Why does LR export take so long?

[rnourse]

I have 113 cr2 files in a collection and I want to export them to jpegs. I tell LR 1.4 to export and its bee running for 12+ hours now!

I know its working because the minimized LR icon in the taskbar says 81% and I can see a bunch of jpegs in the destination folder but my lord this is slow!

Machine is a 2 Ghz Dell with 1GB RAM and everything else in LR runs just fine... machine is not doing anything else right now, just the LR export. The pictures have had some processing done and I did save them as "quality = 100%" but that really doesnt explain 12+ hours of export time.

Has anyone else seen this?

[rnourse]

And yes... I did do some searches but dont see any hits!

[30D'er]

rnourse,

How big are the CR2 files?

It could be the 1GB of RAM. I think the min to run LR is 2GB. (Someone may want to correct me on this)

[aussieskier]

No, the minimum isn't 2gigs, but more ram is helpful. That doesn't seem to explain the problem. I have done a lot of work on an older box with 1 gig of ram and I have never had a problem.

It seems rather strange that it is doing that.

I would try restarting your computer and see if that helps. Sometime things just go haywire in there :confused:

[breadandbutter]

I had the same problem with my laptop before. The way I solved it is using a laptop cooler and problem solved.

It exports much quicker now.

[Glenn NK]

I had the same problem with my laptop before. The way I solved it is using a laptop cooler and problem solved.

It exports much quicker now.

Which reminds me to dust out my PC again - when the CPU runs hot, it runs slower.

But still, 12 hours seems a "bit" much.

Other questions: Defragged lately? HDD nearly full?

[eddarr]

Is it actually working or is it hung up?
How many other programs, i.e. crap, running in the background?

[basroil]

Is it actually working or is it hung up?
How many other programs, i.e. crap, running in the background?

i'de also suggest using good old task manager and turning off all those damned indexing programs, each one of those takes up 20mb and 5% cpu when files are being accessed. also, 113 files for export should take less than 45min even with 5d or mkii files, no matter how many LR edits you made. on my laptop (2.0gh core duo, 2gb ram, really slow hdd), it takes about 20min for 240 1d mkiii files, and that's cuz all photos are on an external drive and files are being written to a different drive. in your case, LR is either hung or slowed down by garbage on your comp. like any desk, you have to clean desktops off and leave only what you need ;)

[BigBlueDodge]

My experience with Lightroom is that it is just a slow application. So much so that at times it is almost unusable. It's a v1.0 product, and I'm sure Adobe's focus was on putting functionality in the product rather than performance. I would expect that 2.0 version of Lightroom to be faster.

[rnourse]

The raw files are 6-10mb and the jpegs are coming out right around the same size...

I know its working because I can see things progressing both as a % and in terms of the number of output files which are increasing. I'm not going to kill it at this stage but its still chugging away!

perfmon suggests I'm pegged on CPU (single core 2.0 Ghz P4) but there's a good chance this may be a symptom of insufficient memory. I'm seeing significant pagefile usage so I might be spending my cpu on paging things in and out to disk!

[EOS MAN1]

I have had issues similar to this in lightroom. Especially when I want to make contact sheets of tons of CR2 files. Lightroom doesn't like a lot of work. It hangs when you over load it. If try again with half the number of files, it should work. Just split the work into two sets.

[Ephemeral]

My experience with Lightroom is that it is just a slow application. So much so that at times it is almost unusable. It's a v1.0 product, and I'm sure Adobe's focus was on putting functionality in the product rather than performance. I would expect that 2.0 version of Lightroom to be faster.

Odd. I've not had any speed problems with LR. The most I've done is have Win Amp, FireFox, CS3 and LR running all at once, and LR just hits the HD a lot. It took around 40 minutes to export 997 Jpgs from a 5D CR2s though.

[rnourse]

Found it...

helpsvc.exe was running away with all the cpu and memory. Defender (MsMpeng.exe) wasnt behaving very well either. Disabled both using administrator -> services and autoruns and redid the export. What took 24 hours the first time completed again in just under 20 minutes.

tx to all for the help tips

[fredlef]

Glad you found the problem. I am a computer guy and was about to say that there is definitely something wrong - good job on the troubleshooting. I run LR in a VM and it works just fine.
Fred

[4x4rock]

Before my old system MB went up in smoke - it was a P4 3.2Ghz with 1GB ram, it took a while to export as well.

I upgraded to a Quad Core 2.4Ghz (OC'ed to 3GHZ) and 4gb ram, LR and PSCS3 really fly now.

One tip to make PSCS loads faster is rename the Digimarc folder under plug-ins to ~Digimarc