Of course we cannot delete our existing catalogs and start new ones. That is not a fix.

terry275's fixes are Windows-specific, fwiw: I use a Mac.

This is a major drag, literally. Fortunately I still have LR3 installed, and only one or two catalogs 'upgraded' to LR4 slowness.

I have just verified with LR4 and also LR3.

It is my hand, not LR4. I did not keep my mouse constantly moving.

I think you do not encounter the slow issue of LR4. When this problem happens,

your mouse is almost sticked to the slider. And every movement take 2-3 seconds.

Steven,

You are right. Just compared with LR3 again and again. LR3 slider is faster and smoother. LR4 is slightly jerky if compared with LR3.

But LR4 is now several times faster than when I just installed it. I almost cannot work with it as any adjustment takes 1-3 seconds for screen to update!!

You dont delete yuor catalogs as they are saved in a different folder

@AndyYau

Thank you very much for the work, that you uploaded that video. I had a look at it in several quality settings. I can see clearly how your mouse mooves and how the picture updates. This is laggy as hell....sorry. Yes, maybe it is in your case as fast als LR3.6, but in my case lr3.6 works completely fluid....and my lr4 works exactly like i saw it in your video.

So this is not fast......this is slow as it can be. not useable!

King regards Frank!

Now confirmed you can load old catalogs in LR4 after virgin start up and they do convert but run sluggish which is what adobe have identified and presumably are working a fix.  When you revert to the virgin catalog in LR4 and work on new imports via LR4 the software performs to LR3 speeds.

@correspondanc & @ andyyau!

You both are completely right. in your 2 cases maybe you are used to a slower speed even out of lr3. maybe lr3 always was a little bit slower, but as i said, in lr3 were people capable of investing money in good hardwere on so they got a really, really realtime and fluid workflow, like i have in lr 3.6. in this case you guys got a slower pc and a slower lr 3.6 and do/can not see a difference between lr 3.6 and 4.0. thats completely ok. but you must understand guys like me who are used to work on a realtime lr 3.6 and now work with this, that is just like got my 5 year older computer back. not even high end machines are able to make a fluid and real time workflow and that is my real problem. yesterday a saw lr4 on the most powerfull mac pro you can get for money. doing most profesional videocutting on it and very high complex renderings using the most expensive quadro fx card. lr4 was not slower or faster than on my machines. it is like tehre is a door in lr4 that is closed for fast machines. as i allready said on my 12 core (24 threads) machine i do not have more than 8% cpu usage so lr4 (x64) does not take the whole power a computer can deliver! working in lr 3,6 my cpu usage rises to about 36%. i will try the trick terry275 wrote above and see if it will bring any difference!

king regards frank!

After two days struggling I have an LR4 running as fast as my LR3 (or if there is a difference I can't notice it).

Struggling because I did not know you could not load the paid copy over the beta test copy. It was unuseable in that mode.

If you have LR4 beta you need to uninstall it with Windows. You need to reboot. You need to remove all relevant .ldata and .lcat files and any LR4 catalogue folder. I also removed all the entries in the ...roaming/adobe/lightroom folder.

If you re-install you need to build a new catalogue of course.

If anyone around here from Adobe wants to claim my method is overkill then maybe the next person with problems will not to take such desparate measures - lucky them!

I should have spotted the clue. I loaded my paid for version of LR4 on two machines yesterday. One worked a treat. One worked like treacle. The first had not been used for the beta test and the second had...

All in the cause of progress. But at least my LR4 is fun to use again.

Happy days.

Tony

I haven't done any scientific test regarding this, but I have a dual screen setup and disabling the second monitor makes a very big difference. With both screens being used by LR4 any change to the RAW settings gives me a beachball. I turned off the second one and it feels much more responsive. I'm working on a Mac Pro, Mac OS X 10.7. Of course, disabling the second screen is not the solution. I still want to use both

I have a medium-big catalog (about 60,000 photos) and it's impossible for me to reimport it: I use constantly virtual copies, and those will be lost (as far as I know) if I just reimport the original DNG/RAW. So that is not an option for me (and I'm sure for lot's of people)

Regards

As an update to my previous post (#46), I tried terry275's suggestion of removing the lightroom folder and allowing LR4 to regenerate a virgin setup.  I then created a new catalog with freshly imported images.  Performance was the same - usable but not perfect with one display but very jerky with the second display enabled.  The second display is lagging far behind the main display - they don't change simultaneously like in LR3.  CPU spikes to 100% when the second display is trying to refresh.  With 2 displays enabled, LR4 is practically unusable.

