LR2 crashed three times yesterday and I'm wondering if it is time to purge my cache.

But I can't find any information on the preference setting which is found on the "File Handling" tab of Preferences. Would pressing "Purge Cache" help solve the program from being hung up?

Other ideas?

I have already selected "Relaunch and Optimize" under the Catalog preferences. No help. Would it help of I didn't choose full-size Previews? Would it help if I deselected "Automatically write changes to XMP"?

The problem is that the program just hangs. I get the spinning pizza wheel and have no choice but to force quit the program.

I am running LR2 on a Desktop Mac running OS 10.5.4.
The computer has 16 GB of RAM.
I have 80,000 files. All my RAW files are imported and stored as DNG.
Many of my files are quite large, coming from a Canon 1DsMk3.

Note: I have also posted this question on the Lightroom Forum.

Hi Henry. The first thing I would do is to right click on the app, select Get Info, and choose 64-bit mode for LR2 (Note: I'm still running 10.4, and it doesn't have this option, so what I'm describing is what others with 10.5 have told me). This will let it use as much ram as it can get. If you don't have 64-bit mode selected, LR2 is limited to using 4GB of ram or less.

The second thing I would try is turning of the automatic writes to XMP. The cache, as far as I know, stores the image previews. I don't think purging it would help, tho obviously I don't know for sure. I believe purging the cache will force all the previews to be regenerated, which is time consuming on LR2. But hey, desperate times call for desperate measures, so at this point I would try everything and see if it has a postive effect.

Another thing I would do is check whether previews are being generated while you're trying to do something else. Look for a Previews progress bar in the upper left corner of the screen. Generating previews seems to take a lot of resources, and totally brings the app to a halt on my machine until it finishes the previews. I just go make myself a cup of tea and come back when preview generation is complete.

Finally, I would try shutting down other apps that might be consuming a lot of RAM.

So far, I'm very disappointed with LR2 performance. I love the new local adjustment tools, but the thruput issues with LR2 really leave a bad taste overall.

Thanks for the suggestion about 64-bit mode.
When shut down the program and opened up Get Info what I saw (see attached picture) was "Open in 32-bit mode". Somehow that was already selected.
Click to view attachment
How can I make 64-bit work?

Sorry to hear you are disappointed with the performance.
I can't say it has bothered me and I have used a lot of local adjustments and gradients. Often several on one image.

Why have you not upgraded your Mac from 10.4 to 10.5.4?
Have you considered trying more RAM?

Deselect it so that it works in 64-bit instead of 32-bit.

As Victoria indicated, uncheck the 32-bit mode box. By the way, does putting the app in 64-bit mode help with the issues you were having?


Actually, the performance I'm seeing is mixed. Some parts of it are just fine. Like you said, I have images with a number of local adjustments (both brushes and gradients), and that goes just fine. Where I'm seeing a major slowdown, especially with my P45+ files, is in opening images (LR 1.4.1 opened P45+ files just fine - really fast), exporting images, switching between modules, and generating previews. So I'd say I'm disappointed in some aspects of LR2, and OK with others. But I do love the new local adjustments, and the new color profile support.


Because I'm a slacker :-)


Well, I have a first generation Mac Pro - the one with the old-style FB-DIMMS. I understand the second generation Mac Pro used more standard DDR2 DIMMS. And I'm guessing the soon-to-come third generation Mac Pro's will use standard DDR2 or DDR3 DIMMS as well. I will probably get a new third gen Mac Pro, and I don't want to spend money on the old-style FB-DIMMS that I won't be able to use in the new machine. Or at least that's what I'm thinking now. But from everything I've read so far, switching to 10.5 and beefing up RAM should really help speed things up.

I would tell you that I have a new MacPro w 10GB ram and gave tried 32 and 64bit and appear to be having the same slowdown/hanging issues as you describe. LR 1.4.1 did not do this. I am on 10.5.4.

My sentiments are the same... I love the feature set of the new release but this is spoilt by significant usability issues on my system caused by slow imports, hanging at seemingly random times but especially when it is importing or generating previews. I guess I don't understand why there are issues as at least my system is pretty clean.

Am hunting for the things other users have tried to improve performance to see if these help until Adobe (hopefully) figures out what is going wrong.

Muir

Mort
"uncheck the 32-bit mode box."
Wow! That is counter-intuitive. But it did work.

"does putting the app in 64-bit mode help with the issues you were having?"
So far so good, but let me do some intensive image adjustments to be sure.

"I don't want to spend money on the old-style FB-DIMMS that I won't be able to use in the new machine. Or at least that's what I'm thinking now."
RAM just keeps getting cheaper. I bought 8 GB last week for $430.

"switching to 10.5 and beefing up RAM should really help speed things up."
I'm not sure about the upgrade to 10.5.4 helping (never tried it in 10.4)
However, the RAM seems to help. But, I was reading tonight in Martin Evenings new LR2 book that running in 64-bit mode only gives you about a 10% boost in speed.

I don't know if this was changed from 1.x to 2.x, but the catalog limit is far below 80,000 images. I believe the limit is closer to 20,000 per catalog. Try splitting into more catalogs.

kaelaria,
I don't think the limit is 20,000 per catalog for LR2.
I currently have 91,734 images and it seems perfectly happy.

Does anyone know what the limit of images is for LR2?

I can't find where I got the 20,000 file limit from - it may have been a tutorial video...anyway I remember 20,000 because after reading/hearing that, I split my catalog into multiples. I did see a slight increase in performance, but that may have simply been due to the optimization. I did it only as a precautionary measure, I had no issues with my 50,000 all in one at the time.

All I find on Adobe is this, regarding the 1.0 FAQ:
How many files can I have in my library?

There is no known maximum number of photos you can store in a Photoshop Lightroom library. Your computer might run out of address space for your photos between 100,000 and 1,000,000 photos.

I found this on Lightroom Killer Tips. Seems there is no clear answer here:

Question: Why should I use multiple catalogs in Lightroom?Answer: There’s a few different reasons to explore using multiple catalogs. I’ll list the reasons as well as some candidates for multiple catalog use here. I’ll also tell you how to create another catalog at the end.

1. Your existing library is getting too big. When I say too big, I mean in the tens of thousands of photos too big. Originally, it seemed like 30,000 photos was thrown around as a limit for the catalog size before Lightroom started to slow down too much. I was actually talking with Tom Hogarty (Lightroom Product Manager) at Photoshop World earlier this month. Tom said that the 30,000 limit isn’t necessarily true. He’s coming across plenty of folks that have catalogs twice as large as that and Lightroom still runs just fine. At any rate, you’ll start to see things slow down if you get too many photos in there. If that happens, it’s a good idea to start breaking your catalog apart into another one.

I have PCs, but I was having issues with extremely slow performance and intermittent crashes. CS3 was also acting up (after upgrading to LR2), esp. w/brush operations.

I relocated Camera Raw Cache and increased its max limit to 20 GB. My performance problems went away in both programs. It has also been suggested that one should turn off indexing for the image drive, but that is for Vista. Some have said that performance increased after uninstalling 1.x.

The Camera Raw Cache caches previews that you have worked on, thus making them faster to load. I'm not sure why LR wasn't flushing the cache as necessary, or at least asking for more space.

At any rate, try moving and enlarging the cache. It solved my problems immediately and it may resolve yours as well.

Good luck!
John

This was mentioned in the LR2 tutorial from Jeff and Michael. The catalog can handle 100s of thousands of images.

Bud