Ok, to sum up my experience:

User of LR3, never installed a beta, installed LR4 as trial.

High-end MacPro (8-core 3GHz, 24GB RAM, OS 10.7.3) 3 displays

LR4 is sluggish and unresponsive to slider movements in develop module, activity monitor shows maximum CPU load on all cores.

Fix: Create new catalogue, re-import same pictures. This brings down CPU load to comfortable levels, UI-snappiness similar to LR3.

As others have pointed out, it will be difficult to compare user experiences such as sluggishness.

LR seems to be somewhat resource-hungry anyway, so users with less powerful machines may be used to a certain lag in response and not notice too much of a difference (which is in no way meant to blame them for having a "bad" computer!).

I suggest observing the activity monitor (on the Mac) as a gauge for system load caused by the program.

I use the "clarity"-slider as a reference point and find that LR3 and a "well-behaved" LR4 leaves some headroom on the CPUs while a a sluggish LR4 drives all cores to the max for 2-3 seconds making the interaction jumpy to the point where it is hardly usable.

If you look at the last three messages you will see the first (of the three)  removed all traces of the beta and now has a useable LR4.

The next two messagers do not tell us whether they have upgraded from the beta or from LR3.

I am sorry to labour this point but, to me anyway, it seems important.

And how do you check if the user profile is corrupt, and how to fix it? For me the thing that makes the most difference is enabling the second monitor, but I want to certainly see if this can be fixed or improved by some other means.

Thanks!

Is the User Profile a Windows feature or something within Lightroom?

Tony

Probably windows. Control panel /user accounts.Create a new user.

creating a new user is a pretty serious change to make to use Lightroom.

I cannot believe anyone would want to do that.

Tony

I experimented with different actions to see if doing/not doing some of them made a performance difference but found that any difference was not detectable - performance remained poor.

Dave

I am not interested in creating a new user account either so have not tried this 'fix'. Removing the second monitor certainly improves performance a lot but, this too, is not an option. I do find that once I develop a photo in Lr4, move to another photo and develop it, then return to the first photo, Lr4 is much more responsive even with second display turned on. This must be related to cache.

One other observation. If I develop a photo then immediately go to close Lr4, it always gives me an error: "Adobe Lightroom is not finished writing metadata changes into XMP..." If I wait 5 seconds or so before attempting to close Lr4, I dont get the error. This error is 100% reproducible in every situation I have tried including in a brand new Lr4 made catalog with just one image in it! I cant get this error to occur on Lr3 even with my catalogue of over 30,000 pictures.

It really seems like Lr4 is working very hard at doing something, but what the heck it is working at I cant say.

Add my voice to the group of people that think it is time for Adobe to jump into this thread even if for no other reason than to let us know they have heard our complaints/concerns and are looking into the issues.

After a bit more playing I have noticed that performance is usable in develop with two displays as long as the second display isn't in Loupe view. In Loupe, there is a full screen preview to render on the fly with slider adjustments.  Still, in LR3 there was no sluggishness at all.  Eaglerapids seems to have the same problems as I do - do you notice an improvement when the second display is set, for instance, on Grid?

The redraw rate needs to get fixed.  Hopefully soon.

So after 2 days of testing now here are my final conclusions:

I did the workaround told here. i uninstalled and deleted everything, reboot and deleted the rest of lr3 and 4. reboot again. i even cleaned the whole registry in windows, in mac os i did that not. i reinstalled lr4.0 and made a new catalogue and imported some pictures and BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM wohoooooowww. lr4 is now as fast as hell. even faster than lr 3.6 unbelievable!

but WATCH OUT! i have a XMP workflow, which means that all my raw files do have XMP files and in dng files, the xmp metadata are written IN the dng file. i have this workflow, cause i have checked in lightroom catalogue preferences (under metadata): "automatically save changes into xmp files (or however this is written in the english lr4 surface). so if you have this kind of workflow it is absolutely no problem when you make the catalogue completele new. i made my whole catalogue new and made all 1:1 previews and lightroom is now still as fast as hell even with my 45000 picture´s catalogue. IF YOU HAVE A DATABASE WORKFLOW, which means that you do not write all your adjustemnts in a picture into a xmp file or inside of the dng file.........all your adjustments will be gone when you remove the catalogue!!! E V E R Y T H I N G!

As far as i can see there is the following problem. People like me, who have a xmp workflow have performance problems, cause there is some behaviour of the import from the old catalogue. it looks like that the file searches where to write, searches, searches...and HEY here it is, lets write something! i do know some people that have a database workflow and all of them have no performance issues. even the XMP error, which a guy described some posts above are now gone for me so i really think lightoom might have here some xmp issues. i am no expert - but at the moment everything points on a xmp bug!

The workaround does nothing else to completely renew everything and now lr knows where the files are and does a really good job.

So my sliders and my adjusments are pretty fast at the monent, even with turned on lens correction and turned an sharpness. when i zoom in the sliders become lagy und sluggish again. when i zoom out everything is fine again - please adobe fix this!

My last realy big problem is the second monitor. when i turn it on, lr becomes very slow again. when i turn the second monitor off, lightroom becomes faster again BUT not so fast as it was in the beginning. i have to shut down lr4 and restart it (without 2nd monitor) and BAM it is fast like hell again!

So for now i hope i could help some guys with my testings!

King regards Frank!

I don't see why we need to do a registry clean etc., etc.,Adobe are supplying a product that doesn't work properly, it runs slow on a Mac and a PC and it looks like the problem lies in the software that Adobe supplies.

I did manage to try out the new features like selective noise reduction but each adjustment took about 4 seconds, the results were good but the time delay is unworkable.

Does anyone out there know if Adobe are working on a fix and if so when will we know if it is fixed, will we get notification of LR4.1 or something so we can download something that works this time.

