I need some help configuring Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4

[Daleus]

I have a client who has a spanking new PC and is using Lightroom 4 on Windows 7 64bit.  She has moved from a previous version on Windows XP, details unknown.

Lightroom has some very irritating behaviour that she has not encountered before.  When typing in a dialog or other text field within the program, it often suffers from some sort of "outage" as it "goes to sleep" for 15 to 20 seconds. Sometimes, Windows even displays the partly opaque "white screen", which generally indicates the system is trying to cope with demands on the system.

During the outage, the system continues to capture keystrokes as evidenced when it comes back to life - all keystrokes captured during the outage are subsequently shown in the text field.

Original observations led me to conclude that something like Windows Indexing might be playing a part - the behaviour very much looks as though the system is struggling to index something or struggling to search an index of something, perhaps a repository of auto-name-completion information. It's difficult to explain.

In order to eliminate some of the typical Windows irritations, a number of configuration changes have been made, but none have made a difference.  Co-workers have suggested that there might be some configuration options within the program itself that can be tweaked to smooth out the program's performance.  I am in the process of researching those at the Adobe site, specifically looking through their forums and some of their troubleshooting documents.

Specifically, one co-workers was able to resolve another clients Adobe problem (not the same software) by moving some resources like a disk-based cache to another physical hard drive.

As I am not at all familiar with the product, I'm hoping someone here may have gone through the same experience or might be a frequent user of the software and therefore be more aware of what's at play here.

As usual, any help, pointers, or references are very much appreciated!

[tomos]

I dont have lightroom.
I have seen similar problems with Firefox in the last two years

Sounds like a bug to me. You could try changing the 'Scratch disks' (Adobe's version of a pagefile). They seem to be pretty standard across the Adobe board.

THey're under Preferences. Here's what it looks like in Illustrator CS4 (Photoshop is similar - my ancient 1999 version has four scratch disks)

I need some help configuring Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4

change them to a drive that isnt being used - preferably on a second harddrive

[Daleus]

Hi tomos!

Thanks for the reply.  I have heard the idea about scratch disks and I'm looking into that now.

I spent the better part of the day yesterday, cruising through a single thread on the Adobe forums and it appears that a lot of people are having performance issues, although none of them seemed to be as specific as this one I'm trying to deal with.

Additionally, after 39 pages of back and forth discussion of the issues, it has largely degenerated into a "You're and idiot! No, *you're* an idiot!!" kind of nonsense. There is a lot of that in 39 pages, and it has been difficult to sift through the nonsense to find reasonable answers.

Disabling unused modules extensions plugins etc within the program, optimizing index files and excluding certain files and executables from the attention of a virus scanner are other options I'm pursuing.

My client has resolved herself to rolling back to LR3 if we can't resolve the issue - she finds the performance *so* poor that her stress level has gone through the roof because she can't provide the timely service she usually does.

Thanks again for the help!

[JavaJones]

Can you give examples of what text fields (or other actions) trigger the problem? Does it seem at all related to accessing the Windows file system, or is it far more Lightroom-specific, i.e. typing in pretty much any dialog (e.g. adding a keyword to a file) causes it? Are there any other delays or slowdowns, both in Lightroom, and other apps? I use LR4 regularly myself and, though there are occasional issues, it seems at least as fast as LR3 for me in most cases, and for some things it's faster.

- Oshyan

[Carol Haynes]

Doesn't seem to do it on my Windows 7 x64 system - maybe it is a driver issue?

[Daleus]

JavaJones:

The issue is most evident when typing keywords into "tag" like fields. Sorry, I don't have the LR nomenclature down.

On further questioning, she sees performance issues in other areas too - a general slowdown when compared to LR3.

She has been busy rebuilding previews and caches, two suggestions from the user forum at Adobe. Her co-worker is much more computer literate and also has some strategies to try and smooth out her work flow. He uses the program on a Mac at work and on a PC at home, and while he says the program is slower than previous versions, he hasn't had the performance issues she has had.

I have also added a number of file exceptions to the virus checker that could be part of the problem. As I understand it, when updating metadata there are several files that get updated and not just one, so the exceptions will hopefully eliminate any interference from the anti-virus program. In fact, the behaviour seems very much in line with that sort of file access.

Carol Haynes:

Yeah, we've checked for and installed the latest drivers for all components in her computer.

Another question that I have not been able to find an answer to, has to do with buffered vs. unbuffered RAM.

In an attempt to alleviate RAM issues, the machine was upgraded from 4 to 12 GBs of RAM, previous to my involvement.  I have noticed that the original 4G is unbuffered RAM, vs. the 8GB added on which is buffered RAM.

My question is, is mixing the two types fatal? If not, should one type precede the other?  In bygone days, it was said that slower RAM had to be installed so that it was accessed before faster RAM, to avoid problems.

Thanks for pitching in with suggestions on how to proceed!

[Carol Haynes]

I would check to see what kinds of RAM the computer actually supports. Look on the motherboard manufacturer's website for details and a manual.

[Stoic Joker]

Why not fire up Performance Monitor so you can see (either logged or realtime) how much of what is being run out of when.

[JavaJones]

Hmm, odd that it freezes typing into text fields. I would definitely try to do some performance profiling while testing that specific issue. The A/V could easily be causing it, or some other active monitoring process (backup, search indexing, etc, etc.), but only by monitoring CPU + file accesses are probably going to be able to tell. Also far as I know the meta data changes aren't immediately written to disk, so it seems odd it would slow things down *right as you're typing*. Is there any global text-related software installed/active, such as a system-wide spell checker, text expander, multi-language switcher, etc?

- Oshyan