Thanks for the detailed information. I really enjoy the “geeky” super-speed tips like this, and I appreciate your input.

-Scott Rouse

Generally, a hard drive will be fastest while writing to the outer edges of the drive’s platters, and performance will decrease when writing closer to the center of the platters. For this reason, drives fill up from the edges toward the center. The specifics of at which points and to what degree performance is cut is drive model-dependant, but generally speaking, the last parts of the disk will have about half the read and write transfer performance of the first parts.

Typical examples of this can be seen in more detailed tests of hard drives, for instance http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hdd-7200,2430-6.html (just a test of three disks I chose at random to illustrate the point).
To get the absolute maximum speed from your disk, you shouldn’t normally use much more than 20-25% of the disk, the rest should be unused space. Getting disks that are four times as big as “needed” is expensive, of course, and exactly how much you want to fill your disk, and in other words how much performance degradation you will suffer, will be an individual question. But when you’ve passed 50-60% of your disk space, this starts to be a real factor.

Finally, this relates to traditional, mechanical hard drives. The story for SSDs is far more complex. While they theoretically don’t suffer any degradation depending on what memory addresses are written, the controllers on current SSDs (especially MLC-based disks) tend to run in to a lot of optimization problems with data writes once free space starts to get scarce. So, expensive as they may be, SSDs will also give you the best performance while they are primarily empty.

I have also found that leaving the XMP writing selected causes a very noticeable performance hit. My simple solution is to leave it off and, when I have finished with a good sized batch of images I select them all in Grid view and hit Command S (just like “Save”) on the Mac or Control S on Windows and LR writes them all then. I look at it like directing LR to generate previews before you start editing. I can walk away and do something else and the XMP files get written.

Greg

I’m incredibly appreciative of yours and Scott’s time, thought, expertise, and responsiveness to my Lightroom issues.

Best,
Alison

If I might jump in here. I think your experiencing the difference in processing time between say a 20 megabyte raw file and a 200 Megabyte tif. Huge files take more ram and more processing power. Even something as simple as thumbnail generation is going to grow slower as your file sizes grow larger.

Two thoughts:
1. Stronger hardware. Ideally, we would want to work with your medium format high-res scans (thats what I am guessing these are) on a quad-core tower with 10+ gigabytes of ram, a 64-bit operating system, and an array of fast hard drives.

2. Do you have the “Automatically write changes to XMP switch” turned on? Especially with giant tif / psd files this is always going to make Lightroom slower. Safer, and more user friendly, but noticeably slower.

I know this doesn’t solve your problems, but perhaps it clears up a little bit of the mystery. If I may add one more thing– this is exactly the sort of performance issue that Lightroom 3 should improve.

best wishes,

David

Unfortunately I’m still having “rolling ball” problems, but at least I’ve been able to isolate it, so I’m hoping you might have some further insight. It (this incredible sluggishness) only happens when the images I’m looking at are scanned images rather than digital capture images. Example: if I bring up a folder of 100 images scanned from film, Library Module, Grid View, and then I try and do something so mundane as deleting a keyword, the process might take 15 seconds. Same scenario with a folder of digital capture images displayed on my screen would be 1 second. Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Alison

Thanks again for all of your help, including your email answers to the questions I posed to David.

Best,
Alison

Thanks, Alison!

Glad we were able to help.

Yes, RAM and “memory” typically mean the same thing in computer terms. With that Mac Pro, you’d probably greatly benefit from increasing the amount of RAM in the machine. It’s something that’s relatively easy to do yourself.

I typically buy aftermarket RAM from Other World Computing or Crucial.com.

I also sent you an email yesterday answering a few other questions that you’d posed to David. Hope you got it.

Thanks,
Scott

FYI, I have 4GB of “Memory” – I’m assuming that’s RAM?

I know that’s really frustrating. How much RAM do you have in your Mac Pro?

Are you running Lightroom in 64-bit mode? Find Lightroom in the Applications Folder, right-click on it and choose “Get Info.” If the “Open in 32-bit mode” box it checked, uncheck it. Restart Lightroom and see if that makes any difference for you.

-Scott