"I don't see why we need to do a registry clean etc., etc."

Neither do I Robbie......

But the value of a forum like this is sharing ideas about work arounds to enable us to use the product whilst Adobe is fixing it.

I don't believe Adobe are not aware of the problem. It would be grown up PR to have a token presence on this thread to admit it - but I don't run Adobe.

In the meantime lets concentrate on helping each other reach the goal of a useable LR4.

Tony

I run i5@4.5ghz, 8GB ram, W7sp1. Initial impressions with LR4 beta were also general sluggishness in navigating around and when switching between 100% pictures to build the 1:1 previews. For me it improved when I deleted the folder "Previews.lrdata" (but kept the catalogue file!) and had LR4 rebuild the previews/100% views from scratch not relying on old database import from LR3.5 (appx 25000 pics). Also, the thing which I noticed is that in Library mode initially zooming into 100% view to build full view takes a bit more time than in Develop mode. But as it is currently only about 1.5 seconds for LR to build full 100% view, then it is not too bad compared with LR3.5 (roughly 1 sec). Sliders move around very smoothly and adjustments appear instantly as well.

Just in case, CrapCleaned the registry and installed fresh set of video card drivers as well. Did not make much difference but made me feel a bit better

Probably the reasonable thing to do is first unistall 4 beta before going for 4 full (I did not do that) but when looking at the installation of LR4 full, seems it unistalls beta anyway.

I have WRITE CHANGES checked. However, this is not my point. I have it checked for BOTH Lr3.6 and 4. When I open 3.6 using any catalog - from a brand new one with ojnly 1 photo to my 30k catalog, if pic an image, go into DEVLOP and change just about anything, then immediately click the CLOSE button, Lightroom closes without issue. However, in Lr4, regardless of which catalog I use (when I have WRITE CHANGES turned on), if I perform the exact same experiment, I get the error 100%^ of the time. If I wait a few seconds then attempt to close Lr4, I do not get the error. This strongly suggests that Lr3.6 and Lr4 are behaving very differently behjjind the scenes. Lr3 deals with my changes and writes them into the XMP faster than I can move my mouse up and click the close button. Lr4 takes about 3 seconds to write exactyl the same data. On my machine, which is a rocket ship, that is very telling.

Can you try this experiment and see if you have the same finding.

Regards,

Kirk

Tried the rebuild previews at 100% workaround - no improvement for me.  I've been trying every workaround posted and haven't had any improvements.

Dave

I too am experiencing slowness on even an SSD drive with 16 g of ram, i7 2600k 3.4 ghz, i built this machine to be a lighroom dominator.  I will wait another month or two before i upgrade.  Maybe they will work it out.  I only have burning software, lightroom 4 and CS5 on this machine. 

I'm running Windows Vista 32bit on a Q6600 2.4Ghz (OC'd to 2.7Ghz) with 4 gigs of ram (Vista 32 only recognizes 3.2 gig of memory) and LR2 and 3 always ran fine but as with most in this thread I'm experiencing the same slow, laggy, slugish behavior.  As others have stated I assumed that it was the beta and the LR4 gold would correct the problems but it hasn't other than being a little more polished.

Something that I've been trying with what seems like a positive effect has been going into LR4 Library Module and selecting a few images or even an entire directory that has already been converted to the 2012 Process and going to Library, Convert Photo to DNG.  Even though all of my images are already in DNG format (from as far back as LR2) it appears to do something to the DNG existing images.  In previous Lightroom versions when you ran the converter on existing DNG files it said it was done immediately but now it takes a little bit to complete.  After the the Convert process is done the Develop module seems to run much more smoothly.  Any Mask options like the Brush or Healing tool work fine also untill I get over a dozen history states then they start to slow some.  The develop slider (for me at least) respond almost instantly as opposed to directories where I have't run the Convert to DNG option on.  I have the Convert options set to default as far as Only Convert Raw Files, Delete originals, and Embed Fast Load Data are the only boxes checked and my JPEG Preview is set to None.  I don't know if the Embed Fast Load Data is really being generated after the fact since the files are already DNG but something seems to be helping as compared to the files and directories that I have not 'Converted'.  I've also played with the Update DNG Preview & Metadata but that didn't seem to have much effect. 

If anyone else cares to give this a shot, let us know if it has any effect for you.

If you need to adjust e-mails you get on threads you may have posted in, you need to make the changes to your "preferences" in your account.

Like so many on this thread, I too found Lightroom 4 unusably slow. Picking up on what Jeff 2011 said, I went into one of my folders and selected a single Canon cr2 raw file and converted the image to DNG...that's right, just the one image. Somehow this seems to have flipped a switch in Lightroom 4, because now (so far) everything is running much, much faster-more like Lightroom 3 behaved. This is true for all of my Canon raw files, Fuji raw files and iPhone jpegs, including images using either the 2012 process version or the 2010 version . I'm running on a 2011 MacBook Pro with 8 gigs of RAM, under Mac OS X 10.7.3.

I still have to run it through some more paces, but Lightroom 4 is now very responsive for me, even with all of the modules active. I'll post a follow-up if I find anything changes. It's really very bizarre to me that converting a file could change the behavior of the program, but it does feel like somehow it fliped a switch or changed a mode that the sofware was running in when first installed. This really is something Adobe needs to address right away.

I built a PC in Dec 2011 - 16GB ram, i7-3930k (3.2GHz)., etc.

The other day I was doing an import using Lightroom 4, and somehow it used 100% of my memory.  Yeah, Lightroom 4 chewed up 16gb of ram.  I never saw anything like that with Lightroom 3.

Adobe, please, please refine the engine in Lightroom 4 to make it perform better.  Right now, it's slow, sluggish and resource hungry, even for basic tasks.