LR import recently slow?

TomFid · Feb 6, 2021

I'm using Lightroom Classic (the latest, regularly updated, and recently with a clean reinstall).

I've always found LR imports slow, but tolerably so. My impression is that it takes about twice as long as a finder copy, which seems like a lot of extra for fairly limited processing, but not worth bothering about.

But lately ... since about December? ... I'm finding that imports are really unresponsive. It takes about 3 seconds just to open the Import dialog normally, but it can take 30 seconds if I have a card in the reader. (That's not counting the time to render previews - that's just loading the window to the point that you can select a source.)

Is anyone else seeing this behavior? My first thought was some issue with USB drivers, but behavior in Explorer seems fine. What's next on the list of possible issues?

S Castle · Feb 6, 2021

TomFid said:
I'm finding that imports are really unresponsive. It takes about 3 seconds just to open the Import dialog normally, but it can take 30 seconds if I have a card in the reader. (That's not counting the time to render previews - that's just loading the window to the point that you can select a source.)

Is anyone else seeing this behavior? My first thought was some issue with USB drivers, but behavior in Explorer seems fine. What's next on the list of possible issues?

Acronis Active Protection? Sounds like it.

skyglider · Feb 6, 2021

TomFid said:
I'm using Lightroom Classic (the latest, regularly updated, and recently with a clean reinstall).

I've always found LR imports slow, but tolerably so. My impression is that it takes about twice as long as a finder copy, which seems like a lot of extra for fairly limited processing, but not worth bothering about.

But lately ... since about December? ... I'm finding that imports are really unresponsive. It takes about 3 seconds just to open the Import dialog normally, but it can take 30 seconds if I have a card in the reader. (That's not counting the time to render previews - that's just loading the window to the point that you can select a source.)

Is anyone else seeing this behavior? My first thought was some issue with USB drivers, but behavior in Explorer seems fine. What's next on the list of possible issues?

Are you importing from the SD card reader using LR? Or are you copying the pictures on the SD card to a folder on your internal drive using Windows File Explorer and then importing from that folder into LR?

Have you noticed that opening or saving stuff with your word processor, picture viewer or anything else, are having delays?

TomFid · Feb 6, 2021

skyglider said:
TomFid said:

I'm using Lightroom Classic (the latest, regularly updated, and recently with a clean reinstall).

I've always found LR imports slow, but tolerably so. My impression is that it takes about twice as long as a finder copy, which seems like a lot of extra for fairly limited processing, but not worth bothering about.

But lately ... since about December? ... I'm finding that imports are really unresponsive. It takes about 3 seconds just to open the Import dialog normally, but it can take 30 seconds if I have a card in the reader. (That's not counting the time to render previews - that's just loading the window to the point that you can select a source.)

Is anyone else seeing this behavior? My first thought was some issue with USB drivers, but behavior in Explorer seems fine. What's next on the list of possible issues?

Click to expand...

Are you importing from the SD card reader using LR? Or are you copying the pictures on the SD card to a folder on your internal drive using Windows File Explorer and then importing from that folder into LR?

Normally, I go straight from SD to LR. Lately, LR has been so sluggish that I've done an Explorer copy of the card first, if I'm in a hurry.

skyglider said:
Have you noticed that opening or saving stuff with your word processor, picture viewer or anything else, are having delays?

No - but then this is more or less a dedicated photo machine, so I might not. I should probably spend a little time profiling what happens during an import.

I probably should have mentioned that the catalog is on an SSD (Samsung 970) with plenty of room and the machine has plenty of memory (32Gb). It's a 4 or 5 year old workstation, so not the latest USB subsystem, but dual Xeons and pretty quick for most tasks.

TomFid · Feb 6, 2021

S Castle said:
TomFid said:

I'm finding that imports are really unresponsive. It takes about 3 seconds just to open the Import dialog normally, but it can take 30 seconds if I have a card in the reader. (That's not counting the time to render previews - that's just loading the window to the point that you can select a source.)

Is anyone else seeing this behavior? My first thought was some issue with USB drivers, but behavior in Explorer seems fine. What's next on the list of possible issues?

Click to expand...

Acronis Active Protection? Sounds like it.

Doesn't have it, but interesting thought - I'll check av activity.

S Castle · Feb 6, 2021

TomFid said:
S Castle said:

Acronis Active Protection? Sounds like it.

Click to expand...

Doesn't have it, but interesting thought - I'll check av activity.

Yeah, I did a quick check on my system with Acronis and Ps is excluded from Active Protection but not LrC; no issues with the latter. But then the photos are already moved from card to SSD. LrC does seem sluggish in other ways but not importing photos.

