Virtual Machine Performance LR3 with Linux/Win 7

First, running Windows 7 outside of a Virtual Machine(VM) is just not an option. I won't won't won't run anything but Linux (or maybe BSD) unless paid to do so. And paid a lot. This is for a pile of reasons which are unnecessary to list here. That said, yes, of course I know the software would likely run a bit better so pointing that out is being an unhelpful Captain Obvious. And yes, I also know that as much as you try to start a thread and hope to stay away from a certain subject it's just not gonna happen.

Anyway!

Here's the ultimate question I am in search of an answer for: Do any of you have suggestions for increasing performance of Lr running in a VM on a Linux machine?

Here's the situation in full: I am running Windows 7 64 bit on a virtual machine withing Ubuntu 10.10 64bit on a i7 950 with 12GB of ram. The video card is not all that great as I resent spending money on them since I am not a gamer. And, I have not set the VM to use the graphics card, as far as I understand it the graphics for the VM are run completely by the processor. I am going to test that a bit later today and see if it makes a difference. I have given the VM 2 cores and 8GB of ram to use. For the most part the performance is great. You wouldn't know it was a VM unless it was pointed out. Moving all sliders creates an immediate effect on the image and for the most part it is smooth and responsive.

Where I run into trouble is when I use many adjustment brushes. Say, 10 or more brushes each with 5-6 or more applications. The more brushes the more it slows. The responses are not immediate, and in fact can fall behind by 4 or 5 adjustments. I've done some googling on this and from what I've read decreased performance was an issue with Lr 2, but was supposedly fixed with Lr 3 (I'm running the latest Lr 3 build). For Lr 3 I can't find anything definitive on whether it's Lr or the environment I'm running it in. Technically I can't find much about running Lr in a VM... Restarting Lr does alleviate the issue for a bit, but that's a pain. That does lead me to believe it may be a Lr issue rather than a VM issue though...

The performance gets very poor (pretty much unusable) when I try the latest 64 bit Nik stuff (Silver Efex and Viveza specifically). Control point edits are very slow to occur. I know that Nik has designed their software to use the GPU for more grunt, I fear that they have designed it to use the GPU almost solely for grunt.

Assuming I'm not the only one with this setup has anyone else here encountered this? Everything else on this box cooks. It transcodes brilliantly and I can multi-task endlessly. Would throwing more ram at it help? I thought 8GB would be plenty. I'm assuming a better video card will help *if* the VM will play with it nicely. Are there any VM changes I can make that will increase the performance?

i wonder if linux's drivers on the host machine is not running the hardware at optium performance... Thats the only think i can think of..

Are you using KVM or something else? Lightroom is heavily-dependent on disk I/O so switching to VirtualBox might improve things (VB tends to be better on disk & network, KVM on CPU).

EDIT: VB also supports 3D acceleration using the host hardware.

if you really want to use LR you wont do it on any VM, doesnt matter if its virtual box, vmware, parallels its going to be much slower than a physical box because of video & disk IO

Sigh. And yet I do and it works well other than this brush issue which is pointing to it being an Lr issue. I tested one of my images on a computer with 7 natively installed. Same thing happens. Happened faster in fact as this machine is of lower spec. Yes, using VB.

the brush issue is because of lack of performance, it will run but the #1 performance problem you will find with LR is the brush same way in photoshop

Thanks for the help.

if you dont want to run winblows and prefer linux look into doing a hackintosh its the best of both worlds

tekkie wrote in post #12125900
if you dont want to run winblows and prefer linux look into doing a hackintosh its the best of both worlds

Or he could dual boot Linux and Windows. Although I'm a Mac guy and would prefer the hackintosh route myself.

LR3 inside a virtual machine, as others have said, is just a completely bad idea. Any memory intensive program in side a virtual environment would be a bad idea, really.

Something tells me you guys haven't tried it. It works very well. Especially once 3D acceleration is properly loaded. The problem is solved. Turns out I didn't have 3D properly loaded because of a weirdness in regards to enabling it via safe mode. Once I got past that it works fine. And like I said in the initial post, the software works fine for the majority of images. It's when I was doing 50 or more adjustments that it bogged down. No need to run a piece of **** OS by MS or Apple and I can still use the best raw editor out there.

All that said, Lr could still use a performance improvement, no matter where it's run, in regards to adjustment brushes.

ions wrote in post #12128930
No need to run a piece of **** OS by MS or Apple and I can still use the best raw editor out there.

Well, have fun spending time making it work, as you just did. For me, I like stuff that "just works." :P

ions wrote in post #12128930
Something tells me you guys haven't tried it. It works very well. Especially once 3D acceleration is properly loaded. The problem is solved. Turns out I didn't have 3D properly loaded because of a weirdness in regards to enabling it via safe mode. Once I got past that it works fine. And like I said in the initial post, the software works fine for the majority of images. It's when I was doing 50 or more adjustments that it bogged down. No need to run a piece of **** OS by MS or Apple and I can still use the best raw editor out there.

All that said, Lr could still use a performance improvement, no matter where it's run, in regards to adjustment brushes.

it works yes, but it doesnt work well, yes I have tried it inside vmware and parallels if I had nothing else I could use it

I dont get the point of whining about a piece of **** os but you have to go through all this hassle only to use the POS to make it work anyway.... yup that makes perfect sense

I dont get you linux people thinking its the best OS lol

ProwlingTiger wrote in post #12128008
Any memory intensive program in side a virtual environment would be a bad idea, really.

No, it's not. I have several virtualized SQL & Exchange servers, all of which run 32GB or more, and all of which perform very well.

tekkie wrote in post #12130054
it works yes, but it doesnt work well, yes I have tried it inside vmware and parallels if I had nothing else I could use it

I dont get the point of whining about a piece of **** os but you have to go through all this hassle only to use the POS to make it work anyway.... yup that makes perfect sense

I dont get you linux people thinking its the best OS lol

+1
Oddly enough, both POS systems can run it just fine by themselves.

jasonlitka wrote in post #12130888
No, it's not. I have several virtualized SQL & Exchange servers, all of which run 32GB or more, and all of which perform very well.

That's the thing, you have 32GB for it.

for servers its not as much about the memory as it is the disk IO we have a ton of vmware machines and never have issues with memory its the disk IO

the one thing that lacks in VM's is video performance imo, cpu / memory work very well