LR3 and Ram

[ROGERWILCO357]

Will upgrading the RAM on my MBP help with the lag I get ? I have the MBP with 4 gigs of 1067 MHz DDR3 and with 2.53 Ghz C2D..I want to upgrade the ram again to 8 gigs will this help ? Or is it a waste of money?

[Staszek]

I noticed a big resource difference when I went to 8gb ram on an i7.

[sprials]

I don't use mac, but you should be able to get an idea from your process list of how much RAM its using. I plan on upgrading to 6 gb soon from 4, mainly for lightroom. It needs 2-3 gb, and other things are running. SSD also helps too

[Moppie]

LR3 very rarely needs more than 4gb of ram, but it is very processor intensive.
More ram might make a small difference, but most of the lag your seeing will be from the CPU. The core 2 duo is now 3 generations and several years out of date. It will be very slow at rendering, exporting and making adjustments on 5dII files.

[silvrr]

I was in the same boat as you with my Laptop. It was choking on 7D raw files and thing were just taking to long, however, ram was never an issue with the 4GB it has. I decided to build a new desktop and the changes were well worth it. While the desktop has 8GB of ram I haven't seen above 4GB get used yet I don't think. Lightroom is really processor intensive as moopie pointed out.

Here are some benchmarks with a similary speced laptop to yours and a more modern system.
http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n143/silvrr600/Capture-9.jpg

[110yd]

Unless I missed something you did not say what OS you are running. If you are running a 32 bit OS your RAM is limited to 3.25 GB. If you are running Win 7 64 bit, the limitation on your RAM will be the motherboard (Windows 7 64 bit will support up to 192 GB)

Regards,

110yd

[René Damkot]

Will upgrading the RAM on my MBP help with the lag I get ?


What lag (as in: when is it occurring)?

Find out what the bottleneck is (likely the CPU, unless you frequently get a Beachball when switching between applications: Ram could help there)

IMO, 4GB is about the absolute lowest amount of Ram I'd like to use on OSX when running LR and anything else at all.

[tim]

LR rarely uses more than 2-3GB of RAM for me. The extra RAM is used as a disk cache, which can help performance. For example once I load a set of say 8GB RAW files once it doesn't touch the disk to get them again as they're in the RAM cache - I have 16GB RAM. 8GB wouldn't help that much unless you work with limited sets of images - I work with about 12GB of RAW files at a time usually.

In your case i'm pretty sure it's the old Core2Duo processor that's the bottleneck.

[mtuepker]

Just went through the same thing myself. Was using win 32 bit w/ an i7 and 4gb of ram (obviously not using the full 4 since it was 32 bit). Upgraded to win 64 bit and 8gb and it's a night and day difference with lightroom. I use to get awful lag while using the brush tool and frequent out of memory errors while exporting..both of which are gone. Maybe just upgrading to 64 bit would have resolved this as well, I can't say for sure.

[BrandonSi]

LR is massively CPU intensive.. While extra 4GB will help, it won't be an amazing difference by any means.

If you're doing a lot of editing / processing, you really need to move to quad core.

Both my desktop and laptop are core i7 + 8GB ram.. I've even got an SSD for my Widows 74 x64 drive, and LR can still choke on some 5DII files, especially when rendering previews.

I give you kudos for being patient enough to edit on a C2D.

[ROGERWILCO357]

Well put in my 8 gigs of ddr3 and this machine rocks no more pin wheels and the os is Mac lionX and back to the Lr3 and CS5 both open and running so smoothly just cannot believe how smooth this machine is running both hog programs ..love it more now...
this is a MBP with 2.53GHz C2D with 8 gigs of DDR3 1067 MHz Ram man i tried running this software on my sony and toshiba and like this software on the mac 200% better just feels like work on any other platform..

[tim]

Now all you need to do is distribute your full stops more appropriately so your posts are more easily readable :p

[Methodical]

One thing I've found is that when things are moving a bit slower, I test for integrity and optimize my libraries and things clear up.