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Digital Photo Professional 4.5.x Slowdown and Freezing caused by program scanning drives

BlueNose
Contributor

Quad-Core i7 3.4 GHZ CPU and 16 GB Ram

windows 10 x64 Pro

Program works well and I rely on it to help process a large number of photos from 5 cameras.

 

However it is loading very slowly and Freezing or slowing down when using it.  This behaviour has become a very serious problem in trying to use it. 

 

I ran procmon.exe (microsoft sysinternals) to see what is was doing when the program froze for minutes at a time.

 

Procmon.exe reported that dpp4main.exe is scanning and opening files on both my C: drive and 😧 drive and each time it DPP locked up completely it was when it tried to open a 100+ GB zip file.   The slowdown occurred when it went out and searched my gaming directories on another drive, another freeze occurred when it was opening multi GB .pst files.
Support told me i just needed to set the default directory - but that didn't work.

 

Is there anyway to to stop DPP 4.5.10 or DPP 4.5.20 from scanning my directories and files ????

I'm assuming at the moment  that it is trying to find and index photos but it's crazy to do this on multi terrabyte drives filled with a huge number of files.  Worse it seems to kick off to scan the files while i'm working on photos - freezing the program for long periods.

 

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16 REPLIES 16

Tim
Authority

Hello BlueNose, 

It seems that a lot of the issues that you are experiencing are the same as in another forum post that has been gone over by several esteemed contributors on this forum.  At this time I am not aware of a method to have DPP not scan the files and drives. Unfortunately that is part of the operation of the program at a fairly base level.  

Did this answer your question? Please click the Accept as Solution button so that others may find the answer as well.

I found the source of the worst of the problem.  Every time i run the program and delete files, when I exit the program starts or leaves another process of the same name still running invisibly and holding onto 80 to 120 MB of memory.  When I start the program again that is when the problem becomes much worse and each time I do this it adds another instance to this back ground process.  When I've had the worst experience there have been as many as 4 or these background processes running.

 

I've terminated the background version after I close the program manually using the task manager to kill it.   This significantly improves the performance but it still seems to freeze the program when I delete files or sometimes when i move from picture to picture. In every case I see file activity where the program is going into directories that are not photo related.

Also when I've been running procmon.exe I've noticed that it goes into a loop and keeps opening and closing the registry and files.  I really like DPP but the constant freezes are so annoying i may have to roll back to 4.3 just so i can process pictures in a reasonable amount of time.

sensia25
Contributor
I am in the same boat and likewise found out dpp4main is scanning needless directories some of which are in my network locations. This is slowing down things terribly. I am hoping Canon will step to fix their problem.


@sensia25 wrote:
I am in the same boat and likewise found out dpp4main is scanning needless directories some of which are in my network locations. This is slowing down things terribly. I am hoping Canon will step to fix their problem.

As are we all. I just hope that they even can. I keep having this nightmare that they contracted the design and implementation of this turkey out to some schlock software house and now don't even have the source code - or at least don't have the necessary manpower to understand it and fix the contractor's design errors. I sure hope that isn't the case, but that hope wanes as time keeps passing with no discernible improvement. I guess if I were Adobe, I'd be having a good laugh.

Bob
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA


@sensia25 wrote:
I am in the same boat and likewise found out dpp4main is scanning needless directories some of which are in my network locations. This is slowing down things terribly. I am hoping Canon will step to fix their problem.

I am running Windows 10, and I don't have that problem.  Check your Windows File Exlorer and Media Player settings.  I have mine disabled, so that Windows doesn't automatically search memory sticks for media files.  Windows Media Player itself can perform automatic searches, too, looking for files to add to its' library.  

 

Other than that, I don't know what to tell you.  I haven't observed any of this searching, on any of my machines.

 

[EDIT]. If it makes any difference, I'm running Windows 10 Professional, not the Home version.

--------------------------------------------------------
"The right mouse button is your friend."

I've finally resolved the situation.  Slowdowns are gone.  I've been able to move back to the current version.

Main source of problem is that DPP does not display error messages when problems occur especiially with memory.

1) I had a virtual ethernet connection for my virtual machines on my computer.  This may have been part of the reason why it kept searching for files.  disabling the virtual ethernet connection reduced the issue with searching files. But the slowdown and outright freezing of the program coninued.

 

2) The rest of the problems went away when I increased my virtual memory paging file from the recommended of 3GB to 16GB (amount of memory on the workstation).  Using a fixed size paging file improves performance in windows.  Unfortunately DPP's demand for memory seems to have been hitting the 3GB marker and I should have gotten some form of memory error message.  But no message.

 

Increasing it to 16GB is probably overkill but the fixed size paging file at 16GB on an SSD eliminated almost 99% of the delays and stopped the freezing of the program.   Still get a slow down when I hit delete rejected photos when I'm doing this for a large number of photos i.e. 50 to 300 but that is a slowdown that is manageable if I delete files in groups of 1- 30 photos.

Also I no longer see dormant multiple DPP processes being left behind when i close DPP after a editing session. 

 

So all my problems are basically solved.  Thank you all for your help.

 

Note: to those having slow downs - try setting your paging file to fixed size and make it as large as your total RAM installed.

Or make it at least 6GB in size.   This will also help reduce delays when running other programs.


@BlueNose wrote:

I've finally resolved the situation.  Slowdowns are gone.  I've been able to move back to the current version.

Main source of problem is that DPP does not display error messages when problems occur especiially with memory.

1) I had a virtual ethernet connection for my virtual machines on my computer.  This may have been part of the reason why it kept searching for files.  disabling the virtual ethernet connection reduced the issue with searching files. But the slowdown and outright freezing of the program coninued.

 

2) The rest of the problems went away when I increased my virtual memory paging file from the recommended of 3GB to 16GB (amount of memory on the workstation).  Using a fixed size paging file improves performance in windows.  Unfortunately DPP's demand for memory seems to have been hitting the 3GB marker and I should have gotten some form of memory error message.  But no message.

 

Increasing it to 16GB is probably overkill but the fixed size paging file at 16GB on an SSD eliminated almost 99% of the delays and stopped the freezing of the program.   Still get a slow down when I hit delete rejected photos when I'm doing this for a large number of photos i.e. 50 to 300 but that is a slowdown that is manageable if I delete files in groups of 1- 30 photos.

Also I no longer see dormant multiple DPP processes being left behind when i close DPP after a editing session. 

 

So all my problems are basically solved.  Thank you all for your help.

 

Note: to those having slow downs - try setting your paging file to fixed size and make it as large as your total RAM installed.

Or make it at least 6GB in size.   This will also help reduce delays when running other programs.


That's good news, and even better detective work.  It makes sense, though.  DPP4 likes to have lots of memory space.  i can''t say what the minimum amount you need to make the program run efficiently, but budget laptops don't seem to have enough.  Having a separate graphics card seems to help, too.

--------------------------------------------------------
"The right mouse button is your friend."

Thanks Bluenose; I will give it a shot but doubt that is a solution. DPP4 hardly ever eats more than 4GB of RAM. DPP4 does not haveto be the special snowflake as everything else runs smoothly on varible pagefile settin on Wndows10.

I want to +1 something has to be done. The app appears to be file monitoring (probably for the filesystem tree) but it's ridiculous - I get a spinning cursor all the time, when I was just extracting a zip file from my drive to the network!

 

If they can't do anything other than think it is a good idea to listen and react to EVERY file system event somehow, please offer us a filter, a watch point (root folder to monitor from) OR limit it to bookmark locations or open/selected folders OR allow us to turn it off and just offer a goddam refresh button.

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