Sunday I placed an order 2 gigs of DDR 500 RAM.

It will increase my total RAM to 2.5 GB. Unfortunately, I have to remove 2 x 256mb DIMMs because all my slots are full. The nForce2 chipset only has room for 3 DIMMs.
I purchased the RAM to make my desktop more usable until I can afford a new PC. Maybe by that time I’ll even be able to afford quad core CPU(s)

It’s not a waste even when I do replace this box. It will become my server and replace skank* which is my CSH user rack server. Skank is an Athlon T-bird 900 with a whopping 512 megs of pc133. I don’t know how, but it’s stable, and before I added new hard drives it had a 384 day uptime. This box will still be a huge improvement over skank, especially when upload tons of 6.1 megapixel images for it to resize in gallery.

Anyways, it will save a ton of time processing those Flextight scans and sorting out those miscellaneous RAWs.

* My server, skank, is named because “skank” is the verb form of “skanking” which is a type of dancing (to ska music). It is not named after the noun, “skank”, used to describe a promiscuous female.

Well, I had hard drive issues a while ago and I had to recover all the data off of it, and I got a bunch of randomly named files (with the proper extension at least).  Forty gigs of those files are 6 megapixel NEF files (Nikon’s RAW format).  Twenty out of the forty gigabytes of RAWs are from the classes I took this summer which I need to finish filtering out and editing by the end of this quarter.

For a while I have fiddled around a bit with Adobe Lightroom Beta 3 and liked the results and the flashy graphics.  It’s simple to use and does a pretty good job for what I used it for.

The other day I put Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 4 (I think they are going to push the Photoshop part to entice people).   I imported the 40gb of pictures into Lightroom and let it move them to where it wanted and sort them by date (I figured this way at least I would be able to get a general idea what I was looking at by date).  I assumed that it would take a while so I wasn’t too concerned about performance so I let it run over night.

Today I finally decided I wanted to start editing some things, or at least sorting the stuff out so I could have stuff to show tomorrow.

I am completely disappointed.

Let me start off by saying this does not reflect how the final product will behave because I am using beta software.

Heres’s a brief description of the box I am running it on:
Athlon M 2500+ (running at 2200 mhz)
1GB of RAM
Vista RC2*

I load up Lightroom, I click on a “shoot” that has about 300 RAWs in it, and my system locks up for a good five minutes.  When I finally get my task manager open I can see it is sucking up about 500 or 600mb of memory.  Finally, I can use the system again.  Everything seems to be going smoothly.  I check my Task Manager.  Lightroom is only using 170mb of RAM.  Lookin’ good.  I scroll through some images.  Perhaps that was just a glitch or it just needed to cache some things…

Nope.  It locks up again.  This time I have task manager open and I see the memory jump back up to it’s peak before.  Obviously, Lightroom is eating up all my memory and caching all my images into swap space.  Efficient?  Heck no.  It takes longer for it to read the data cached off of swap space: A. because it is not in it’s compressed form. B. even though caching the manipulation that lightroom aplys to the RAW file may be fast when the cache is in memory, it’s probably faster to recalculate it for the freshly loaded RAW file.

It went through a few cycles like that.  By this point I had only been running it for about 30 or so minutes and it racked up a good 6 million page faults.  Why can’t Adobe manage it’s memory responsibly.  Relying on the OS for this when dealing with data of this magnitude is silly.  Do you think SQL servers that have gigabytes of data store it all in memory and rely on the OS to manage it? I hope (and know) not.  It makes me cringe to think of how this software would run on a default MacBook configuration with a mere 512mb of memory.  I hope they’re not just targeting professionals with large budgets that can afford fancy Mac Pros (or in my case, more RAM) and such.  Most students don’t get much of a choice when it comes to computers, if a choice at all… and if they even do use Adobe Lightroom, are they going to really want to use that piece of software that they perceive to be slow when they get out into the photography industry?

Conclusion:

Lightroom is a great product, with great features, a great interface and everything like that.  If only it worked well for me on large scales like what I am doing I would fall for it.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  I think I’ll let it stay on my hard drive and use it for correcting pictures from parties and such.  One gigabyte of RAM should be sufficient enough and not cause this much of an issue.

*I’d like to address that due to the lack of my knowledge Lightroom works that there is very slim chance that it could be Vista’s fault for all this, but Adobe should have taken this into consideration, and I highly doubt this to be the case.  Had I more time, I would put XP on another hard drive and do the same tests.

I finally got around to posting these pictures in my gallery, which can be found here.  They are still pretty rough, and unedited, except for some contrast stretching.
Here are a couple of my more favorite ones.  Click for slightly larger image :).

I hope you enjoy them.

I really need to get around to processing them.  I have only a gig of RAM on my desktop and it doesn’t like dealing with 400MB 16bit tiffs.

I apologize if anybody tried accessing my site, or Jeremy’s this weekend.  After 385 days of uptime, I decided that I needed to take “Skank”, my server, down for maintenance.  It’s 60gb hard drive had a whine of death and I had 3 80gb drives to put in it.  And that I did.

Basically, in Linux (or BSD I believe), you don’t need a RAID controller to have a RAID.  And I wanted to take full advantage of all 3 drives, so I set up a RAID 5 with them.  To migrate the data from the 60gb reiserfs partition, I used dd to copy the bits to the new 160gb partition.  After that which took an hour or two I used the command resize_reiserfs to resize the 60gb partition on what was actually a 160gb partition to 160gb, and bam!, a couple more seconds and I was migrated.  I also set up a RAID 1 for my boot partition and and a RAID 0 for swap.
Then I just had to tweak my fstab and grub config and grub the new drives, restart, and yup it worked.  Okay, I embellished a bit.  It didn’t go all that smooth, but the outcome is what matters, right?

So right now I am scanning tons of 4×5s on a Flextight 848 and damn, they are sexy.  So very much faster than the Flextight II’s and that makes me happy.  Honestly, they scan at 2040dpi, about 4 times faster (just an estimate) than the Flextight II’s do at 1800dpi.  Heh, and I am on the same network as my server so I can just scp all my 16bit tiffs to it instead of storing them.

Yeah, I am stressed… my portable hard drive got destroyed and it had a lot of stuff on it.