At wits end with Lightroom's slowness...

[kevin1789]

I've been using the Adobe suite for a loooonng time.  I think my first time in was with Photoshop 3.  Anyway, I'm really ready to hang it up with Light-room. I can not believe how unbelievable slow it is.  I have gone to numerous forums and done what feels like every suggestion on the planet to correct it.  I even went so far as to upgrade my entire machine to a blazing fast system (a few months ago) and it STILL RUNS SLOW as dirt.

Just flipping between images takes a painfully slow time. Typically I use XnView to initially go through all of my photos (deleting those I don't want) and then I switch to Lightroom to do my modifications.  The photos were initially stored on a corporate network server but when I thought maybe that was the problem, i took the time to move them all to a SSD drive on my local machine.  (I back them up every so often manually)  But it still runs slows.

As an example, I'll choose an image while in Develop mode.  Wait about 5 seconds for it to change to that image.  Then I hit the crop tool.  Wait another 10 seconds for that to appear.  Do my crop (which works fine while I'm cropping).  Hit Enter, crops quick enough.  If I want to do any other changes like temp or tint, forget it, I have to wait an eternity for the changes to appear.

Someone surely has an answer, because I can't bring myself to believe this is how people actually do their edits all day.

[kevin1789]

Maybe I should take a video to demonstrate?

[John Waller]

That would be helpful.

[John Waller]

Which version of Lightroom are you running?

Which operating system? What are your hard ware specs?

kevin1789 wrote:

As an example, I'll choose an image while in Develop mode. Wait about 5 seconds for it to change to that image. Then I hit the crop tool. Wait another 10 seconds for that to appear. Do my crop (which works fine while I'm cropping). Hit Enter, crops quick enough. If I want to do any other changes like temp or tint, forget it, I have to wait an eternity for the changes to appear.

Someone surely has an answer, because I can't bring myself to believe this is how people actually do their edits all day.

There's obviously something wrong somewhere. I've used Lightroom since version 1 and have never encountered such slowness on any machine I've had: Windows or Mac. It's always been fast and responsive for me.

[kevin1789]

Ok, I am running the latest and greatest of Lightroom.  So... looks like 2015.8 Release.

Windows 7. 64 bit (dang corporate)

Dell

Intel Xeon CPU E5-2609 @ 1.7 GHz (2 procs)

128 GB Mem

512 SSD (I have 3 in the machine actually) one on the OS, one scratch, one with the Photos on it.

Nvidia Quadro M5000

[Bob Somrak]

It seems to be a known problem of Lightroom being slow if you have a machine with more than four cores.

[dj_paige]

Also a known problem with 2 Xeon CPUs

[kevin1789]

Wait, you're kidding me... Lightroom is just not going to work simply because I have a beefy machine with more than one CPU and several cores?????

That can't seriously be it, please tell me Adobe isn't THAT bad.

[kevin1789 · Accepted solution]

Got it.  So, I did some searching about multi cores and processors (because I simply could not believe that was actually the case) and sure enough, not only do a lot of people have this problem but I came across a fix for it.  And I can't believe it, but it actually worked!!!  Lightroom is blazing fast now.  No stutter, no issues, it moves like it should.  Omg, finally.

Btw, to fix it, I went into command prompt and typed this:
start /affinity F cmd.exe /c "c:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Lightroom\lightroom.exe

Then started Lightroom.  Worked like a charm. 

source:
Lightroom: Slow performance on Xeon CPUs | Photoshop Family Customer Community