Determining factors in lightroom speed

[ChrisCummins]

Hi,
my computer recently starting falling apart at the seams (lots of blue screens, graphics card died etc etc), so I decided to invest in some better parts and do a bit of an upgrade. While I'm shopping for parts, I'm curious as to what factors and components are most critical to lightroom (+photoshop) running as quickly and efficiently as possible. I've read about the software optimisation tricks (keeping the library optimised, setting preferences and so on) but I'm interested in the hardware factors.

Does Lightroom stress the RAM, HDDs, Processor or other components the most? Lightroom generally runs quickly however I would love for export/import/processing times to be reduced. Any ideas?

Regards
Chris

 

[ChrisCummins]

I suspected as much. Is it the speed of the RAM or just sheer quantity? I may try overclocking the memory in my PC to get a bit more performance out of it. It seems strange that overclocking is almost exclusively done by gamers and yet everyone could advantage from it. Extra performance for free - seems like a good bargain.

What about HDD speeds? I'm tempted to go RAID 0 with some fast new solid state drives and put the operating system and lightroom on it, which would at least quadruple my current read/write performance to the discs, would that help with running the program or is that not so important?

 

[semordnilap]

Memory, catalog size, and processor speed I think, are going to be huge factors. And processor speed... Any 7200 sata drive will be fine, though yes, an ssd will be faster, but mostly if you can keep your LR catalog on it. That, though, is expensive, and that money would probably be better spent on ram & processor.

But to go back to it... if you keep the catalogs that you are working in small, you'll keep the program moving a lot faster.

edit: I suppose if you're using multiple drives you could find a way to keep your LR catalogs on the ssd and just keep the photos themselves on your other drive(s)–I don't know how that would work, and you'd be looking at a large ssd.

 

[degruyl]

I believe that lightroom 3 is 64 bits on both mac and windows. In that case, just throw memory at it. Quad core seems to be the best performance (it goes down when the number of CPU cores goes higher).

What size image files are you using? I deal with 500 - 1500MB files from LF scans, and memory is the limiter, but in normal sized tiff / raw files the operation is general pretty snappy.