Railfan Technology > Non-stop hard drive activity when using Lightroom

Need a quick answer before I toss my computer out the window.

Why is my drive with photos ONLY running NON-STOP when I
open Lightroom?  Cataglog is already built.  And it's happening
not only while I'm viewing thumbs or in develop mode - but if I
just open LR and do nothing.  At this rate, I think my hard drive
will last 2 weeks.

Did a fresh install of everything - why not, that's always fun.  Unrelated.

My C: dirve is a Western Digital 1TB SSD drive with WIndows 8 fresh install,
along with Adobe Cloud Photoshop and Lightroom.  I have a seperate 2 TB
regular drive for images only.  And another 256 Gig SSD for whatever - was
going to be scratch disk or even use for LR's library catalogs but haven't re-set
that up. LR defaulted my catalog on my SSD C: drive.  In the past,  I had an
issue with LR not recognizing my SSD.  Tips welcome there - but really, just
wondering why my image only regular hard drive is running non-stop simply
because LR is open.  Task manager is showing what I hear - 56 to 63% use.

Thanks

Mitch

Closed it - activity pretty much came to an end, though not completely. 

Wondering if Mozilla Firefox is browsing my hard drive non-stop, but
again, as soon as I opened LR - doing nothing but opening it, Task
Manager shows the drive active time 56 to 63%.  Close it - drops to 0%,
though I still hear very short almost regular read /writes (yet active time
shown on  all my drives is 0%.  .

Disconected from the Internet - no difference. 

Task manager is showing only reads, incidentally.  No writes.  Noisy.

/Mitch

I'd ask lightroom what's going on. Sounds like
it might be cataloging your disk.

John.

Try this:

Click on Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Resource Manager.

Once that is open, maximize the window by clicking on the "box" in the upper right corner, click on the Disk tab. In the lower section titled Disk Activity, click on the File column to sort it. Now you can go down that list to see what files are being "touched" and to the left of that you will see the name of the process that is doing that.

Perhaps LR really -is- trying to (re-)catalog everything on your hard drive...sort of. 

One possibility is the 'indexing' option for Windows is turned off for the drive with your LR cataloged files.  What that means Windows does not maintain an internal 'index' of all the files other than the directory itself on the hard drive, which then causes Windows search function to 'plow through' the directory itself.  Meanwhile, every time LR starts up, it has to 'rebuild' its own directory/catalog of your photos, as I suspect it wants an exact hard drive location address for the start of each file.  This is much like Windows does at startup, 'finding' every typefont definition file on your computer.  As a first step, go to 'my computer' or just 'computer' where it shows all the hard drives on your computer.  Right click on that particular hard drive.  The first tab - General - has a couple of 'check boxes' at the bottom.  Make sure the indexing option is checked.  A test to see if it's LR rebuilding iits indexes, boot up your computer, give it 2-3 minutes to start up all internal services, many of which are 'delayed start' to bring up the desktop as fast as possible.  Then start LR and go away and come back maybe 30 minutes later.  If it was LR causing all the activity, then it should quiet down once its finished all the cataloging activities.

Another potential culprit is where your photos are is that the hard drive itself is failing.  If that's the case, then just about anything that accesses that drive may spend unusually long periods of time to access files out there...generally taking several retries for one or more reads to do it successfully. 

Another possibilitty is that somehow Windows page file and/or other temporary Windows files, in addition to LRs temporary files are on that hard drive.  To check this, go to the control panel and click 'system', then 'advanced system settings' on the left of that screen.  Under the 'advanced' tab are such items  as 'virtual memory' and 'environment'.  These may have been changed to either shrink the virtual memory, move it to a different drive, put Windows temporary files on that drive, etc..  A word of caution...if you are 'in over your head' on these settings and don't really know what they're for, find someone who does!  It's possible you could end up reinstalling Windows if you screw it up good!

