On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 11:41 AM, Godfrey DiGiorgi <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 6:01 AM, Bruce Walker <[email protected]> wrote: >> Godfrey, my Catalog folder is on the internal startup drive. Free >> space on the startup drive is 132 Gig. My images are all on an >> external 2G FireWire drive. >> >> I believe I'm following all the performance recommendations. I've >> tried other arrangements and this seems to work best. >> >> AFAIK, the paging is occurring because I've run out of physical RAM >> and the OS is trying to make do with virtual. I watch the System >> Memory tab in the Activity Monitor frequently and I can see the free >> space shrink away. I also see Lr's Real Mem, Virtual Mem usage climb >> slowly into the stratosphere. Lr starts off using 470Meg of each, >> eventually reaching 3 Gig each after an hour or two of previewing, and >> a few dives into the Develop module. >> >> The only other app that's as bad as that (well besides Photoshop) is Safari. >> :-/ > > I'll agree that Photoshop and Safari rank for my top memory hogs too. ! > > I see similar behavior in terms of LR taking more and RAM to operate > as it works, up to about the 3-4G level, but then no more. The > Activity Monitor might be 50% blue at that point with very little to > no green left (on a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo machine with 8G RAM). The system > is obviously paging. > > HOWEVER, everything continues to work well. When I exit LR, within a > few moments the RAM is 50% green again. The fact that the system is > paging doesn't stop it from operating correctly and without > hesitation. Is your system acting aberrantly, aside from what you see > in Activity Monitor? I normally don't have Activity Monitor active as > I have not found much need to investigate and analyze memory and cpu > operations most of the time.
The reason I have Activity Monitor up so often is to give me an early warning that resources are getting low and it's going to start paging and becoming too sluggish to endure. The system is otherwise working fine, as fine as it can be with no remaining RAM. It recovers right away when I exit from Lr -- all the RAM that Lr was hogging is returned to the pool. What invariably causes it to hesitate and generally become a slug is that Lr can't get any additional space without VM paging. Paging is slow, of course, because it's off a disk. And then to top it off, Time Machine always kicks in at the most inopportune moment and starts trying to take more RAM *and* making all the drives busy. Sigh. First-World problems. :) > Perhaps the use of 6G RAM instead of the more commonly used 4G and 8G > configurations is itself the issue. Perhaps the memory controller > isn't as efficient in scavenging and doing reallocations with that > memory size. I ran Lightroom 3 on a 4G MacBook Air with results > similar to what I see on the (older) 8G MacBook Pro last evening. > Memory on the MBA was certainly much tighter ... however, I previewed > 400 18Mpixel raw images, edited a couple, etc, without any problems. I > then switched to LR4 and found similar performance and slightly better > memory usage, when I looked. It was outrageously bad for me before I increased from 4 Gig to 6 Gig. So it works better now, but is still darned annoying. > In general, I don't really look so closely at the analytics unless I > am experiencing a serious problem. And usually, with either LR or PS > (and Safari!), occasionally closing the app and reopening it rather > than working a several hour session non-stop really helps as they do > use a tremendous amount of system resources. Indeed that's what I end up doing -- stopping and restarting the trouble-prone apps -- but I was lamenting the necessity to do that. If Lr handled RAM better, it wouldn't keep claiming more and more of it while working; it would release some when done with it. > -- > Godfrey > godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
