Digital Photo Professional incredibly slow

[gecastro]

Does anyone else have the problem that with more than 500 photos in the folder, DPP becomes almost unusable? I recently upgraded to the latest version, 4.19.10, and it seems even slower than the previous version.

[shadowsports]

Greetings,

I just upgraded from 4.18.10 to 4.19.10.  I'm not seeing any performance differences.  Do you save your files on a local disk?  Are they stored on an external drive or in a folder being backed up to the cloud?  I performed some edits and did a convert and save.  Seems normal for me.

[gecastro]

I do have my files in a local NAS, so I'm expecting it to be slower than a local hard drive. But this hasn't changed in two years, and last weekend DPP really struggled to handle the folder, maybe because I started with 800+ files.

I ended up using another software to cull the files and it was a lot faster and responsive than DPP, so the NAS should not be an issue.

PD: I have an R6, so files are on the small side compared to an R5.

[wq9nsc]

I regularly shoot with three 1DX III bodies at sports events and dump all of the photos to the same folder, generally there will be around 2,000 from an event.  I use a HP Z series workstation and a SSD for storage for working files with DPP using any disk workspace on an HP Z drive (SSD drive directly on the CPU bus). 

I don't notice any speed issues based upon number of files and I just finished post-proc for an event after upgrading to the latest version of DPP and it doesn't seem any different speed wise than the prior version. 

It does have the same issue DPP has pretty much had forever (at least on Windows PCs) in that it has a "memory leak" and after an hour or so of usage the amount of memory allocated to DPP grows very large resulting in lethargic behavior, the cure is to exit and restart DPP which provides proper performance for another hour or so.  This is on a PC with twin Xeon CPUs with 256 GB of memory per CPU and DPP doesn't use a significant portion of free memory but it simply grows sluggish as it grows regardless of the amount of available memory.

Rodger

[gecastro]

After monitoring the desktop resources for a while, I found part of the issue. Windows Defender was hogging around 60% of the NAS bandwidth, after adding some exceptions to ignore all the files from the NAS the speed did increase substantially.

Although working with a NAS won't be as fast as a local SSD, I did notice a few things:

• DPP maintains a cache in the local drive to speed up thumbnail visualisation and other stuff.
• DPP still hangs with [Not Responding] at times. Although, I can see that it is not reading from the NAS, so the bottleneck must be something else.
• I find it very strange that just opening the Preference menu takes some time and shows the "Not Responding" message.
• I have an 8-core CPU, 95% free, and 64BG RAM 80% free

[wq9nsc]

Odd, I never get the "not responding" message so it sounds like another running task is probably in conflict with a DPP process.

It is sad that Canon has never ported DPP to Linux which is a much less "busy" and convoluted OS and would likely make the DPP slowdown issues go away.  Both of my HP Z stations came with Red Hat Linux as one of the factory installed operating systems and it is a pleasure to use compared to the always intrusive and bloated system that Windows has become, particularly post XP/7 which were both fairly well behaved and far less loaded with extra garbage.

Rodger

[gecastro]

After more testing, I think that the problem is the NAS. Although there is some spare bandwidth, I assume that reading the files from the NAS adds a few extra inefficiencies than just the speed of the drive (SMB protocol?). Still puzzles me that opening the preferences window also lags when you read the photos from the NAS, like it keeps accessing the filesystem even when it's not necessary.

I guess I'll have to add an extra step to my workflow to edit the files locally before moving them to the NAS.

I agree about Linux, these days I only use Linux, with the exception when I do photo editing.

[Waddizzle]

Many NAS devices are designed to be data archives, not file servers.  Major difference in speed.

[hborkhuis]

Hi, I want to share my solution that works already for years. DPP uses a sort of filesystem watcher that tracks the changes on disk so newly created folders (after importing new pictures) etc. are directly visible on screen. My Pictures folder has a lot subfolders (1 per shooting day), this is what slows down the application. 

Solution: Restart the Windows Explorer (using Task Manager) after that DPP is started. Now DPP looses the connection with the filesystem watcher and DPP comes alive again.

[wq9nsc]

I often have more than 3,000 images in a folder because I shoot sports events with at least two and sometimes three 1DX III bodies with different lenses and I dump them all to a single event folder for editing.  That doesn't create any speed issues but pretty much every release of DPP has suffered from a "memory leak" issue causing it to continue growing in size with time during an editing session which makes it grow very sluggish.

I find the main DPP process will grow up to 10 GB or so after an hour of editing at which point it becomes sluggish requiring exiting and then restarting DPP which returns it to normal operation.  Note that this problem is NOT related to available system resources, I use a HP Z series workstation with twin CPUs with 128 GB of memory per CPU and even with DPP running by itself consuming less than 4% of system memory resources it still turns into a slug as it grows obese with time.

For editing, I have DPP on one SSD on the processor bus and the RAW files are stored on a second processor bus SSD until editing is done.  This ensures fast file operations.

Go into task manager while DPP is running to see how much of your CPU, memory, and disk communications resources are being used.  If memory is low to the point that virtual memory is being used shortly after the program is started, then DPP will get very slow.  If you have other processes going on (and Windows as installed will have many unneeded startup programs that spawn ongoing processes that eat resources) then DPP may be starved for resources.

To me the biggest DPP issue is it does not make good use of the specialized processor cores on the graphics card and most other image intensive programs do much better with utilizing these resources.  Digital lens optimizer and the noise reduction algorithm are the two most computationally involved portions of the DPP program with RAW to JPG conversion running a close 3rd.  I have a pair of Nvidia Quadro workstation cards in my PC and I have never seen DPP push utilization of the Cuda cores over 1% while my video editor regular pushes them into the 20 % range.  What DPP does however is run heavily from the CPU itself, I have twin 8 core Xeon processors and DPP will periodically max out all 16 cores during some operations.  I have a new workstation on order from HP with twin 28 core processors and it will be interesting to see if DPP manages to max out all 56 cores while still being less than a speed demon.  Canon REALLY needs to contract this program out to a software concern that can give it some badly needed updates.  It does a lot of things well and is very simple to use but in terms of performance, it is the 28.8K dial up model of the image processing world.

Rodger