I've noticed ever since upgrading from Lightroom 3 to 4, that is not noticeably slower on many operations. Lightroom was never fast but it now it can take multiple seconds on a top of the line mac Pro to bring up a crop rectangle or move a clonestamp circle. It is very painful to use.
With the activity monitor I can see that these operations are hitting disk. I.e. they are highly correlated with spikes in Data written/sec. This happens even though I have plenty of available RAM and 12 cores.
My catalog and the application itself are on an SSD but the photos themselves are on a regular hard drive. (My total library is approaching a terabyte, so it won't fit on even the largest SSDs.)
Any suggestions for speeding this up?
And for the software developers in the audience, any idea why Adobe is crippling Lightroom performance with synchronous disk writes like this?
Have you upgraded to the latest version? When 4.0 was first released, it definitely had a lot of performance problems, particularly on larger images (over 15 megapixels). The two minor releases since, 4.1 and 4.2, have both added some considerable performance improvements. It is, by no means, "fast" by many measures, but it is a lot faster than it was.
Additionally, I've found that Lightroom tends to get a lot slower the larger its window is. I use 2560x1600 screen resolution, and when I run Lightroom full screen, it is at its slowest. If I shrink it to about 50% of the total screen area, it speeds up considerably, although I still wouldn't call it particularly fast. With 4.2, I usually run full screen now, and I just kind of deal with the performance.
You should make sure that your catalog is regularly optimized as well, and you should probably do some research to figure out what size disk cache for ACR is most appropriate on a Mac (I use Windows myself.) Catalog optimization, if you have not done it, can greatly help improve performance for a little while. Tuning the ACR cache size can help as well.
I am using the latest 4.2 version. This has been an ongoing problem since 4.0 though.
Good suggestion to look at the camera raw cache size. I had mine set to 50 GB, but it was on local disk. I've moved that to an SSD. We'll see if that helps.
Lightroom slow to disk
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