CPU Spikes On ONE Program, but not others...

Anybody???

Have you checked with Adobe directly and/or on Adobe's Lightroom forum to see if there's a fix?

Possible that one of the MS updates created an incompatibility with Lightroom.

Alternatively, have you tried uninstalling and then reinstalling Lightroom to see if that fixes the issue?

BTW: if you google this issue, there are multiple complaints about Lightroom 5 causing CPU spikes.

Thank you, Ron:

I have tried uninstalling / reinstalling Lightroom and unfortunately it did not fix the problem.

I haven't contacted Adobe directly because... I guess I didn't think there was a way to do so.

I just posted a question in the official Adobe lightroom forum. I don't know why I didn't post one there earlier. Possibly because I thought people would say, "Just buy a new computer." (Admittedly, my machine is from 2009 so it is pretty long in the tooth.)

But if you were to "guess" at what is going on, does it look to you that my CPU is just TOO OLD to handle Lightroom? Or does it look more like there is some sort of driver problem? Or maybe my SATA hard Drive is on the fritz?

From what I understand, Lightroom does try to save changes automatically when working on a file. My totally uneducated hunch is that it is having some sort of "issue" when trying to write automatically.

He has the screw up lightroom steal your passwords keyloogger malware.

• How much free hard drive space do you have?
• Have you defragged the hard drive recently?
• Have you run chkdsk on the hard drive?
• Have you run diagnostics on hard drive and RAM lately?
• How much unnecessary "junk" is running in the background?
• Are you just looking for an excuse to buy a new PC?  :emotion-4:

How much free hard drive space do you have?

Admittedly, not much. About 20 GB.

Have you defragged the hard drive recently?

This last Wednesday (Yesterdy) It defrags every week on schedule.

Have you run chkdsk on the hard drive?

Yes, and I have run chkntfs and they both are fine.

Have you run diagnostics on hard drive and RAM lately?

Yes, they are fine. I have run every kind of diagnostics and benchmarking test I can find and they are fine.

How much unnecessary "junk" is running in the background?

Minimal. I even try turning off antivirus.

Are you just looking for an excuse to buy a new PC?  :emotion-4:

No! I am incredibly cheap!!! I am trying to find a way NOT to buy a new computer (even though everyone tells me that it's all my old CPUs fault.

 In fact, I have had THREE tech support people from Adobe use their remote support to try and fix the problem.

They all have looked at my machine's cpu and none of them said anything like, "Your computer is too old," or anything like that.

The problem is that it only stops responding intermittently. So they will work on it and say, "Try it now." I will try it out and it will work fine for a while, but after 5 or 10 or 15 minutes it will stop responding again.

By that time, the agent has left the chat and closed the remote support. they just leave a message in the chat window saying, "If there are more problems, contact us again."

He has the screw up lightroom steal your passwords keyloogger malware.

Well, I have tried using Avast and malwarebytes, and they tell me my machine is clean.

Lightroom is a memory and CPU hog. It tries to take everything it can get to allow for better performance. One thing I found was to DISABLE" Automatically Write to XMP". You should do a web search,as there are lots of posts about high CPU use.

UPDATE: Thursday, March 26th.

On Thursday I had THREE different tech people from Adobe log into my computer remotely and try and diagnose and solve the problem. (The didn't all log in at the same time).

The first one thought he had fixed it by "giving resource priority to Adobe programs."

It worked for about 20 minutes and he logged off from my system (and our chant session) after about another 5 minutes, it started acting up the same.

So I contacted another one, and he did a few other things (threw away the Lightroom preferences file, checked the ntfs structure, a few things like that). He had me try it out while he promised to stay logged in. Lightroom stopped responding again within 15 minutes. Unfortunately, he had already logged out by then.

So, I had a THIRD technician login and work on it. He bumped up the lightroom cache from 6GB to 10GB and he created a new catalog and imported all my images into it. That took about 25 minutes to import the catalog.

At first, it was fine. Very zippy zooming in and applying edits. Probably the best it had run (I think the extra 4GB of ram was making an improvement).

But then after about 20 minutes of use, it stopped responding, too.

Of course, by then he had already logged off. His last message was that he would try and contact me on Friday to see if it was working ok or not.

I am not 100% sure how he will contact me. He ended his chat session and I doubt they have my email address.

Really don't know what to do.

Thank you, KIRKD:

Lightroom is a memory and CPU hog.

It's funny, but there are a lot of people out there who insist that lightroom ISN'T a memory hog. I read some posts by people who had increased their computer's RAM from 4GB to 8GB, and they said that Lightroom used the same amount of memory with 4GB as it did when they had  8GB.

On the other hand, I just increased my own memory yesterday afternoon from 4 to 8GBs, and now lightroom uses 3.5gb of memory, while before it would use a max of only 2.5GBs of memory.

One thing I found was to DISABLE" Automatically Write to XMP".

Yeah, I tried that too. At first, I thought that was the problem, but apparently not. At first, it seemed to work ok after switching it off. But later it still did the same thing.

BTW: From what I understand, lightroom only writes to an XMP file when working with RAW images, but not when working with jpg, tif, or dng images, and it certainly hangs on my machine with dng images (I don't remember whether it has had this problem with tif and jpg files as well, but I know it has had this problem with both RAW (nef) files and dng files.)

You should do a web search,as there are lots of posts about high CPU use.

Oh... believe me, I have done a LOT of web searches. I have started threads about this on three different forums (flickr, adobe, and lightroomforums.net),

Plus, I have had THREE different adobe tech people use their remote support system to try and fix my system, and it hasn't worked. (See more info below.)

WEI scores mean nothing when you have a fragmented hard drive with thousands of files on it.  Adding SSD's would improve the issue but they would soon be written to death.

Thank you for your response, SpeedStep:

For what you are doing it doesn't sound like you have near enough ram.

I understand and appreciate what you are saying.

I would be inclined to agree with you if it weren't for the fact that Lightroom 5.X had been running fine for the last 8 months and only recently started having problems (on two different computers at about the same time frame)

I don't know if I mentioned that my son's computer also started having this problem about the same time.

My thought is it might be a windows 7 update problem from mid February (both machines are running win 7 64-bit) that is conflicting with lightroom.

BTW: I kind of suspected that the Techs from adobe would say I didn't have enough ram or my CPU was too slow, but they all checked out the specs using the windows experience index and none of them said anything about the hardware.

I have a few clients who are Lightroom users and they don't have issues like that but they have VERY expensive machines.  They have Dual GPU 2012 mac pro's with 128 Gigs of ram.  You have more pictures than you did months ago and defragmentation and other scalability issues are showing now.  There is nothing Dell specific about the problem and its not supported here.

For what you are doing it doesn't sound like you have near enough ram.

The single best thing you can do to speed up Lightroom in general is to dedicate a Huge SSD to the Lightrooms catalog folders (which include the catalog itself and previews). Images themselves can be stored on regular hard drives.

12 cores should run 6X - 8X as fast as 2 cores (there is some overhead to more cores, so even 6X would be satisfactory).

This means a 12 core Nehalem Mac Pro.  On the affordable Dell Side this would be a Precision T3500 /24 Gigs of ram with 6 core cpu.

The T5500 can have more ram and 12 cores.