Hello,
I am in deep trouble with the startup times of DXO PL4. With each upodate DXO submits, the startup time gets worse. In the meantime I have startup times (from doubleclicking PL4 icon to be ready to choose a pic) beteween 2,5 and 3,5 minutes!
As a comparison: DxO Photolab 3.3 (incl.Viewpoint 3) had a startup time of about 25sec (2nd start around 17sec). The computer is the same!.
It`s not a slow one, a HP Spectre Convertible with Win10, i7-8565U (1.8GHz), 16GB and SSD. The performance of my computer did not change for other applications.
The computing performance / reaction time seems also to be worse with the resent update (eg. picture browser). What happened there ?
What can be done to get the PL3 startuptimes back ?
Will DxO fix that ?
If it wont be fixed soon, I have to switch to another solution.
Sorry to hear that you are experiencing some really poor startup times.
Just some thoughts.
Are all your photos located on the local SSD tiefer with the systems and applications or on an external disk or location?
Have you tried to move out your database from PL to a safe place and launch PL to let it create a new clean and empty one?
This is the default place of the database:
%UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming\DxO\DxO PhotoLab 4\Database
Hi @Required,
my photos are located on a NAS (connected via GBit-LAN to the router, Laptop is connected with fast Wifi to router. I know that storage on SSD might be faster for the picture access, but the NAS is better for my workflow. As PL3x was ways faster I do not expect that the NAS is the main bottleneck.
I`ll try the database hint later this day. Thnx.
Ticket is already active. I`ve sent some diagnosis data yesterday evening. “Barbara” is taking care.
Welcome. It seems like this issue may be more specific to something in your computer configuration rather than a general one. I have not changed my desktop computer in several years as well. PL3 took 12 to 15 seconds to open and the current version, PL 4.2 takes about 9 seconds. Does your computer have all the latest Windows 10 updates? What else is running when you are using PhotoLab? Have you looked at your memory usage which PhotoLab is starting?
I hope you’re able to determine where the bottleneck is.
Hi @mwsilvers,
please check my other posting. Obviously there is a dependency on the number of (sub-) folders.
To your questions: Computer is SW and configurationwise up to date (and not a slow one). Mostly PL is used as the single application (or sometimes web browser or Windows Mail in parallel, but nothing which is really demanding).
based on the questions of the support team I have now started a few trials and recorded the times….
Start time in original configuration (last directory opened in PL4 was on the NAS, (one of approx. 600 parallel sub-folders)) reproducibly approx. 2.5 - 3.5 minutes
Start time with disconnected network drives (last directory opened in PL4 was on the NAS, (one of approx. 600 parallel sub-folders)): approx. 30s
Start time with reorganized / rearranged network folders (last directory opened in PL4 was on the NAS, (one of approx. 60 parallel sub-folders)): approx. 20s
Start time with the last opened directory on the local SSD: 12-13s
Measurement from 2020 with PL3.3 and the last directory opened in PL3.3 was on the NAS (one of approx. 450 parallel subfolders)), reproducible approx. 17-25s
From this I derive the following conclusions and questions:
PL4 apparently has a problem with the large number of folders (comparison 1 to 3).
The performance problem is not due to the use of the NAS (comparison 3 to 4)
Why has the performance loss in the original configuration been so severe since the last update?
Does the number of (sub-) folders influence the startup time (is it possible that exceeding 512 is a problem?)?
The findings above seem to solve my problem. Nevertheless, I would like to understand the rootcauses so that I can behave accordingly or so that DXO has a chance to improve something in the future.
Not sure if this performance regression is entirely if at all a problem caused by PL4 or DXOs fault.
The Meltdown&Spectre CVE Mitigations necessary for almost all Intel CPUs can have a quite severe impact on the I/O performance of the system, especially with a large number of files and/or folders. But it could only explain parts of the problem and would require that appropriate patches have been applied in the meantime and that those Mitigations are active.
On my HP Envy X360 convertible (Ryzen 4500U with 802.11ac) when opening PL4 directly onto a (1Gbps) NAS in a shared folder (there are above 4500 Folders and 60.000 files in the same share!) the whole startup of PL4 still takes only somewhere around 11-13seconds until the GUI is visible and around 16-18 seconds until the first Previews are loaded. (directly loading onto the SSD it takes around 11-12 seconds until those are rendered)
On my Ryzen 9 Workstation the startup time of PL4 is always around 9 seconds!
So i don`t really think there is a limitation revolving around the number of folders/files and caused by PL4.
Maybe it´s another software causing massive additional i/o access? The AV Scanner for example?
I had the same problem until a few moments ago. Based on your issue I have looked into my setup and found that if I go into Edit / Preferences and tab along to Performance and select DeePRIME acceleration to Use CPU only - it speeds my PL4 startup time from 3 minutes down to 30seconds. I have an NVDIA GeForce GTX750Ti installed and it does have an marker against it informing that its partially supported. So - selected CPU Only and its now working very much more quickly. Hope this helps you.
I had the same problem until a few moments ago. Based on your issue I have looked into my setup and found that if I go into Edit / Preferences and tab along to Performance and select DeePRIME acceleration to Use CPU only - it speeds my PL4 startup time from 3 minutes down to 30seconds. I have an NVDIA GeForce GTX750Ti installed and it does have an marker against it informing that its partially supported. So - selected CPU Only and its now working very much more quickly. Hope this helps you.
Hi @Colmax,
thanks for your hint. I tried both options (CPU only and automatic). This had no influence to the startup time. The support for the Intel UHD Graphics 620 installed in my notebook is also “partly only”.
Up to now I had the best results with re-organizing the folders on my NAS to have a lower amount of folders in parallel. DxO is still investigating …
I also have an NVDIA GeForce GTX750Ti graphics card. Despite only being marked as partially supported I have expressly selected the card to be used in the Preferences / Performance / DeepPRIME setting. I have successfully processed a few hundred images with DeepPRIME Denoising and not experienced any of the “stuttering and/or errors” that are indicated as possible problems. Also, I haven’t experienced any startup delays in PL4 with this graphics card setting. More importantly, to me, I’ve conducted benchmarks of the export times of DeepPRIME with and without using the graphics card and find the graphics card to be significantly faster than than the CPU-based noise reduction by a factor of 2-3.
Thanks for sharing this Paul. I’ve gone back and tried the other modes and lo and behold PL4 loads in approximately 30seconds with each! No idea what I’ve done but it had been loading in approx 3 minutes! Other than clearing out Google Chrome history, I have zero idea as to what I’ve done!!
hello all,
it seems that there is a random effect on the startup time which passes away in the same random way. Very strange. Would be interesting if other users have the same effect, too.
We arer talking about startup time, I believe ie: not CPU vs GPU performance…
I’ve had this problem for a long time now. It can take two minutes before PL4 is ready to work. I’ve noticed that it may be related to reading the database file somehow. I’ve tried to read the log file to see where the hold up is, but it is a huge file, and I don’t know what I’m looking for. But creating a folder to hold the contents of the database folder and moving all files to it and deleting all database files ALWAYS reduces startup up time to mere seconds. PL4 will create a new empty database file.
@rlebleu this could fit to my observations when reorganizing the folders. If the folders are reorganized on a very central level of the tree (like I did) all entries in the database file are not valid any more, which could have the same effect than deleting the old database.
On my old MacBook Pro 2012 (but with SSD), my startup time is 20 s in project mode with 300 pictures in the project.
It seems you have a individual problem, not generic for DxO.