And, as someone else mentioned, recreating catalogs from scratch isn't a realistic solution for those of us who have spent hours editing, sorting, rating, and keywording images in our LR3 catalogs.  They need to convert properly.

Out of curiosity, I installed L4 on a computer at work: Core i5, 4GB, Radeon 5450, Win7 Pro 64bit.  This machine is lesser spec'd than my home machine (i7, 12gb, Radeon 5750, Win7 Ult).  I created a new catalog and imported some raws. LR4 is much more responsive on this lesser machine than on my home machine, for some reason. It is smooth and snappy, like LR3.   With a second display enabled (as a window on the main display because this comp doesn't have two physical monitors), performance slows a tiny bit and the second display image lags about 1-2s, but this is much better than it is at home on my better computer.  On my less capable work computer, LR4 would be totally usable even with two displays.

Differences: At work, LR4, Win, and the source images are all on the same drive wheras at home, the images are on a separate internal sata drive.  Work has a slower CPU and less RAM. Work never had LR4 beta installed (did have LR3), home did.

Similarities: Same OS, both 64bit, both ATI video, both LR4 final, both new catalogs, same RAW files.

Message was edited by: aross4242

I ended up uninstalling LR4, I was unable to work with it it was so slow, tryed zooming and it toke about 4 seconds to update..............was so looking forward to upgrading.

I tried the route of virgin install after uninstalling the original LR4-over-Beta install, deleting all files and cache and  I restarted with a new, empty library.  I imported a few Canon RAW files and gave it a go - I see very little, if any, performance change.  I processed one of the same RAW files in 3.6 and it was very responsive with low latency.  Using similar edits, the export of the finished JPEG took about 16 secs in LR4, 8 in 3.6. 

I'm going back to 3.6 until Adobe comes up with a solution.  I do this as a hobby for fun and LR4 is so irritating right now that it ain't fun at all.

Dave

LR4 seems to be a downgrade from 3.6. Definitely not what I expected from Adobe and from what I'm reading I'm not unique in my impression.

I'm also experiencing a sluggish interface. I'm using a 2010 6-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro with 24GB of ram and a 240GB SSD. LR4 is currently using about 3GB RAM. Slider movements take 1-2 seconds to show up on the 12MP Nikon D3s RAW preview in the Develope module. Even more curious, moving files within LR is extremely slow even when I'm not in the folder sending/receiving the files which would require a screen redraw for each move... but it acts that way... About one file per second moves between source and destination. 

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.

It really would help if future posters not only tell us about their slow LR4 but also about whether they migrated from the beta and/or LR3.

Tony

Macbook pro, LR3, LR4 Beta (beta was super slow).  For what its worth, I had a slow experience with LR4.  Used a new catalog, tried some of the suggestions here, did an archive install of Lion.  No success.  Adobe customer support said I may have had an issue with a corrupt user profile (i was missing the adobe plist files).  Created a new profile, and wow, just like that, night and day difference. Makes the program usable, even downright snappy.  YMMV. 

Not sure how to check, honestly. I created a new user profile, and ran lr4

under that instead, and it works great (so far).

Worked on my mac. No clue for windows, slightly more of a clue with osx.

Sorry, I don't have the silver bullet.

Ok

My feelings based on a Lapbook pro 15inch 2.2 Ghz Intel Core i7 with 8Gb 1333 MHz DDR3 750 ( 40 Gb free from 750 Gb internal hard drive) running OSX 10.7.3 with the high definition screen 1680 by1050.

Working on an 8 bit TIF from a Canon 5D11 (5340 by 3560)

I've just had a selection of images provided from a client for me to edit.

