Digital Photo Professional 4.4.30.2 Hangs every 3 minutes+/-

[FloridaDrafter]

It has always hung up at least twice every session when editing RAW files, but since the latest MS update, I use Win 7 Pro 64bit, (8/8/2016) it is unbearable. DPP 4 hanges every 3 minutes or so. I can't help but think it is something to do with Microsofts latest update. Has anyone else seen this problem? Or the hanging from time to time? The little blue circle where my mouse cursor used to be is getting old quick. I have oher RAW editors and am thinking I might have to start using them.

My files are usually 25mb+/- and the folder rarely exceeds 7gb.

[FloridaDrafter · Accepted solution]

I found the culprit. Picasa. problem solved. Woot! it was constanly looking to uptate image libraries which cause DPP to hang (it couldn't use the folder because Picasa had it in use). I updated Picas 2 days ago and that's when the major problem started. Picasa = uninstalled 😉

[Waddizzle]

Sounds to me like your system is running out of RAM.  I was getting sluggish performance from DPP4.  DPP3 had always ran so much faster.  I upgraded a laptop from 4GB to 8GB, and DPP4 seemed to run a little quicker. 

I, too, had RAW files that varied in size from 23GB to 28 GB, with the average falling somewhere around 25-26GB.  It would take about 50-55 seconds to process each file into a JPEG.   After the RAM upgrade, that number dropped to about 45-50 seconds to process each RAW file.  DPP seemed able to clean up after itself more efficiently, which means it frees up scratchpad RAM more quickly.

Another tip with MS Windows, is to make sure that you have plenty of free hard drive space, because Windows needs to create and manage what is known as a paging file, which is basically your virtual RAM.  The more free hard drive space you have, then theoretically you should have more continuous free disk sectors, which allows for efficient reads and writes.  A paging file varies in size in relation to the amount of system RAM that you have.  It can frequently be double the size of the amount of system RAM that you have.

[FloridaDrafter]

Thanks for the tips, Waddizzle, but you were probably replying while I was. Here is how I solved the problem. I have a fairly new system with 8 GB of RAM, so that was the first thing I looked at, my ussage was at 30%. I also have a 2 TB HD and have my page file set to 4 GB (my rule of thumb is half your RAM for page file). I looked at my Windows error report in Event Viewer and saw that DPP "could not access files or folder" being the reason it was hanging. Ordinarily, this wouldn't show up as an error message but I forced Windows to shut DPP down while it was hanging. I had recently updated Picasa and it keeps tabs on new image files, so I started to suspected Picasa, being a Google product, it is very invasive. As reported in my OP, DPP has been hanging 2 or 3 times at random in the past over a 2 hour average session (I've had a version of Picaso on my system for a while), but only since the Picasa update, a week ago, did it start hanging every 2-3 minutes. I also thought my folder might be to big, my current project had 11.7 GB of RAW files from a bird shoot, of course, I broke that up into smaller folders. I even rolled back windows updates and uninstalled DPP and went back to the version that came with my camera (7D mark II).

I unistalled Picasa and no more problem, even after bringing DPP back up to the latest version and letting Windows do it's update thing. So in my case, Picasa was the evil culprit 😉

-Newton

[Waddizzle]

"I also have a 2 TB HD and have my page file set to 4 GB (my rule of thumb is half your RAM for page file."

A paging file is virtual memory.  Typically, you want the paging file to be twice the size of available RAM, not the other way around like you have described.  In fact, Windows defaults to a paging file size that is twice that of the available RAM.