Upgrades for Lightroom

NikonsandVstroms

With the D7100 my computer can handle 24 MP images but it's a bit of a pain, the export time does suck but I'd say it ranks below the preview rendering which takes a little bit making reviewing/ranking the images a bit of a pain so that is what I'd like to address.

So I have a couple paths but I'll give you guys the basics.

Right now I have a Workstation with a Xeon W3540 (2.93 GHz Quad core from 2010) 12 GB of ECC RAM and images are stored on a 3 TB 7,200 RPM drive.

One upgrade that is happening (I need it for another program I use for work) is going from 12 to 24 GB of RAM, right now IIRC it's ECC DDR3-10600, and it looks like I can go up a notch in speed and possibly ditching ECC (since it doubles the price) which would hurt stability a tiny bit but also give me an additional speed increase.

Will the increase in RAM help? Or is it an issue of the HD reading the file? Or CPU limited?

billg71

I think it's a processor limitation. I have a 3.2g Core 17 from around the same era as your Xeon and 24G of DDR1600 RAM, when importing and creating previews Lightroom pushes all 8 cores pretty hard but only uses about 8G of RAM max.

I have a D800 and those raw files run around 45MB, makes generating previews a "Go get a cup of coffee" experience.

Best,
Bill

basflt

have you tried using a card-reader ? , instead of downloading strait from camera ?

this is my procedure
i first copy RAW to harddisk in the final folder , then i import from disk into LR
it goes fast , and i dont have to move them again ; i set LR to add in their original location

cmason

I don't think you are processor bound. The Xeon's and i7 share a micro architecture, with the i5/7 adapting what was already established in your Xeon chip. The Xeon is built to take far more stress, heat etc, and also takes advantage of the ECC memory, which is important for mission critical software. However, Lightroom isn't mission critical and I suspect does not have routines to leverage ECC memory (otherwise it would be required).

Given that I have Lightroom running just fine on a Core2Duo with 3GB of RAM, I suspect more RAM won't significantly improve things either. Even on my system, the limiting factor is HDD access, as it is the slowest thing in my system (and yours). The RAM and your processor will help with rendering activities, but I suspect you have plenty of each, and even a move to i7 will not make a significant difference.

The best spend of $$ I think is to install a SSD, especially if you have a spare PCIe slot on your system board. SSD are very very fast, and the PCIe version is insanely fast, faster than SATA. But even SATA screams compared to a spinning disk. Adding an SSD will remove the HDD limitation on your system.

Run your Lightroom Library from the SSD, and if you can spare it, put the scratch disk there as well (cache, though I suspect with your RAM, your Lightroom never needs the hard drive cache).

NikonsandVstroms

cmason wrote: »

I don't think you are processor bound. The Xeon's and i7 share a micro architecture, with the i5/7 adapting what was already established in your Xeon chip. The Xeon is built to take far more stress, heat etc, and also takes advantage of the ECC memory, which is important for mission critical software. However, Lightroom isn't mission critical and I suspect does not have routines to leverage ECC memory (otherwise it would be required).

Given that I have Lightroom running just fine on a Core2Duo with 3GB of RAM, I suspect more RAM won't significantly improve things either. Even on my system, the limiting factor is HDD access, as it is the slowest thing in my system (and yours). The RAM and your processor will help with rendering activities, but I suspect you have plenty of each, and even a move to i7 will not make a significant difference.

The best spend of $$ I think is to install a SSD, especially if you have a spare PCIe slot on your system board. SSD are very very fast, and the PCIe version is insanely fast, faster than SATA. But even SATA screams compared to a spinning disk. Adding an SSD will remove the HDD limitation on your system.

Run your Lightroom Library from the SSD, and if you can spare it, put the scratch disk there as well (cache, though I suspect with your RAM, your Lightroom never needs the hard drive cache).

Thanks for the info I have a SSD but just for the system (240GB), I'll give that a shot....I still have 100GB free so I can test it out, must have had a brain fart to not try it with that.

NikonsandVstroms

Nope....I'm CPU limited :cry

I put up the meter widget in another window and it spikes whenever I go to preview the next image.

I have to go Xeon though since AFAIK the bios for my motherboard works just with them....and they offered the 6 core 3.33 GHz CPU I'm looking at stock so I know for sure it will work.