't happen.

As an adjunct, I would be very interested to see some ram benchmarks on this particular machine. It would be very interesting to see throughput numbers on both of these settings and such a thing is pretty easy to obtain.

S-Man23 wrote:
Try putting it on the "ludicrous" setting and it'll blow your socks off.

it's this file:

The preferences file is the com.adobe.Lightroom4.plist file, located in [user name]/Library/Preferences.
The [user name]/Pictures/Lightroom folder contains:

Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat, the Lightroom database file
Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat.lock, which prevents you from overwriting data
Lightroom 4 Catalog Previews.lrdata. which contains preview data for your photos
Catalog backups are saved to [user name]/[catalog location]/[catalog name]/Backups/.
Installed and custom presets and templates have filenames ending in .lrtemplate and are located in the [user name]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom folder.
Registration data is in Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/.
Important: Apple made the user library folder hidden by default with the release of Mac OS X 10.7. If you need access to files in the hidden library folder to perform Adobe-related troubleshooting,

adobe said some slow LR issues were due to a corrupted lightroom profile. i deleted mine and it sped up quite a bit. your mileage may vary

http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/preference-file-locations-lightroom-4.html

Since my mobo didn't have the option for "Ludicrous speed" I've re-named (wasn't sure about what would happen if I deleted the file entirely) and now, the same set of edits that I was struggling with (almost threw my tower out the window .. get it? ) now, its much faster and smoother! the sliders are moving as it should and reacting as it goes. by no means its flying, but now I can work without swearing!

Thanks Andrewho and Alan!

EVO088 wrote:
Since my mobo didn't have the option for "Ludicrous speed" I've re-named (wasn't sure about what would happen if I deleted the file entirely) and now, the same set of edits that I was struggling with (almost threw my tower out the window .. get it? ) now, its much faster and smoother! the sliders are moving as it should and reacting as it goes. by no means its flying, but now I can work without swearing!

Thanks Andrewho and Alan!


When you say you renamed it you're talking about the file extension, yes? I'm just thinking of copying the file to an external drive first and then deleting it.

Trying to find a fix for corrupted appdata. (pretty sure thats what it was?)

There is a simple rename file - restart lightroom 4 procedure.

did this and fixed many small issues and did increase the speed.