I have LrC as part of the photo package but don't use it. I usually use ACR as part of Ps.

Performance Monitor might be able to help find out what's going on.

skyglider · Feb 6, 2021

TomFid said:
skyglider said:

TomFid said:

I'm using Lightroom Classic (the latest, regularly updated, and recently with a clean reinstall).

I've always found LR imports slow, but tolerably so. My impression is that it takes about twice as long as a finder copy, which seems like a lot of extra for fairly limited processing, but not worth bothering about.

But lately ... since about December? ... I'm finding that imports are really unresponsive. It takes about 3 seconds just to open the Import dialog normally, but it can take 30 seconds if I have a card in the reader. (That's not counting the time to render previews - that's just loading the window to the point that you can select a source.)

Is anyone else seeing this behavior? My first thought was some issue with USB drivers, but behavior in Explorer seems fine. What's next on the list of possible issues?

Click to expand...

Are you importing from the SD card reader using LR? Or are you copying the pictures on the SD card to a folder on your internal drive using Windows File Explorer and then importing from that folder into LR?

Click to expand...

Normally, I go straight from SD to LR. Lately, LR has been so sluggish that I've done an Explorer copy of the card first, if I'm in a hurry.

I was going to suggest using Explorer to copy from the SD card to a folder on an internal drive first to see if the slow import is because of your USB connection to your card reader. But I see from you response that you've already done that.

TomFid said:
TomFid said:

Have you noticed that opening or saving stuff with your word processor, picture viewer or anything else, are having delays?

Click to expand...

No - but then this is more or less a dedicated photo machine, so I might not. I should probably spend a little time profiling what happens during an import.

I had a problem of delayed saving from my word processor to the data HDD, and at first thought it was a Libre Writer problem. Then I noticed other things were getting slow and determined that my data HDD was the cause. So I was wondering if your problem is not a LR problem.

TomFid said:
I probably should have mentioned that the catalog is on an SSD (Samsung 970) with plenty of room and the machine has plenty of memory (32Gb). It's a 4 or 5 year old workstation, so not the latest USB subsystem, but dual Xeons and pretty quick for most tasks.

May not be where the catalog is stored but rather where the photos are stored.

Ken Seals · Feb 6, 2021

TomFid said:
I probably should have mentioned that the catalog is on an SSD (Samsung 970) with plenty of room and the machine has plenty of memory (32Gb). It's a 4 or 5 year old workstation, so not the latest USB subsystem, but dual Xeons and pretty quick for most tasks.

This implies the image files go to another disk during import. The SSD speed will be helpful as LrC creates the previews which are on the SSD with the catalog, but the copy process to the disk where the image files go will not be faster because of the SSD.

I'm running LrC V10.1. I import from SD and XQD cards and see no slowdown. My catalog and previews are on a NVME SSD and the image files go to an 8TB 7200 rpm HD.

rmexpress22 · Feb 6, 2021

Only thing I can think of is if you have a device, USB, mechanical hard drive, etc..., and it takes some time for it to allow LR to scan it for images, or for LR to check if it can be mounted.

Oddly enough, for me, R5 files seem to be snappier than 5D4 files in LR classic.

TomFid · Mar 24, 2021

I finally figured out that my problems were specific to a new SDXC card. Finder copies from that card worked fine, but for some reason LR struggled with it. I don't know if there's something different about the XC protocol or what, but upgrading my card reader solved the problem.

LR is still about half the speed of a finder copy, but it's doing more, so I can forgive that.

Batdude · Mar 25, 2021

TomFid said:
I'm using Lightroom Classic (the latest, regularly updated, and recently with a clean reinstall).

I've always found LR imports slow, but tolerably so. My impression is that it takes about twice as long as a finder copy, which seems like a lot of extra for fairly limited processing, but not worth bothering about.

But lately ... since about December? ... I'm finding that imports are really unresponsive. It takes about 3 seconds just to open the Import dialog normally, but it can take 30 seconds if I have a card in the reader. (That's not counting the time to render previews - that's just loading the window to the point that you can select a source.)

Is anyone else seeing this behavior? My first thought was some issue with USB drivers, but behavior in Explorer seems fine. What's next on the list of possible issues?

No I'm not seeing this behavior because I didn't do a "clean reinstall".

Did you write down the settings before reinstalling it? When you click on the import tab what is the current LR setting for Build Previews?

Instead of messing around without knowing what you are doing is best to instead call Adobe's tech support and ask them to help you set it up. They can even log into your computer and they will do it for you. Also stop messing around with other people's guesses that the problem could be this or that because their assumptions might not have anything to do with anything.

