Darktable isn’t the fastest for me either. I’m running darktable on an i7-7700HQ DELL laptop with 16GB RAM and Nvidia GTX1060 6GB videocard on a Windows 10 OS. The images are pulled from either the HDD or the SSD (sometimes it depends).
I wish darktable was a little bit punchier and quicker. It’s great with jpg when it comes to speed, but with RAW images it lags a bit. Especially the heavier modules like exposure/curves etc.
When I open up OBS 64 bit, it slows down my laptop as well. If I use it to record darktable, the time between input and output is even longer. It sometimes takes 5-10 seconds before the changes are noticeable. It’s very annoying and the only thing I dislike about darktable.
I wanted to give a brief update on my situation. I started this thread (and several others, all related to “darktable’s speed”, in terms of actual processing and how fast it feels when browsing, culling etc) because I felt DT wasn’t as fast as I was expecting back then when I switched from Mac + Lightroom to Linux + Darktable (most importantly: from an old macbook pro with a 2014 core i5 and 8Gb of ram to a recent Dell XPS with a 2017 i7 processor, additional GPU and 16Gb of ram, which I thought it would be an drastic step-up in performance).
After my latest tests with the development version of DT, 2.7.* I went back to the stable version 2.6.2 and I had to re-create all the database because of the (documented) lack of backward-compatibility. So I started from scratch and imported all the folders with xmp files of all my +40k images; it took a while, ok, and I had to reprocess a few images with settings that were incompatible between 2.7.* and 2.6.2 (the ones with profiled denoise modules activated).
But in the end I found what I was expecting from the beginning of my history with DT: a fast, reliable and consistent approach to editing and processing. When editing, I don’t have any more issues with preview creation; even if I don’t generate cache images separately with dartkable-generate-cache I get large previews almost instantly; star ratings and tags are quite fast to be applied and removed from photos; during processing, exposure and tone curves are fast (even though not as fast as in Lightroom) and the lag between applying any setting and watching the results on screen is minimal and not disruptive. My concern about perhaps having a too large database has faded away; I can easily navigate my 40 thousand images.
So in the end I wanted to write about my experience to say this; if any of you are having similar issues to those I was having, just try to start from scratch, build a new database reimporting all the raws + xmp files, and perhaps use the stable DT version. In my case, this has made a huge difference.
Thanks to the developers once more for an awesome product and for the support I have had in my Dartable experience.
PS: the processing speed in these tests hasn;t changed though; still 12secs to process the raw file with GPU support. I guess this shows that this particular test does not reflect the actual real-life performance of Darktable.
But here we go. The mainboard has 4 slots A1, A2, B1 & B2
darktable 2.7.0+1087~g7fe35d67d
CPU @4.8 GHz
Don’t take the numbers to serious.
Sticks
DIMM slots used
CPU only (s)
opencl (s)
1
A2
23.4
4.4
2
A1 A2*
23.7
4.4
3
A1 A2 B2
23.9
4.4
4
A1 A2 B1 B2**
13.8
4.0
*not recommended warning → single channel mode
**dual channel mode
Conclusio? But the RAM sticks into the correct slots as written in the manual. Don’t care about the CPU if you can get a nice GPU. The Intel Core i9-9900K doesn’t pay off here.
Yes, I’m sure. Just run it again now.
Dual channel only works if you use the correct slots, which would have been A2 and B2 with 2 sticks. And I didn’t tested A2 & B2. I was a bit surprised that 3 sticks didn’t use some mixture of single/dual channel.
So I tried performing the tests but it didn’t work.
I have 0 knowledge about these things.
Tried downloading the Phoronix Test Suite, I went to the file folder, I hit install and some windows cmd screen came up, with all kinds of lines and then closed down.
I have no idea or way how to open the program now. What did it do? What got installed on my computer? How do I open it? I wanted to run the benchmark with the samsung RAW files, but I can’t until I know how to open it.
Edit: I think it’s installing now. I ran the batch file and I had to install phoronix, cygwin etc… I hope this won’t mess up with my system :’)
Edit 2: Everything got installed I guess, but I still can’t access the program. Someone please enlighten me how all of this works or let me know how I can uninstall everything that I just did from my computer without having to do a system repair.
Edit 3: I really hate this lol. I’ve got Cygwin open right now, cause I found it. However, if I add the command lines, it won’t do anything and just say: “bash: darktable-cli: prompt not found”
So I can’t do the test… Can someone give me an explanation and as simple as possible on how to get this to work? This is really annoying for me because I have 0 developer skills/knowledge. I have 0 affinity with coding and the whole: “it’s done in 5 minutes” has already taken me 1,5 hours already. I don’t have that much time on my hands.
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