1. I've saved the meta data to the photos
2. exported the 18 images as a LR3.5 catalog, leaving the 18 images on my firewire drive
3. zipped up my LR4 beta app  so I could use both
4. installed the LR4 final
5. right clicked the catalog in a folder on my desktop - Open with LR4.0
6. it wanted to convert so I let it do so
7. and LR4.0 started with the new catalog
8. I had to update the film strip of images to PV2012.
9. The controls are fast, way faster than LR3.5 which I currently use
10. I'm currently updating iTunes to 10.6
11. I have 1.31 Gb of memory available - from Activity monitor - LR4.0 using 1.66 Gb
12. 
    I've already used the transform tool to adjust
    1. vertical
    2. rotation

     I've got several dust spots already removed

     I've not got any profile adjustments applied as I'm using a tiff made from combining 3 DNG files that had the profiles applied.

1. zooming to 100% - under 1 second dragging at 100% around the screen  - instantaneous
2. painting adjustment marks - instantaneous - at 100% and fit
3. adjustment of the verticals and horizontal using the manual corrections
   1. whether by using the ALT(±1( / CTRL(±5) / SHIFT(±20) keys at fit - instantaneous
   2. whether by using the ALT(±1( / CTRL(±5) / SHIFT(±20) keys at 100% - instantaneous, zooming back out to fit after a +20 change  is just short of instantaneous.
4. From Grid mode, opening a new photo fit and
   1. Module change to Develop - 1 second
   2. loading image ± 2 seconds
   3. zoom to 100% ± 1 sec
5. Q - spot in healing mode cleaning mark and select area and time to update ±1 second
6. Dragging the spot marker to align a vertical edge, ie I've got a spot over an edge, so I need to move the "From" spot so that the "To" spot perfectly lines up, refresh as I drag the spot suffers from a lag of under 0.25 sec, faster than LR3.5 - Remember I have manual lens corrections AND adjustment masks on this image, but the adsjustment mask is not over this Q spot.

This conflicts with many peoples experiences, I'm finding it very snappy, and the only reason I downloaded the LR4Beta2 er LR4.0 was because I wanted to import a catalog of a few images into LR4 and reference them from my main drive, rather than export the images and use LR4 Beta to read the images from a new location as I've been doing with other finishing edits.

I will comment on DNG edits below

1. Auto applied Canon profile
   1. loading a dng at 100% from the film strip ±4 seconds
   2. flicking around an image @ 100% - is jerky and sticky
   3. Zoom in and out of 100% ±1 second
   4. manual transformations - slower than for above, but still under 0.2 sec, ie click (quick sniff) done - not very scientific, but I can't operate a timer at the same time
   5. Turning on and off the detail really slows things up until I've zoomed around the image at 100%, also the CPU started burning 400% for a while, and then dropped again.
   6. Q healing is a little slower, the updating the spots when you need to accurately align vertical is significantly slower, maybe 1 second, but this is with the auto profile on and manual transforms. With the auto profile turned off, its almost as fast as with the TIF above.

I am finding that the DNG is a little slower, but its definitely no slower than LR3.5 was for me

I've tried to be as accurate as possible, but based on a catalog imported from LR3.5, with 3.5 installed, and develop settings  from LR3.5 newly updated develop setting specific to LR4 beta, I'm very pleased with the speeds on my laptop.

hamish NIVEN Photography

Maybe the people who experience a slow Lightroom have the lens correction feature active for all of their pictures.

I really wondered about the slow speed in LR3 already. Yes, in LR3! The reason is, I use LR for my complete workflow, even retouching and the more you add spots and gradients to a picture, the slower it gets on my computer, but... ONLY if the lens correction is active.

I experienced, that the lens correction feature is slowing LR3 massively. You get a response time of some seconds for your clicks if lens correction is active. If you deselect it, everything works smooth.

In LR4 everything maybe a little bit slower, but I don't see the difference to LR3. Other bugs are more obvious (tone curves) and critical. But I really think (or hope) Adobe is on it.

I would appreciate it if Adobe would be more present even in this user forum to inform people about coming changes, hotfixes and bugfixes, because it seems to me, that everyone is complaining, but there are no solutions or hints that could help.