Mac hardware recommendations for Lightroom 3

Question

I'm currently running a 2008 unibody 15" MacBook Pro 2.53 with 320GB 5400 RPM hard drive and 4GB of system memory. I've upgraded to Snow Leopard and I'm running Lightroom 3 (64-bit).

I have two problems with my setup currently and I'm seeking recommendations on improving the situation:

• memory usage during processing exceeds 1.5GB
• time to move between images in Develop module is painfully slow

I've noticed that system memory usage typically goes up drastically during export to JPEG. Is this normal and how much memory is normal? It seems the larger the set of photos being exported, the greater the amount of memory is needed. I often find myself staring at Activity Monitor and shutting down all other applications to free up as much RAM as possible.

Then switching photos in the Develop module takes ages for me. I think this is a disk related issue so I'm thinking new larger 7200 RPM hard drive should sort that out. The current hard drive is a Hitachi 320GB 5400 RPM drive and it often seems to be the bottleneck when installing applications and writing data.

Any recommendations?

Answer

yes, that memory usage is normal converting to jpeg.

I"m finding 4Gig works fine. A few suggestions.

upgrade your drive to a 7200 drive. you're probably seeing I/O delays and a faster drive will help.

preferences->file handling, set the cache to a larger value. I use 25 gig.

optimize your catalog (under the file menu) every so often.

system performance will lag as your memory set grows. You can check /var/vm (using terminal):

[chuq-laptop:~] chuqui% cd /var/vm [chuq-laptop:/var/vm] chuqui% ls -l total 8912896 -rw------T 1 root wheel 4294967296 Aug 6 12:14 sleepimage -rw------- 1 root wheel 67108864 Aug 4 21:57 swapfile0 -rw------- 1 root wheel 67108864 Aug 7 16:57 swapfile1 -rw------- 1 root wheel 134217728 Aug 8 13:53 swapfile2 [chuq-laptop:/var/vm] chuqui%

if you see more than 3-4 swapfiles, you'll speed things up by rebooting and re-initalizing VM. If you haven't rebooted for a while, you may see 6-7 files especially if oyu've done a lot of image work, and that slows down the paging system (again, a 7200 RPM drive as your boot drive helps this as well...)

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