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PSE 8 - Fullscreen mode slow, .mov-files jerky

Sep 26, 2009 3:54 AM

I try the german PSE 8-version - unfortunately the organizer seems to be slower than PSE 7 (I have about 20000 fotos organized). When I press F11 for fullscreen mode, it takes 5 (five !) seconds, until fullscreen appears. For a main function in a software this is terribly long - can anyone confirm this ? (I have a pretty new and fast PC, Vista 32). Solutions ?

By the way - I have still problems with .mov files from my Powershot G10. Movies perform jerky, as if they had a very low frame rate. This was a problem with PSE7, and it is still a problem with PSE8. MPEG is ok.

All in all it does not seem to me, that an upgrade is worth the money.

1191 Views 15 Replies Latest reply: Robert Eckerlin, Jun 21, 2012 11:13 PM

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1. John R. Ellis,

Sep 26, 2009 4:21 PM in reply to Saintloop

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One of the first things I noticed about PSE 8 was that entering Full Screen mode seemed much slower.

When showing all 10K visible thumbnails in my catalog, PSE 7 takes 7 secs to enter full-screen mode, while PSE 8 takes 13 secs.

With just 15 thumbnails showing due to using Find > Set Date Range, PSE 7 takes 1 sec, while PSE 8 takes 6 seconds.

(A tip for both versions is to use Set Date Range or some kind of search to restrict the number of thumbnails showing -- Full Screen enters faster then.)

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2. DP*,

Sep 26, 2009 4:32 PM in reply to Saintloop

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I noticed the same behavior for both fullscreen mode and .mov playback. I don't know what PSE is doing to take so long to display an image fullscreen.

The continued jerkiness of .mov playback is a big issue: as more digicams use this file format for movie clips it's a major problem to not be able to play them back properly. It would also be nice if PSE allowed you to specify your own file viewers rather than rely on the built-in one.

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3. John R. Ellis,

Sep 26, 2009 5:14 PM in reply to DP*

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I don't know what PSE is doing to take so long to display an image fullscreen.
This feature is very poorly engineered. I looked into this using a process monitor, and PSE 7 and 8 query the catalog database a couple of times for every single thumbnail viewable in the Organizer results. So with a 10K catalog and no restrictions on which thumbnails are showing, they do on the order of 20K accesses to the database! (PSE 8 does proportionately more than PSE 7.) By setting a date range and causing only 45 thumbnails to show, they do on the order of 190 database accesses, which is much faster.

Of course, there should only be a few database acceses, and their number should be independent of the number of thumbannils currently in the Organizer results.

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4. DP*,

Sep 26, 2009 9:14 PM in reply to John R. Ellis

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I also took a look in ProcessMonitor. PSE is certainly doing a lot. Heavy use of the registry too for what look like operations you could do once and cache the result.

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5. Robert Eckerlin,

Jun 21, 2012 5:26 AM in reply to John R. Ellis

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Since John is mentioning querying "the catalog database a couple of times for every single thumbnail": is my assumption/hope correct that i could substantially alleviate the problem by buying a SSD drive and by storing the PSE catalog database (and the folder containing the catalog database file) on a fast SSD drive? And is my additional assumption/hope correct that I will not need to buy a huge and expensive SSD to store my 50'000 foto files (around 200 Gigabytes) on such a huge SSD?

If somebody knows the answer: I will be very grateful to get the answer.
Robert Eckerlin

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6. John R. Ellis,

Jun 21, 2012 7:49 AM in reply to Robert Eckerlin

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As long as you have, say, 3 or 4 gigabytes of memory, an SSD may not help much, since Windows will end up caching all or most of the catalog database in memory. (Catalog database files are relatively small, e.g. a catalog with 25K photos takes 60 megabytes.)

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7. Robert Eckerlin,

Jun 21, 2012 8:26 AM in reply to John R. Ellis

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John, Thank You for your answer.

My own catalog database-file =(xxx.pse8db) is around 220.000 KB large. This seems to concord to your own estimate.

On my PC (with 12 GB of memory storage), one Full-Screen-View of two Photos that I have previously selected takes around 20 seconds. And if after the first Full-Screen View of these 2 Photos, I exit Full-Screen View Mode and immediately after that perform again a Full-Screen View of these same 2 Photo Files, I have again to wait 20 seconds. ...I do hence not benefit noticeably from any caching.

Some additional details: performing a Catalog "Repair" and then a Catalog "Optimize" did not help. Seting (as described in this forum) a date-range also does not help (perhaps, because I do nearly all my activities within PSE Collections/Albums ...this already limits the number of photos that are candidate for a Full-Screen View)). What would help on my PC: use of PSE V10 as opposed to PSE V8...but the color of the PSE V10 Organizer Background destroys all the pleasure, that I have working with my photos... and I therefore wish to stick to PSE V8.

Are you sure sure, that the long 20 second delay is mainly caused by Database IO Operations? In that case, I will perhaps buy a SSD (mainly for the PSE Catalog folders), let PC specialists plug the SSD into my PC, and then try my luck.

