Hello, I’d like a sanity check for what I’m observing with RawTherapee. My version is 5.10 on Windows 10 Pro. Observed through bare metal (6 core) and through VM (16 core).
I’m processing 10bit Sony RAWs and I’ve noticed for some actions the program takes a long time to process what I’ve done. What I’ve seen is when I copy a profile and paste it to the several hundred images it takes a long time for the program to respond to my inputs. Even longer for several thousand photos. This isn’t a super big issue for me as I can simply switch to other tasks and wait for the paste to finish.
What really grinds my gears is tagging photos with color or stars. Each photo takes about 15-20 seconds to apply the tag. This increases with each subsequent photo. I’m at the point of CTRL selecting all my photos hoping I don’t misclick to apply the tag at the very end so I can keep my workflow moving at a steady pace.
Opening a photo to edit also takes a long time, about 15-20 seconds. I see the loading bar on the left immediately jump to 90% then sit there until I’m brought to the editor.
I believe the software is storing these tags in separate files along side the image files, or perhaps its in a database. Either way I’m just scratching my head here, am I crazy?
What the team has developed here is nothing short of amazing. Perhaps I am just abusing the software too much with my caveman like thought process.
They are over network. I’ve not had issues with anything on the network. I’ve even edited video over my network, just simple 1080p at a reasonable bitrate.
I did a little testing and at 100 images on local disk the tagging is slightly faster, maybe down to 10-15 seconds for a single image. I did notice on local disk that if I tag a large group it is much faster than over the network. I’m guessing there is some overhead while going with network storage that I didn’t fully understand.
What I think the brunt of the delay is RT creating those .pp3 files that sit along side the image files. Once those are created I can go back and change the color tag and it is almost instant. A large group changed is much much faster.
I might continue with over the network and initially tag all the images to create those .pp3 files.
Another idea, I’ve not had a reason to use this feature yet, is have my cloud storage server (Nextcloud) sync images I want to edit to a folder on my main computer. So that I’m editing and creating files on local disk that will sync over the network to the server any changes that were made.
But yeah, I had no idea SMB had so much overhead with this type of workload. I wonder how well Linux’s network sharing would handle it?
To sum up, I’ll bet SMB and network sharing just doesn’t like the several hundred or thousand files that need to be created and edited. HDD doesn’t seem to care. I’ll pursue getting file sync enabled with my storage server. Otherwise I’ll fall back to initially tagging all images to create those files.
Windows 10 pro is running a lot of services and tasks, which are not needed all the time, especially not for RT. Switching them off, will speed up your system a lot. Then additionally for editing, i prefer the ultimate power mode:
Computer runs fine. No issues with computer performance except that one time my CPU cooler died without me noticing. RT is the only thing bogging down. It’s been narrowed down to the network share I was accessing. If there is a way to speed that up.
OK, the reason I was asking about fragmentation was due to it taking 10-15 seconds to tag even on the local drive. It may not be, but I’ve seen fragmentation cause serious I/O performance degradation, but it’s been a while (and on mechanical drives).
Yeah my one SSD is full of AI models. I could put some raw photos on there for editing, but not the 1000 or so that I had for this most recent project. Or the thousands that I take from astrophotography.
On my main computer, editing on the local disk, initial tagging took 10-15 seconds per image. After an image was tagged every subsequent tag after was instant. It’s something about RT creating those .pp3 files that bogs down the program. However over the network share the subsequent tagging still took some time, but it was shorter. (down to 15 seconds from 20 seconds)
If RT could not hang and freeze while those tags are being applied so I can continue to navigate or add even more tags to lets say a queue. The program would be much more usable on slower (or stupid like mine) setups.
Definitely sounds like something on your box. It would really be just a curiosity thing (and might tell us nothing at all), but ART was forked from RT. I wonder if they would tag faster / slower / same in ART? On my little laptop stars and colors locally in RT 10 are instantaneous.
OT, but I would’ve more expected to hear of astroimaging using Siril / GIMP, not RT.
I only used RT for the eclipse this year for color grading. I needed it for some “quick” pre-processing of a time lapse. I don’t know why I said astrophotography when I only needed it for the eclipse.
I’ll give ART a try. What is OT? For my astro I use PIPP, DSS, Autostakkert and Gimp.