[timh]

In my experience, LR can become really slow without any disc activity going on whatsoever. If paging were always the problem, one would be able to tell from the hard disc trashing away.

Indeed, as a coder myself it smells like asynchronous threads waiting for each-other the whole time. Maybe I/O related. That would explain the sluggishness while doing seemingly nothing, and it would explain why some machines have big problems and others run great (those which are most like their test machines). Adobe's QA process is infamous.

[Smeggypants]

Using the 4.0 30 day trial. I was about to buy it but then it started to crawl really, really bad. It was not this bad when I first tried it. I've been to the Adobe Optimization page and I've done their instructions. Definitely thinking twice about purchasing this product.

4.0 has a bug whereby if the 2nd monitor view is enabled ( and sometimes the filmstrip ) it slows right down. I used 4.0 with the 2nd monitor view off and it was better. 4.1RC2 niow is a whole lot better than even 4.0 with 1 monitor.

[Class A]

Indeed, as a coder myself it smells like asynchronous threads waiting for each-other the whole time.

Quite possible.

LR 3 had a bug (not sure whether they fixed it in LR 4, not touching that yet) where sometimes not all of the images of a selection were moved from one folder to another. Seems like a different (e.g., preview rendering) thread sometimes locks the images so the "move" thread cannot move them.

LR 4.0 was quite a disaster in terms of severe bugs (LR 3 catalog import related, for instance) and I'd be embarrassed if I were responsible for all the problems that are listed in the "issues" lists for each new release. One wonders what kind of testing they are managing at all, or whether they are leaving most of it to users.

[Sage97]

4.0 has a bug whereby if the 2nd monitor view is enabled ( and sometimes the filmstrip ) it slows right down. I used 4.0 with the 2nd monitor view off and it was better. 4.1RC2 niow is a whole lot better than even 4.0 with 1 monitor.

Is the second monitor the one on the upper left side that applies the editing/changes? I'll try this later. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Class A]

Is the second monitor the one on the upper left side that applies the editing/changes?

No, that's the "navigator" window.

You can activate the second monitor view by pressing F11. Its main use is for displaying alternate views when working with two physical monitors, but some use it as a second "soft" monitor.

[timh]

LR3 never worked properly with multiple monitors either. I generally have 3 and it randomly picks a primary and secondary which are invariably different from what I would want.

I wish Adobe would just give me a secondary window and let me do what I like with it.

[Class A]

I wish Adobe would just give me a secondary window and let me do what I like with it.

You should be able to use this mode.

Pressing "Shift F11" should toggle between a secondary monitor and a secondary window. If that doesn't work, try opening the film strip at the bottom (F6) and right-click on the second monitor icon (second from the left) at the top of the film strip bar.

[Smeggypants]

LR3 never worked properly with multiple monitors either. I generally have 3 and it randomly picks a primary and secondary which are invariably different from what I would want.

I wish Adobe would just give me a secondary window and let me do what I like with it.

LR3 always worked fine with my second monitor. which ever monitor I opened lightroom on the second window opened on the other. Cool

[Smeggypants]

Quite possible.

LR 3 had a bug (not sure whether they fixed it in LR 4, not touching that yet) where sometimes not all of the images of a selection were moved from one folder to another. Seems like a different (e.g., preview rendering) thread sometimes locks the images so the "move" thread cannot move them.

LR 4.0 was quite a disaster in terms of severe bugs (LR 3 catalog import related, for instance) and I'd be embarrassed if I were responsible for all the problems that are listed in the "issues" lists for each new release. One wonders what kind of testing they are managing at all, or whether they are leaving most of it to users.

They have a pool of volunteer beta testers who will get rewarded with a free copy. I used to beta test for a number of leading audio software companies. It was frustrating to report something and not haver it fixed. The company can never fix everything for a major release unfortunately, they have to have a cut off point somewhere. never an easy situation

[timh]

[weird, double-posted!]

[timh]

You should be able to use this mode.

Pressing "Shift F11" should toggle between a secondary monitor and a secondary window. If that doesn't work, try opening the film strip at the bottom (F6) and right-click on the second monitor icon (second from the left) at the top of the film strip bar.

It's fine with 2 monitors, but with 3 I get the following behaviour:

Let's say I have Lightroom open on screen #2, and I ask for a full-screen scondary window. Sometimes it opens on #3 (fairly decent 19" panel) but just as often it opens on #1 (12" laptop screen, I'm probably using it for something else like email or IM, not useful).

If I ask for the secondary window to be not full screen, then I can put it where I want but it doesn't seem to be a real window. When I switch focus away from Lightroom it vanishes and when I focus back it's in a different place, usually half-way between two monitors. Sigh.

They have a pool of volunteer beta testers who will get rewarded with a free copy.

The thing about volunteer beta testers is, with absolute respect for the sterling job I'm sure you did, they're not professional testers and they're each being paid something less than $1000 which is not enough incentive to really hammer an app properly.

Volunteers are not going to hit many of the bugs that proper formal testing would hit, and professional testers are amazing people who can find, reproduce, categorise and report many more bugs per hour than mere humans like you and I. I wouldn't want to marry one, but wow - they're useful to work with. Having someone submit a bug report with full documentation and steps to reproduce it is often 70% of the work necessary to fix it. Bugs like that usually get fixed before release, and cheaply. Skimping on QA just means customer dissatisfaction and inflated ongoing dev costs, e.g. working on 3.5 (free bug fix upgrade) when they should have been working on 4.0 (paid new version) and working on 4.1 (free) when they could be putting resources into 5, or into a new Photoshop, or whatever.

[philbaum]

LR4.0 was slow, installed 4.1 RC2 and it makes all the difference. Seems snappier than when i had 3.6 on. I recommend 4.1 RC2. For a second thing, the Pentax lenses didn't show up under lens corrections in 4.0, now they do. thats a positive step forward.

Off-hand, i can't get a second monitor to work right with my laptop, but i have more things to try, like without LR