Thanks in advance for an answer to the above question.
Robert

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8. John R. Ellis,

Jun 21, 2012 9:45 AM in reply to Robert Eckerlin

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On my PC (with 12 GB of memory storage), one Full-Screen-View of two Photos that I have previously selected takes around 20 seconds. And if after the first Full-Screen View of these 2 Photos, I exit Full-Screen View Mode and immediately after that perform again a Full-Screen View of these same 2 Photo Files, I have again to wait 20 seconds. ...I do hence not benefit noticeably from any caching. ... Are you sure sure, that the long 20 second delay is mainly caused by Database IO Operations?
When I looked at this 2.5 years ago with Microsoft's Process Monitor, it was very clear that full-screen view was doing thousands of accesses to the database file, proportionate to the number of thumbnails that were showing. But even though there were thousands of i/o's to the database file, there were almost no accesses to the physical disk, which is a very strong indicator that the database file was entirely cached in memory. Most likely, this was a programming error on the part of the low-skilled Organizer team in India that had assumed responsibility for the Organizer -- in this case, the Organizer was generating thousands of SQLite queries against the database. Those queries were being executed relatively fast, since the database was cached in memory by Windows -- they would have taken an order of magnitude longer if the accesses had to go to the physical disk. (It sounds like PSE 10 has fixed this bug?)

If you're on Windows 7, you can easily verify how much your physical disk is being accessed while entering Full Screen view -- go to the Disk tab of the Resource Monitor. (I don't think Vista includes the Resource Monitor, in which case you'd have to use the much more geeky Performance Monitor.) If there are few accesses of the physical disk, then introducing an SSD with its faster i/o operations will have no effect on Full Screen view.

Seting (as described in this forum) a date-range also does not help (perhaps, because I do nearly all my activities within PSE Collections/Albums.
As an experiment, show all thumbnails (not an album) and time how long it takes to enter full-screen view. Then apply a date range to cause fewer than 100 thumbnails to be visible, and time full-screen view. If it's much faster, then you're seeing the same thing I saw.

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9. photodrawken,

Jun 21, 2012 10:54 AM in reply to John R. Ellis

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FWIW, I'm running Win7 x64 with 8Gb of RAM and PSE10. I have two internal SSDs; the photos and the catalog are stored on the secondary SSD. My test catalog has 63 images. When I highlight all 63 images, it takes less than one second to display the first one in full-screen. Displaying the next image(s) using the arrow keys is instantaneous.

Ken

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10. John R. Ellis,

Jun 21, 2012 11:53 AM in reply to photodrawken

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photodrawken wrote:

FWIW, I'm running Win7 x64 with 8Gb of RAM and PSE10. I have two internal SSDs; the photos and the catalog are stored on the secondary SSD. My test catalog has 63 images. When I highlight all 63 images, it takes less than one second to display the first one in full-screen. Displaying the next image(s) using the arrow keys is instantaneous.
In PSE 8, the problem only becomes noticeable when thousands of thumbnails are visible (e.g. after showing all photos). With just 60 thumbnails visible (e.g. after applying a date range), then it isn't a problem.

I'm pretty confident this was an obvious implementation flaw, and it may well have been fixed in PSE 10. Try the experiment I outlined above -- show all the photos in a catalog with thousands or tens of thousands of photos, and time how long it takes to enter full-screen mode. Then apply a date range to cause only 50 photos to be shown, and time full-screen mode.

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11. photodrawken,

Jun 21, 2012 1:52 PM in reply to John R. Ellis

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I can't do that experiment because I don't have a catalog with that many items.

Are you saying that if you are showing 7K thumbnails and select 50 of them it takes significantly longer to display a full screen image than if you start with 50 thumbnails showing and select all 50?

To my way of thinking, I/O is the main culprit: To display a full screen image, Organizer has to access the actual image on the drive to retrieve the full resolution image for full screen display. Even if thumbnails are a contributing factor, accessing the thumbnail database file will also obviously hit the I/O queue.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm certainly not trying to defend the Organizer's programming code (or SQLite), but it seems that the fast read access of an SSD will be the determining factor.

Ken

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12. Robert Eckerlin,

Jun 21, 2012 2:02 PM in reply to John R. Ellis

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John R. Ellis wrote:

When I looked at this 2.5 years ago with Microsoft's Process Monitor, it was very clear that full-screen view was doing thousands of accesses to the database file, proportionate to the number of thumbnails that were showing. But even though there were thousands of i/o's to the database file, there were almost no accesses to the physical disk, which is a very strong indicator that the database file was entirely cached in memory. Most likely, this was a programming error on the part of the low-skilled Organizer team in India that had assumed responsibility for the Organizer -- in this case, the Organizer was generating thousands of SQLite queries against the database. Those queries were being executed relatively fast, since the database was cached in memory by Windows -- they would have taken an order of magnitude longer if the accesses had to go to the physical disk. (It sounds like PSE 10 has fixed this bug?)

