Mac M2 mini Memory Leak in Lightroom classic

Changes I made to Lr’s classic preferences, and updates that may have fixed issue

1-I turned off face recognition

2-I upped the camera raw cache to 8gb and the video to 8gb

3-I changed the preference for previews from embedded to create replacement standard previews during idle time

4-I ran a synch on a 54k image folder that had just been added - It showed it was looking for metadata changes

5-I ran “optimize” off the file menu - instead of when closing and asking for a backup + optimize

6-I let Lr sit running idle for 24 hours

Lr had crashed 4 times just before all these changes. I had picked “reboot” of my only two options 3 of the times. On the last crash I chose “force quit” which generated an error log, and a buggy window (black window with black type face) to explain what I had been doing. So I typed up my problems with the mini and Lr classic in textedit - and pasted them into the window and sent the report.

This part is weird, and may have nothing to do with anything.

I came back to the running computer hours later, and a new tab had opened in my Firefox web browser. It claimed Lightroom (not Lr classic) had been “updated”. On top of this web page was an operating system notification dialog box claiming the same thing. Only option was to click ok/or close. When I checked my Adobe subscriptions - only camera raw shows that it has been updated?

I rebooted., and finder would not allow me to look at the hard drive or network. I went to system settings and it was showing an update to the OS to Ventura 13.5.2, and that I needed to reboot again. The computer rebooted about 7-8 times which a temperature bar slowly showed progressing each boot time. Now, Lr classic is (knock on wood) running pretty good. I don’t really know what did the trick, but I thought I should leave a record of how Lr classic can (for the time being) run on a M2 mini.

Whew, That was disturbing to review, and I had forgotten some of the steps. The last three months have been relatively trouble free. I think the problem is that the USB ports on the M2 mini are defective/or wrongly spec'd. Not only did the two USB 3 external drives refuse to be recognized by the mini ever again, but the Logitech mouse and keyboard (have a USB dongle) caused problems. Using a Thunderbolt 3 external drive, and Blue tooth mouse and keyboard did the trick. For me, not using any USB devices was the solution.

I did find some differences in mac/win Lightroom. Synchronizing and lens tagging is way faster in windows, but Topaz plugins or focus stacks/stitches are faster on the mini. I am still slower on the mini, but that is me and my former way of doing things in windows fault. Currently the image catalog is 470,000 and LR is running fine on the mini.

Lrc continued to crash, but I noticed some odd behavior. The wifi keyboard and mouse began seeming to trigger the mini into a loud clicking. Plus the mouse cursor's were too low resolution for Photoahop. So I got a blue tooth mouse and keyboard, and it seems much better particularly the responsiveness of the mini. The last two Lrc crashes my 2TB usb3 external hard drive just disconnected for no apparent reason. The mini would not see the drive, so I tested it on a Win10, and Linux machines - both found no errors, and could read and write to the drive. I hooked it to the other usb port, and it lost connection again, and refused to see the drive. So, I replaced the usb drive with a 2tb thunderbolt 3 drive. The mini seems fine with it. I began the catalog over from scratch with the previous post changes, and added a few more.

-Devined the "Standard" preview as 1440 pixels

-Turned off develop module updating metadata of jpg, png, etc changes

-Set the previews to never expire Hope it is going to work

Luis, I am sure something is very wrong. I have been doing this in Lr on Windows for 15 years, and never run into this serious of a debilitating memory leak. When I search Apple I find 20 years of people complaining about memory leaks. When I search Adobe I'm finding memory leak complaints as well. I finished importing a 47k folder, and it took 22 hours over a cat5 network. I went to close Lr (which includes backup/verify the database and optimize the 337,000 photos cataloged so far), and it took 3 hours for Lightroom to "close" (while it does the other bits in the background). At one point Lightroom was showing as "unresponsive" in the activity monitor with a spinning beach ball for almost 30 minutes. On a ten year old Win10 machine this takes a fraction of the time.

I don't know what to blame, but Lr classic and osX, or the memory being shared by the system and the gpu (even though the gpu is suppose to have it's on ram) - whatever the reason - are not playing well together. Maybe it's Adobe's code. Maybe it is Apple's OS, or Hardware. Hope they fix it soon, because this is not working. Swap stays between 2-3.5gb

No, None of these were "imported" from a previous mac. I just got this mini about two weeks ago, and finally broke down and subscribed to the Ps/Lr offer by Adobe. So, this is my first go round with the latest versions from Adobe and Apple (though I have a history with both). I pulled it out of the box, hooked it to a 32" 1080p led tv and edited some videos. Worked great! My eyesight is not so good, and I found that a large monitor/TV made the text easier to read, and the TV had a "PC" color setting, and voila - the photos looked right - so I was off.