Thank god for this article. My wife is a photographer making heavy use of Lightroom on her 17" MBP and has been experiencing these exact problems for a year or two. We've tried everything to fix it, rebuilding the system from scratch, to no avail.
She had 4 gigs of RAM which we recently upped to 8gigs which reduced the severity of the problem.
I really, really hope this is something that gets fixed in Mountain Lion. Tasks that should take 20 seconds take 10 minutes or more.
She's not crazy, but she is running Adobe software on a machine without sufficient RAM. Adobe installs gods own cache of really crappy stuff that starts up at boot and who knows what kind of kexts they shove in there to make your machine unstable.
I won't run any adobe software after I saw the abuse they did to my machine.
Apple basically gets a free pass if you're running Adobe. This is a company that ships crap.
Also, you're probably starving it of sufficient memory. If Lightroom is up, you're probably out of memory, even with 8GB.
I'd recommend getting rid of Lightroom and going to Aperture, or given aperture is a bit behind the curve, upgrading to 16GB of RAM and seeing what adobe-installed processes and KEXTS you can get rid of.
Moving from Lightroom to Aperture's not a possibility, given the workflow, experience, and catalog data she's built up in Lightroom over the years.
Upgrading from 4 to 8 gigs last week helped a lot. I'd go to 16 except her MBP won't support it.
I'd love to get her on an SSD but she's on a 1tb drive now and it would be hard for her to try and fit into a 512gb SSD now (especially now that she's on the D800 with huge video files and 72mb raw photo files.
It's frustrating that it will work find some of the time and not others, implying that the problem could be fixed with better memory management. I do hope that a serious Adobe competitor arises to force Adobe to make its apps faster and more resource efficient.
>Moving from Lightroom to Aperture's not a possibility, given the workflow, experience, and catalog data she's built up in Lightroom over the years.
Forget the advice. Lightroom is faster, as noted in every review of both programs. Try Aperture yourself with the demo to find out.
Working with 10+ megapixel images is always going to be slow, and with camera advances, it will get worse every time your wife gets a higher resolution camera --so comparing it with how it used to be when you have 6mp files is not exactly correct.
>Apple basically gets a free pass if you're running Adobe. This is a company that ships crap.
Yes, millions of professional designers using Adobe software are idiots. You are just making BS claims with no support whatsoever. Try opening a huge image in Photoshop and any other editor and see which behaves better and faster.
The only "crap" stuff Adobe does is mostly whatever it acquired from Macromedia.
>I'd recommend getting rid of Lightroom and going to Aperture, or given aperture is a bit behind the curve, upgrading to 16GB of RAM and seeing what adobe-installed processes and KEXTS you can get rid of.
And I'd recommend not listening to BS anecodotal suggestions on the internets. Read a couple of professionally done reviews and benchmarks. All state that Lightroom is faster and more efficient that Aperture. Aperture got a little better in the last version, but still no match to Lightroom.
(I'm not bashing Apple, I like both. Things are what they are though, and yes I've tried both of them.
Thing is: working with freaking huge images, like hundreds of 16 megapixel RAW files, will be slow, whatever you use.
She had 4 gigs of RAM which we recently upped to 8gigs which reduced the severity of the problem.
I really, really hope this is something that gets fixed in Mountain Lion. Tasks that should take 20 seconds take 10 minutes or more.
It's good to know she's not crazy.