If you're on Windows 7, you can easily verify how much your physical disk is being accessed while entering Full Screen view -- go to the Disk tab of the Resource Monitor. (I don't think Vista includes the Resource Monitor, in which case you'd have to use the much more geeky Performance Monitor.) If there are few accesses of the physical disk, then introducing an SSD with its faster i/o operations will have no effect on Full Screen view.

John, Thank You very much for your answer.

Yes, you are correct. On my PC too, the Resource Monitor does not show substantial physical disk activities when entering Full Screen View. Instead, the Resource Monitor shows high/substantial CPU activities; this fits very well with your theory, of database queries queries going against cached database data.

You saved me a lot of time, money, and disappointments that I would have encountered with attempts to use a SSD for the PSE catalog database. Thanks again.

Tomorrow, I will report the PSE V10 time it takes to enter Full Screen View with my large PSE Catalog. This might be interesting for one or another other PSE user who have large catalogs.

Robert

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13. John R. Ellis,

Jun 21, 2012 3:07 PM in reply to photodrawken

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Are you saying that if you are showing 7K thumbnails and select 50 of them it takes significantly longer to display a full screen image than if you start with 50 thumbnails showing and select all 50?
Yup, that was precisely the behavior observed with PSE 8.

To my way of thinking, I/O is the main culprit: To display a full screen image, Organizer has to access the actual image on the drive to retrieve the full resolution image for full screen display. Even if thumbnails are a contributing factor, accessing the thumbnail database file will also obviously hit the I/O queue.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm certainly not trying to defend the Organizer's programming code (or SQLite), but it seems that the fast read access of an SSD will be the determining factor.
The i/o time for accessing the full-resolution image to display is more than fast enough on a traditional disk, which seeks in 10 ms or less and can read at 50 MB/sec or faster (even a USB drive does 10 MB/sec). The average JPEG is, say, 5 MB. So total i/o time to display an image in full-screen mode, even with a traditional laptop or desktop disk, should take on the order of 0.2 secs or less. An SSD might speed that up, but it would hardly be noticeable to a user.

Robert Eckerlin just confirmed what I observed in 2009: To enter full-screen view, PSE 8 is doing almost no access of the physical disk yet is taking 20 seconds, with high processor utilization. The Process Monitor indicated that CPU time was being used to access the catalog database file, which was in memory, proportional to the number of thumbnails showing. Since there is very little accesses of the physical disk, an SSD can't possibly help in any significant way.

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14. photodrawken,

Jun 21, 2012 5:17 PM in reply to John R. Ellis

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Yes, that's interesting. The experiment you suggested would definitely be worthwhile, but since I'll never have several thousand images in a catalog, I'll have to leave it to someone else with an all-SSD/multi-SSD system to do that.

Ken

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15. Robert Eckerlin,

Jun 21, 2012 11:13 PM in reply to Robert Eckerlin

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Robert Eckerlin wrote:
Tomorrow, I will report the PSE V10 time it takes to enter Full Screen View with my large PSE Catalog. This might be interesting for one or another other PSE user who have large catalogs.
As mentioned in a previous post of this thread, with large catalogs (i.e. multiple of 10'000 photos) use of PSE V10 (as opposed to PSE V8) helps to reduce the time it takes to enter Full Screen View. On my relatively fast Windows 8 PC, I measured the following times, for entering Full Screen view:
- PSE V8: around 20 seconds for my large real-life catalog of around 58'000 foto files
- PSE V10: around 4-5 seconds for a catalog of around 53'000 foto files. This V10 catalog has been created some times ago, by converting my V8 catalog; after the conversion, I went (as recommended by others) through a Catalog Repair and Catalog Optimize.

Even if 4-5 seconds is still slow: this is a very substantial improvement when compared to 20 seconds. I guess, that this difference is large enough to motivate users of large V8 catalogs who switch frequently to Full Screen View, to convert to V10 (in my particular case, I do not convert to V10, because of the awfull background color of the UI Interface of the PSE V10 organizer).

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A detail, about PSE V8: on my PC, with my large PSE V8 catalog, I do not see a time-difference for entering Full Screen View, between the following two cases:
- case a: before switiching to Full Screen View, the PSE Organizer shows the thumbnails of all my photos
- case b: before switching to Full Screen View, I use a Date Range (i.e. Find --> Set Date Range) or an Album to limit the number of thumbnails shown by the Organizer.
...But, I remember that long time ago with PSE V7 (or was it PSE V6?), using an Album to limit the number of thumbnails shown by the Organizer, was effectively reducing the time to switch to Full Screen View. I guess, that this was also the case when setting a Date Range.

With PSE V8, what still makes a small time difference with large catalogs, is between selecting one single foto and selecting multiple fotos to be be shown in Full Screen View.

---
Thanks again to John for his wonderful help....If I was a high-level Adobe Manager: I would make an irrestible offer to John to hire him for PSE Development. John would make a very substantial difference.

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PSE 8 - Fullscreen mode slow, .mov-files jerky

Sep 26, 2009 3:54 AM

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