DerKeyser · Mar 25, 2021

TomFid said:
I finally figured out that my problems were specific to a new SDXC card. Finder copies from that card worked fine, but for some reason LR struggled with it. I don't know if there's something different about the XC protocol or what, but upgrading my card reader solved the problem.

LR is still about half the speed of a finder copy, but it's doing more, so I can forgive that.

Yes Lightroom is a bit of a dog when it comes to import speed, but considering that it scans all the files on the card to show the selection preview, copies all the files to local disk, and renders a preview of the file to be stored in cache (could be a LARGE preview depending on your settings), it’s actually decently quick about it if you are using a current version LRC.

The most important part is that Adobe fixed the import logic to actually use and scale on modern hardware.

So the import speed is now VERY dependant on you having a FAST cardreader and scales almost liniearly with the amout of CPU cores you have available.
In Lightroom 6.0 fx. None of that mattered, It would just use about 2 CPU cores and about 4Gb RAM, and cardspeed, remaining corecount and memory didn’t matter/was left unused.

TomFid · Mar 25, 2021

Batdude said:
TomFid said:

I'm using Lightroom Classic (the latest, regularly updated, and recently with a clean reinstall).

I've always found LR imports slow, but tolerably so. My impression is that it takes about twice as long as a finder copy, which seems like a lot of extra for fairly limited processing, but not worth bothering about.

But lately ... since about December? ... I'm finding that imports are really unresponsive. It takes about 3 seconds just to open the Import dialog normally, but it can take 30 seconds if I have a card in the reader. (That's not counting the time to render previews - that's just loading the window to the point that you can select a source.)

Is anyone else seeing this behavior? My first thought was some issue with USB drivers, but behavior in Explorer seems fine. What's next on the list of possible issues?

Click to expand...

No I'm not seeing this behavior because I didn't do a "clean reinstall".

Did you write down the settings before reinstalling it? When you click on the import tab what is the current LR setting for Build Previews?

Either the import settings are stored at the catalog level, or they're in preferences that are preserved across a reinstall (unless you manually remove a config file). I don't reacall and don't have it running at the moment to check. But either way, that can't be the cause, because (a) I know the settings well enough to check, and (b) I did the reinstall after the slowdown.

Batdude said:
Instead of messing around without knowing what you are doing is best to instead call Adobe's tech support and ask them to help you set it up. They can even log into your computer and they will do it for you. Also stop messing around with other people's guesses that the problem could be this or that because their assumptions might not have anything to do with anything.

Does Adobe actually answer the phone? I have to admit I've never attempted to use LR support, but I'd be astonished if they were any good. My experience with bug ticketing is that it took several years for them to (partially) fix the dynamiclinkmediamanager video cache explosion bug. I've been through the "well, did you plug it in?" idiot checking enough times that I would always bet on crowdsourced ideas from this forum over tech support. In any case, since the problem was hardware-related, I don't think Adobe could have done much. But it would be nice to know they were competent - I'd be more inclined to recommend LR to friends & family.

Batdude · Mar 25, 2021

TomFid said:
Batdude said:

TomFid said:

I'm using Lightroom Classic (the latest, regularly updated, and recently with a clean reinstall).

I've always found LR imports slow, but tolerably so. My impression is that it takes about twice as long as a finder copy, which seems like a lot of extra for fairly limited processing, but not worth bothering about.

But lately ... since about December? ... I'm finding that imports are really unresponsive. It takes about 3 seconds just to open the Import dialog normally, but it can take 30 seconds if I have a card in the reader. (That's not counting the time to render previews - that's just loading the window to the point that you can select a source.)

Is anyone else seeing this behavior? My first thought was some issue with USB drivers, but behavior in Explorer seems fine. What's next on the list of possible issues?

Click to expand...

No I'm not seeing this behavior because I didn't do a "clean reinstall".

Did you write down the settings before reinstalling it? When you click on the import tab what is the current LR setting for Build Previews?

Click to expand...

Either the import settings are stored at the catalog level, or they're in preferences that are preserved across a reinstall (unless you manually remove a config file). I don't reacall and don't have it running at the moment to check. But either way, that can't be the cause, because (a) I know the settings well enough to check, and (b) I did the reinstall after the slowdown.

TomFid said:

Instead of messing around without knowing what you are doing is best to instead call Adobe's tech support and ask them to help you set it up. They can even log into your computer and they will do it for you. Also stop messing around with other people's guesses that the problem could be this or that because their assumptions might not have anything to do with anything.

