Ligthroom very slow with large libraries

[xavier farre]

I imported all my photos to Lightroom, arround 12,000 photos. Now it spends

more than one hour every time I launch it doing "Checking locations...olders

and photos" Trying to work with it while it is doing that is extremely slow,

impossible to work. Is this normal?

[ellis_vener_photography]

Have you tried moving the library from your applications disk to another HDD?

[rosemaryh]

I had to delete my libraries and work one image at a time...however I don't know if that's convenient for other people.

 

I find it very slow also.

[mark_sirota1]

There are lots of people working with libraries in excess of 50,000 images and not suffering slowness problems, so there must be a difference in your system, layout, workflow, etc...

 

I think that message means that many of your files are not available in the same disk location they were in last time, and so it's looking elsewhere for them. Do you keep your photos online, or are they on some removable media, or...

 

What kind of disks do you use, and how are they connected? Are they being "protected" by filesystem encryption or anti-virus tools that might be slowing things down?

[godfrey]

I find it best to import and then let Lightroom render its preview files for a while. That

takes some time and slows down interactions.

 

One thing that some folks on another forum have noted is that Lightroom will operate

extremely slowly on PC systems that do not have the SSE2 instruction set, particularly

when you have large libraries, limited memory or a slow/fragmented hard drive. This is

because it has to emulate the SSE2 instruction set. Most feel LR is unusable in that

hardware environment. There are some recent systems that, despite being good

performers otherwise, do not include the SSE2 instruction set.

 

(This does not apply to Apple systems. All Apple PowerPC G4 and G5 systems have the

AltiVec instruction set required for that cpu family and all Apple Intel systems have the

SSE2 instruction set. Lightroom operates well on all of them, faster on the fast ones of

course...)

 

G

[roger_smith4]

Which systems have "the SSE2 instruction set?" Would a two-year old Pentium IV Dell laptop have this? It seems reasonably quick on my computer.

[john_gleason1]

Roger: Looks as though Pentium IV or newer chips (at least) hav on-board SSe2:

 

http://www.intel.com/support/processors/sb/cs-001650.htm

[godfrey]

Yes, but some recent pentium IV clones, like some Athlons, do not. I'm not versed enough

in Windows/PC lore to be able to tell you how to figure it out. But someone else posted

this to the other forum:<br><br>

 

> To stay simple and know what CPU will provide SSE2:<br>

> <br>

> * Intel: Any Pentium4 or derivates (including Celeron, Xeon based on<br>

> P4) and Pentium-M and derivates (Core Duo etc).<br>

> <br>

> * AMD: Opteron, Athlon64 and Sempron (only Sempron based on Athlon64,<br>

> some were based on AthlonXP)<br>

<br>

Godfrey

[john_gleason1]

According to Wikipedia (which could, of course, be imperfect information), AMD introduced SSE2 in about 2003. This page also has a list of CPUS with and CPUs w/o SSE2 instructions:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2#CPUs_supporting_SSE2

[jimstrutz]

Ahh, that probably explains things. I have an AMD Sempron 2800+ that does not support SSE2. Lightroom seemed a little sluggish until when I was first fiddling with it. The I added another 1000 images and found that some things are simply too slow to use. Like 100% viewing.

[olli.pekonen]

I have 64bit Athlon with Media Center XP in a HP Media Center

Pavilion m7350.fi, originally with 1GB RAM. Initially Lightroom

was a joke in this box, nothing happened with some 50 images.

I just slapped in another 1G worth of RAM, and now it works

like a breeze. So yes, there is something very nonlinear

(like an instruction set emulation requiring a lot of RAM)

going on here. But with suitable amount of RAM (as much as fits

in), things should start rolling...

[xavier farre]

Mark, as you said:

 

I think that message means that many of your files are not available in the same disk location they were in last time, and so it's looking elsewhere for them. Do you keep your photos online, or are they on some removable media, or...

 

That was the problem, it happens when it tries to find the files in a different place than last time, in my case when the external disk was conected last time and not connectet the following or the opposite. Thank you, problem solved.

[godfrey]

Hmm. I have two libraries that mix off- and on-line volumes of photos. What happens on my

system is that when I open one of these libraries, Lightroom does a quick check and marks

all the ones that are currently off-line. Takes a few minutes with a 10,000 photo library. After

that it runs at its normal speed. It does the same check again when I put that drive back on-

line.

 

G