Tag Archives: lightroom

Lightroom and Mac Pro performance – part 2

Back in February, I wrote about the performance I was seeing with my Mac Pro, and compared it to several other machines. My intent was to compare performance between various different machines and configurations…but it had the unexpected side effect of giving me a baseline with which to measure new versions of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

This data proved to be quite useful when Lightroom 2.0 was released, and I could test the 32-bit build against the 64-bit build. What I found was surprising.

Just like last time, the basic test was generating 1:1 previews for 211 raw images (compressed NEF format from a Nikon D200), about 1.75GB of files.

First, Lightroom 2.0 32-bit:

Mac Pro, 2 x 2.8 GHz Xeon, 8 cores, 12GB RAM, OS X 10.5.5
CPU utilization between 350-500% throughout
Total time 4:57, average 1.41 sec/image

And Lightroom 2.0 64-bit:

Mac Pro, 2 x 2.8 GHz Xeon, 8 cores, 12GB RAM, OS X 10.5.5
CPU utilization between 500-550% throughout
Total time 7:06, average 2.02 sec/image

So the 32-bit version on OS X 10.5.5 was actually a bit faster than my previous tests of Lightroom 1.3.1 on 10.5.2, which could be due to either the Lightroom 2.0 upgrade, or 10.5.5 changes.

But the 64-bit version of Lightroom 2.0 totally blew chunks, as you can see. Pretty disappointing, and totally reproducible for me, so I opened a ticket with Adobe. They got back to me saying they could reproduce the problem, and also had a bunch of mumbo-jumbo about how there is more overhead in accessing memory in 64-bit mode (which I’m not sure I believe, but I’m not up to speed enough on the Leopard 64-bit implementation to know for sure).

Well, Lightroom 2.1 was recently released, and here is the data:

Lightroom 2.1 32-bit:

Mac Pro, 2 x 2.8 GHz Xeon, 8 cores, 12GB RAM, OS X 10.5.5
CPU utilization between 350-500% throughout
Total time 4:55, average 1.40 sec/image

Lightroom 2.1 64-bit:

Mac Pro, 2 x 2.8 GHz Xeon, 8 cores, 12GB RAM, OS X 10.5.5
CPU utilization about 400% throughout
Total time 4:05, average 1.16 sec/image

Wow – obviously a big change; the 64-bit version now totally rocks. There was something in the 2.1 release notes about enabling SSE extensions in 64-bit mode – sounds like that might have been the bug!

I didn’t record the memory usage numbers, unfortunately…but I remember watching during the runs, and the 64-bit version seemed to be using about twice the memory that the 32-bit version did.

Mac Pro performance

I’ve been torturing myself with the idea of buying a Mac Pro for a while…I mean, come on – 8 cores, for $2799? So last week, I finally broke down and pulled the trigger. But of course it didn’t stop there – I added another 10GB for a total of 12GB of RAM, and added a couple of disk drives as well.

It certainly “feels” fast – but I wanted to actually make some measurements, to see if it was just my imagination. I could run benchmarks, but that didn’t sound like much fun. So instead, I ran a process in Adobe Lightroom 1.3.1 to create 1:1 previews for 211 raw images (compressed NEF format from a Nikon D200), which is roughly 1.75 GB of files.

Here’s what I did. And yes, I’m apparently geeky enough that this sounded like fun. :-)

On the Mac Pro and the Macbook Pro, I generated these 1:1 previews in an existing Lightroom catalog with about 12,000 images in it. On all other systems, I generated the previews in a brand new catalog with nothing in it other than these 211 photos.

All of the virtual machines mentioned below are using VMWare Fusion, running on the Mac Pro.

Here are the configurations I ran, and the results:

Mac Pro, 2 x 2.8 GHz Xeon, 8 cores, 12GB RAM, OS X 10.5.2
CPU utilization between 350-400% throughout
Total time 5:36, average 1.59 sec/image

Macbook Pro, 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 cores, 4GB RAM, OS X 10.5.2
CPU utilization between 150-200%
Total time 13:35, average 3.86 sec/image

Dell XPS 420, 2.8 GHz Pentium D, 2 cores*, 3GB RAM, Windows XP SP2
CPU utilization about 50%
Total time 27:00, average 7.68 sec/image

Virtual machine, 2 processors, 3GB RAM, Windows XP SP2
CPU utilization between 150-200%
Total time 8:58, average 2.55 sec/image

Virtual machine, 1 processor, 3GB RAM, Windows XP SP2
CPU utilization about 100%
Total time 15:12, average 4.32 sec/image

Virtual machine, 2 processors, 3GB RAM, Windows Vista
CPU utilization between 150-200%
Total time 8:29, average 2.41 sec/image

* – not sure why this process on the Pentium D only seemed to be using a single processing core, that’s what happened when it ran.

Clearly the Mac Pro is pretty darn fast, and Lightroom interestingly appears to use up to 4 processing cores. The VM data was interesting to see, as well; I can run Windows XP in a VM dramatically faster than running it on my (admittedly old) Dell XPS 400. I wish I had a Core 2 Duo windows machine handy that I could try this on – would be interesting to compare that data with the virtualized Xeon processors on the Mac Pro.

UPDATE 10/30/2008: Additional data from Lightroom 2.0 and 2.1, on OS X 10.5.5, comparing 32-bit and 64-bit performance.