Click to expand...

Does Adobe actually answer the phone? I have to admit I've never attempted to use LR support, but I'd be astonished if they were any good. My experience with bug ticketing is that it took several years for them to (partially) fix the dynamiclinkmediamanager video cache explosion bug. I've been through the "well, did you plug it in?" idiot checking enough times that I would always bet on crowdsourced ideas from this forum over tech support. In any case, since the problem was hardware-related, I don't think Adobe could have done much. But it would be nice to know they were competent - I'd be more inclined to recommend LR to friends & family.

Yes they will pick up the phone and they will help you. Last time I called them it was last year and I think i waited 15 or maybe 30 minutes, but hey that's not bad right now due to the pandemic. The other day I contacted Honeywell thermostat and they picked up in an hour. That really sucked. If you don't like waiting you can leave a voice mail with Adobe and they will call you back when is your turn.

The number is 800-833-6687. I hope you find the problem good luck.

Batdude · Mar 25, 2021

TomFid said:
I finally figured out that my problems were specific to a new SDXC card. Finder copies from that card worked fine, but for some reason LR struggled with it. I don't know if there's something different about the XC protocol or what, but upgrading my card reader solved the problem.

Oh good. Got a link to that SDXC card?

TomFid said:
LR is still about half the speed of a finder copy, but it's doing more, so I can forgive that.

TomFid · Mar 25, 2021

The card is a Lexar Pro UHS II,

Loading…

smile.amazon.com

The reader that solved the problem is,

Loading…

smile.amazon.com

It's a cheapo that's not even UHS II aware, but seems to do the trick.

I think the problem was not card capacity, but rather that my old readers weren't UHS aware, so they were using the legacy pinout. Somehow LR triggered a compatibility issue that Win Explorer did not.

Batdude · Mar 25, 2021

TomFid said:
The card is a Lexar Pro UHS II,

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NLWGKT4/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The reader that solved the problem is,

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B006T9B6R2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It's a cheapo that's not even UHS II aware, but seems to do the trick.

I think the problem was not card capacity, but rather that my old readers weren't UHS aware, so they were using the legacy pinout. Somehow LR triggered a compatibility issue that Win Explorer did not.

Very interesting. Thanks.

TomFid · Dec 9, 2022

Well, I hope it's the conclusion. I've been limping along with intermittent performance problems, but without a lot of time to troubleshoot.

Finally I got serious and started monitoring system performance during various kinds of LR tasks. I discovered that episodes of bad performance were happening when the Performance Monitor indicated that Cached memory usage had grown as large as physical RAM (64GB). Digging further with the Microsoft RamMap tool, it seemed that most of the bloat was memory mapped files. Normal browsing/tagging use of LR would increase cache by about 100mb a minute.

This immediately made me think that I was getting death by virtual memory paging, maybe triggered by an LR memory leak. So I checked the system VM settings. It turns out that VM was disabled by setting the pagefile size to 0. I can't imagine how it got that way, but after restoring it to "Auto" everything seems fine. It's like getting a new computer really. I'm not sure what creates all the mapped files, or why they don't get cleaned up with VM=0, but memory seems well behaved now.

TomFid · Jan 2, 2023

TomFid said:
Well, I hope it's the conclusion. I've been limping along with intermittent performance problems, but without a lot of time to troubleshoot.

Finally I got serious and started monitoring system performance during various kinds of LR tasks. I discovered that episodes of bad performance were happening when the Performance Monitor indicated that Cached memory usage had grown as large as physical RAM (64GB). Digging further with the Microsoft RamMap tool, it seemed that most of the bloat was memory mapped files. Normal browsing/tagging use of LR would increase cache by about 100mb a minute.

This immediately made me think that I was getting death by virtual memory paging, maybe triggered by an LR memory leak. So I checked the system VM settings. It turns out that VM was disabled by setting the pagefile size to 0. I can't imagine how it got that way, but after restoring it to "Auto" everything seems fine. It's like getting a new computer really. I'm not sure what creates all the mapped files, or why they don't get cleaned up with VM=0, but memory seems well behaved now.

Actually, this is a near miss. The problem started again after a day. Cached memory overflow was definitely the defining symptom, but the culprit turned out to be EasUS Todo Backup.

I discovered this via a clean boot in which I disabled all non-Microsoft services (see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...-windows-da2f9573-6eec-00ad-2f8a-a97a1807f3dd ). Then I re-enabled things by halves until the problem resurfaced.

I've switched backup programs and things have been fine for a couple weeks.

LR import recently slow?

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