Is it normal for memory usage in Lightroom 3 to exceed 1.5GB, and what can I do about it?

Question

I'm currently running a 2008 unibody 15" MacBook Pro 2.53 with 320GB 5400 RPM hard drive and 4GB of system memory. I've upgraded to Snow Leopard and I'm running Lightroom 3 (64-bit).

I have two problems with my setup currently and I'm seeking recommendations on improving the situation:

• memory usage during processing exceeds 1.5GB
• time to move between images in Develop module is painfully slow

I've noticed that system memory usage typically goes up drastically during export to JPEG. Is this normal and how much memory is normal? It seems the larger the set of photos being exported, the greater the amount of memory is needed. I often find myself staring at Activity Monitor and shutting down all other applications to free up as much RAM as possible.

Then switching photos in the Develop module takes ages for me. I think this is a disk related issue so I'm thinking new larger 7200 RPM hard drive should sort that out. The current hard drive is a Hitachi 320GB 5400 RPM drive and it often seems to be the bottleneck when installing applications and writing data.

Any recommendations?

Answer 1

yes, that memory usage is normal converting to jpeg.

I"m finding 4Gig works fine. A few suggestions.

upgrade your drive to a 7200 drive. you're probably seeing I/O delays and a faster drive will help.

preferences->file handling, set the cache to a larger value. I use 25 gig.

optimize your catalog (under the file menu) every so often.

system performance will lag as your memory set grows. You can check /var/vm (using terminal):

[chuq-laptop:~] chuqui% cd /var/vm [chuq-laptop:/var/vm] chuqui% ls -l total 8912896 -rw------T 1 root wheel 4294967296 Aug 6 12:14 sleepimage -rw------- 1 root wheel 67108864 Aug 4 21:57 swapfile0 -rw------- 1 root wheel 67108864 Aug 7 16:57 swapfile1 -rw------- 1 root wheel 134217728 Aug 8 13:53 swapfile2 [chuq-laptop:/var/vm] chuqui%

if you see more than 3-4 swapfiles, you'll speed things up by rebooting and re-initalizing VM. If you haven't rebooted for a while, you may see 6-7 files especially if oyu've done a lot of image work, and that slows down the paging system (again, a 7200 RPM drive as your boot drive helps this as well...)

Answer 2

Memory usage is fine, as long as you have enough system memory to cover it. Once you start running out of memory, then you'll notice performance problems.

Switching between images in LR3 is a bit slow; I think there are enough users who report this issue that an update to lightroom will address it.

You've probably nailed it, the 5400 RPM hdd is your biggest bottleneck. That said, you should forego the 7200 RPM and go for an SSD. I replaced my 7200 RPM drive in my MBP with an SSD, and the MBP performance screams.

Answer 3

Regarding your second point, try increasing the 'Camera RAW cache settings' in the Preferences ('File editing' tab). This defaults to 1Gb and will determine if LR will need to generate the rendered preview from scratch or use a cached copy. In the Luminious Landscape tutorials, they have this set to 50Gb.

Answer 4

Using a combination of high performance hardware, including a quad core CPU (Intel i7), an SSD (for very, very fast loading times) and at least 4GB ram will make Lightroom faster.

The main ticker is your CPU as this is responsible for processing the RAW files. I'd place getting a fast hard drive or SSD (very highly recommended) around the same as more RAM.

I have an iMac 27" with an SSD and Lightroom 3.6 takes around 3-4 seconds to open, and this is primarily because of the SSD. Loading 18mp raw files takes only a few seconds due to the CPU.