DrPhrogg Loc: NJ

I have been restoring old WWII photos from my FIL. There are a lot of spots. Using LR5, I am finding that the program slows, and sometimes even hangs (program not responding) for up to 2 minutes before I can continue. I cleaned out old footprints, and rebooted, with no change. If I switch to a different picture, I get normal processing speed. If I then go back to the problem photo, the spot remover will not keep up with the cursor. It takes 30 seconds or more to change from fit view to 2:1. Cursor movement is jerky.
I exported the half finished image, and re-imported it, and the speed was fine. It is not a corruption of the program, but associated with individual photos.
Are you limited to how many edits you can make before the program gets balky? Anyone have another fix for this?

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

If you have not done it recently, try File > Optimize.

abc1234 Loc: Elk Grove Village, Illinois

I suspect that this is not a LR but rather a computer problem. You should post information about the hardware and operating system. I would look at HDD free space and speed, RAM (the first thing to consider), CPU specs, file fragmentation, when was the registry cleaned last, swap file size, HDD health. How fast does PS or PSE run? What OS and is it up to date with service packs? How big is the LR catalog? This should keep you busy for a while.

R.G. Loc: Scotland

It may be a RAM problem. If you are low on RAM, much will depend on how much RAM the other stuff on your computer is using. This could explain the inconsistencies.

If you do decide to try more RAM, remember that your operating system needs to be 64 bit to take advantage of any RAM higher than 3GB.

Having said that, I have 16GB of RAM in my PC and I still hit a brick wall if I've done a lot of editing (but it doesn't happen anything like as quickly as when I had only 4GB). I think the type of editing influences how quickly you hit the brick wall.

Mixing a lot of cloning with making a lot of selections (using the adjustments brush) seems to be the worst blend. Try to do all of your global adjustments first, then do all of your selecting (keeping it to a minimum), then try to do all of your cloning in one cloning session.

And when you're cloning, try to avoid using a patch (the pick-up area) that consists of a previously patched area. In other words try to avoid having your cloned areas overlap. And if possible try to avoid using patches that include previously selected and adjusted areas.

I would suggest doing all of the cloning early on, but the trouble with that is that a patch can respond differently to the surrounding area when you make adjustments to that area. A patch that seemed to blend in convincingly when you first did it can suddenly become more visible because it has responded to adjustments differently from its immediate surroundings.

Another step that I've seen suggested is to purge the HDD buffer. I can't comment on how effective that is - I suspect that any difference that it makes is marginal. But it can't do any harm to increase the size of the buffer to 4GB or more.

minniev Loc: MIssissippi

Purge both caches in addition to the other tricks here. But know that spot removal of lots of spots on a photo is not Lightroom's strong suit. A few? Fine. Lots and i notice some drag, worse on my slower computer. You might want to invoke a pixel level editor if you use one.

DrPhrogg Loc: NJ

Thanks for all the suggestions.
Windows 7, 64 bit w/ 8g ram.
Defrag & purge didn't make a difference.
If I am dragging and change image in develop mode, I get the speed back without doing anything else. It seems to be linked to the individual photo image. I have only seen the problem with spot removal. I sometimes use PSE 10 with no issues.
As indicated, if I export & re-import, the problems go away. It may just be that spot removal just drags down LR5. Not clear why is it not an issue when I move to the next image.

abc1234 Loc: Elk Grove Village, Illinois

Nothing obvious. How big is your scanned file. Perhaps it is bigger than what you need. 300 dpi should be adequate and your scanned tiff's should be under 25 M. Puzzling is right.

Billyspad Loc: The Philippines

Not a LR user but do heavy processing in Photoshop. Some actions just chew through RAM. Save your work very regularly close and reopen the image. Its the only way I have found that works with certain images and processes. Old versions of Adobe products worked happily with small amounts of RAM. Latest incarnations seem to require 8 gig as a minimum and prefer 16+.

DrPhrogg Loc: NJ

This is what I found, but I was hoping for another answer.

Wallbanger Loc: Madison, WI

Upgrading your RAM may help, but I've found in Light Room, disk speed makes a huge difference. On my MacBook Pro with SSD and 4GB of RAM, LR flies through images and edits, compared to my 16GB Dell with dual Xeon processors and a traditional HD.

I'm actually adding an external RAID 10 array with 4 disks on USB 3.0, which should get me "closer" to the performance I see on my Mac with the SSD, as well as solid redundancy.

Jim-Pops Loc: Granbury, Texas

This is correct for Lightroom, export and re-import. You will loose your Photo's back. I am using a newer Mac with 16 gb ram. I have only run into this one time and it was with a recent photo post with many changes and several virtual copies of same picture. When going to your problem picture Lightroom is loading all history moves into memory and that will eventually eat up all your memory while on that picture. I just went to check and try something. Just found that if I increase my "Camera Raw Cache Settings" on my machine from 10 GB to 20 GB the picture has improved speed. This setting is under Preferences - then File Handling. One other thing to do is close all programs except Lightroom to preserve as much of your memory as possible.