Another culprit may be your security software.  Perhaps it's been scheduled to do a full scan daily at 1PM, or whatever.  I finally got so fed up with my security software that I've set ALL updates and scans to MANUAL!!!  Otherwise, it 'takes off' doing a scan and really slows down everything I'm doing.  It's up to me to weekly check for updates and do scans.  I've set Windows similarly, as well!

It's also possible you have used some kind of 'system speedup' software that has changed some of the settings for Windows.  I discovered that when I enabled the speedup software that came with my SSD (all of Windows and it's files as well as all often-used software and 'my documents' reside on the SSD.  I should get a 2nd one to 'separate' devices for better performance), really 'odd' things started happening.  But that was 4-5 years ago and I can't recall what was happening.  I disabled that speedup function and everything went back to normal.  I have another 'clean up/speed up' utillity program that also makes system-wide performance setting changes.  Although these types of products advertise 'easy to use', etc, some of their features are best left to experts.  As I recall, I selected/enabled about half of its automatic speedup options because they don't all apply to my computer such as 'registry cleaning' because I do that manually, myself.

Another potential is your 'cloud' software such as Dropbox, etc.  If you've indicated that your photos are to be in the cloud, it's busy re-synchronizing everything!   The newer versions of LR ALSO use the Adobe cloud, and LR could be the one that's trying to re-synchronize your files.  A way to see if that's what's happening is to watch the network activity.  Using a 'three finger salute' (<cntl><alt><delete>), click on the 'networking' tab and look at the activity while you're doing nothing and the hard drive is running full speed ahead!  

And lastly, you may have some kind of virus/spyware on your computer that is 'looking' for anything useful to the bad guys.  How up to date is your security software and when was the last full scan? 

And I almost forgot...How many photos are in  your LR catalog?  LR keeps the series of clicks/settings/adjustments to each photo in what seems to be one large sequential file for each catalog.  The more adjustments made to the photos in that catalog, the 'change history/log' keeps growing and growing.  When I've scanned photos or slides, it's not uncommon for me to do a hundred or more clicks to fix colors, remove dust and scratches, etc.  If my catalog for that project has more than 200 images or so, by  the time I get to the last of them, LR performance is noticably degraded as it has to read the entire history file to find the end and then add the click history there.  And, of course, when you start up LR, it has to go through the entire history file applying each of those clicks to each of those images before it displays them.  When you start editing, it easily 'gets/processes/reads ahead' of your editing while still providing full access/editing to the images your working on.

Check the most obvious and easiest things first, and go from there.

 

I do not use lr but use bridge and ps. Bridge can cause the same problem. At some point the system will collapse. This occurs on my system with the cloud application but not with my older CD app system which I also use. I now restart the system after use as the problem occurs after use.

My basic knowledge would point to memory to disk paging as the only reasonable explanation.

Other?

No idea of algorithm s but possibly trying to cache too much for an older system.

Software bloat, just too much processing being added. This did not occur initially.

Add ons? I have a few,. Should see how to remove.

Anyway after a session, I do a restart. Throw back to unix, system gets a clean start.

Bob

Posted from Android



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/02/18 13:29 by robj.

Our son's PC became very busy and slow for no apparent reason. Somehow BitTorrent had been installed and son's PC was being used as a node in a global file sharing network (P2P). Our ISP threatened to terminate our service because of traffic volume. We deleted the BitTorrent software. There are many other P2P applications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file-sharing_applications

Lurch_in_ABQ Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Our son's PC became very busy and slow for no
> apparent reason. Somehow BitTorrent had been
> installed and son's PC was being used as a node in
> a global file sharing network (P2P). Our ISP
> threatened to terminate our service because of
> traffic volume. We deleted the BitTorrent
> software. There are many other P2P applications.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file-s
> haring_applications

If you like messing with open source such as Linux and it's applications, BitTorrent is good way to acquire installtion ISO's...but you can acquire an awful lot of other software items too, it must be said. Either way you must be savvy enough not to set your sofware up to share what you have with the world. That's not how P2P is supposed to work, but you gotta do what you gotta do. We can't all have truly unlimited bandwidth.