Lightroom performance is TERRIBLE after upgrade to Big Sur

Brady Nations wrote:

It happens when nothing else is running. Before Big Sur, I often had many other applications open at the same time LR was running, and it ran fine.

In other words, you have not done any such check: Run Activity Monitor (Launchpad -> Other -> Activity Monitor) with the View set to All Processes (rather than the default “My Processes”), and see what processes are using the most CPU, GPU, Memory, and such.

Since you are running an iMac, you probably didn’t notice that you have processes “sucking the life” out of your computer, since your upgrade to Big Sur! (People running MacBooks noticed right away, since it drains their batteries.)

The normal “housekeeping” background processes, of a new upgrade, tend to “settle down” after a day or two.

However, third-party software, that wasn’t ready for such a huge change in their operating environment can get “confused”.

If the App, itself, is incompatible with the upgrade, people usually notice, right off.

However, the background, utility, system extension, etc., processes, that often come with many third-party programs, can “run amuck”, unchecked, and (almost) unnoticed by the average user.

These are what you need to use Activity Monitor to find.

Then you can be better informed as to what you should do.

Yes, Brady Nations, «Given no competing processes»—so long as that truly is the case—then that suggests some other issue with Lightroom on Big Sur 11.1.

Now. So far as I’ve seen, Big Sur’s memory management seems to be very similar to the 2020-11-06 macOS Catalina 10.15.7 Supplemental Update.

So. One other possibility may be how your Memory Pressure is going, while you are running Lightroom: do the issues you have been experiencing with Lightroom seem to correspond with times of High Memory Pressure?

(You could also see how such issues relate to CPU and GPU use.)

Another thing you can try is to boot into Safe Mode, and see if Lightroom seems to behave better (or worse, or you can’t tell the difference).

Be patient, when booting into Safe Mode: your system will run a full drive repair, during the boot. This can take several minutes (maybe up to about 20 minutes) to run the drive repair.

In Safe Mode, most third-party system extensions will not run. So, hopefully, Lightroom doesn’t depend upon any such.

Basically, even if there is some «software conflict between LR and Big Sur», it’s best to find out as much as you can, so you have better information to share in a bug-report! (My opinion, anyway.)

Brady Nations wrote:

A new twist: I have an iMac and a MacBook Pro. Both are running the latest LR[Lightroom] and Big Sur. ONLY the iMac has the problem. …

The problem pertains to where the cursor is representing an input position, such as moving a slider, or changing the size of an on screen box. It moves fine if just moving freely around the screen. Tried both trackpad and mouse: both behave the same. Thoughts?

Is this behavior only within Lightroom, or in other applications with their «slider[s]» or other manipulation of onscreen objects?

Have you looked for correlation with CPU, GPU, Memory Pressure, etc., as I had recommended you check?

Have you tried in Safe Mode?

The fact that this only occurs on one of your machines (the iMac), though with all pointing devices, suggests there is something installed on the iMac that is interfering.

Are your iMac Mouse and/or Trackpad wired, or Bluetooth? Apple or third-party?

Please go back in to Creative Cloud, uninstall your current version of LR and install LR version 10.0. This is a common problem with LR on Catalina and Big Sur. It's an Adobe issue.

Have you run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up" or anti-virus apps on your Mac either before installing Big Sur or afterward?

I rolled back Lightroom classic mac version to previous update which resolved problems I was having.

thanks for tip

Welcome, Brady Nations, to Apple Support Communities!

It is Adobe that is the one that recommends Big Sur for the latest version of their Adobe Lightroom.

Are you running their latest version?

Are you running the latest version of Big Sur (11.1 vs. the former 11.0.1)?

Hi Brady Nations -

I've been having this same issue for about a month. I have NOT upgraded to Big Sur yet however because I'm a pro photographer and I use lightroom/photoshop a lot so I always wait at least a month or two for Adobe to catch up with Apple's STUPID software updates. Man, I wish they would stop with these...but I digress. As I said, my lightroom was acting just like yours is now. Slow to do anything. The only thing that solves the issue for me is quitting lightroom and then restarting it. That has solved it for me. Not sure if it will for you, but worth a shot if you've not tried that yet.

Good luck!

Tony

Brady Nations wrote:

LR is up to date. Big Sur wasn't. Upgraded to 11.1. Showed minimal improvement. LR is still quite "jerky". Barely usable.

Have you contacted Adobe about their software?

Brady Nations wrote:

… LR and Windowserver are the two big users. There are dozens of other processes that are 0.0 %CPU. When I do a task in LR it's CPU% jumps WAY up, at times higher than 100%.

Did you order your “All Processes” View by CPU %, so the largest are at top?

If so, what you indicate suggests you have no problems with competing processes.

(Incidentally, % CPU is given as the % of a single CPU Core. So, a single, multithreaded program can take up to the number of CPU Cores, on your computer, times 100%. I have heavy compute processes that go to nearly 400%, on my four [4] CPU Core Mac mini.)

Hi,

I just the downgraded from 10.1.1 to 10.0 and, unfortunately, there seem to be little to no improvement :/ all my photos are .... actually are not smooth, be it edit, simple move in the photo or zoom in/out. Everything takes ages to complete, black label "loading" appears and stays quite a long time.

Note I'm now on BigSur11.2@iMac2017/27-i7/64G, have set 100G local raw cache on SSD and raws are stored on NAS. It was running quite fine till BigSur, after then it's as if I had hand brake in place. At the same time AM shows little CPU or GPU load and still there is enough free memory.

Hope some soon-to-be-release LrC fix version finally sorts this out.

Regards,

Daniel

Brady Nations wrote:

I have to believe that Apple pays attention to what their users are saying.

If you say it to them…

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