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Digital Photo Professional 4.3.1 takes aprox 2 or more minutes to load under Windows 10.

BlueNose
Contributor

I've installed the latest Digital Photo Professional for Windows 10 x64 and the program takes forever to load.

The small DPP ver.4 startup screen shows quickly but the main program takes quite a long time before the main program  shows up with the ability to navigate and edit photos.   It is so frustrating waiting for 3 minutes for the screen to come up that I finally went and bought an SSD to load the O/S  and programs.  End result is it still takes 2 minutes or longer to finish loading.

Other programs that are much larger load almost instantly but not DPP4.

Has anyone else run into this problem and if so any luck with fixing it?

9 REPLIES 9

BlueNose
Contributor

I used Process Monitor (sysinternals from microsoft) and monitored the startup.

The slowdown was due to DPP opening a large zip file I had in the root of my datadrive D:\ (6.5 GB of small source files), before it tried to load my pictures from the last directory opened D:\Pictures_all\2015\2015_08_22

 

I moved this file to another drive and deleted it from D:\

Started DPP again and it worked fine and opened almost immediately.

 

I can't think of any reason it should try to open the largest zip file in the root directory.  Is this a bug in the startup process for  DPP4?


@BlueNose wrote:

I used Process Monitor (sysinternals from microsoft) and monitored the startup.

The slowdown was due to DPP opening a large zip file I had in the root of my datadrive D:\ (6.5 GB of small source files), before it tried to load my pictures from the last directory opened D:\Pictures_all\2015\2015_08_22

 

I moved this file to another drive and deleted it from D:\

Started DPP again and it worked fine and opened almost immediately.

 

I can't think of any reason it should try to open the largest zip file in the root directory.  Is this a bug in the startup process for  DPP4?


I haven't seen that problem, but it's suggestive that the zip file was on the same drive as your pictures folder.

 

What I have seen is that all releases of DPP4 have been much slower than any release of DPP3. Sometimes it will suddenly freeze for several minutes during an editing session, almost as though it were periodically recovering from a memory leak. Also, if I'm editing offline files, it runs much slower if I'm in contact with the destination drive than if I'm not. IOW, the offline file caching does me very little good, and the OS seems powerless to assert its authority over the process. Most of my editing is done under Windows 8 and 8.1, and a small amount under Windows 7.

Bob
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA

What it appears to do is look for picture files before it goes to the last directory so it is either a bug in DPP4's code where searching for pictures/picture directories occurs before the actual opening of the last directory I was in.

Even when I removed the humongus zip file I noticed it is still opening some files and directories on 😧 before it goes to the last directory I was in.  Most likely a stupid programming error in the startup of the program.  Once I removed the file from the root the remaining directories and files it opens are minor, so no noticable delay now.

 

However if it finds a larger directory or files before it finally switches to the correct directory then the program will be much slower.

BlueNose
Contributor

I've run into the same problem with DPP 4.5.10 and DPP 4.5.20 where it loads very slowly and sometimes freezes (not responding) for a minute or more when working on photos.

I ran microsofts ProcMon.exe (sysinternals) and found that the reason for the slow load and frequent freezing or slow performance is symptomatic to it scanning my whole drive 😧 and the C: drive and trying to open large files that it should not be opening.

 

Looks a lot like a virus but I doubt it.  i think it is scanning the whole drive and opening all archives (zip files, pst files) including looking at my game directories and my programming directories and my backup directories trying to find image files !!! 

Whenever it hits a large file like a 100 GB zip file it just goes off into limbo but smaller files slow it down by minutes.

 

With 2 and 3 terrabyte drives, that are at 80% used, this is a major slowdown of the program.

I've looked through documentation and registry and configuration files and I'm not finding anything to turn this off.

 

I tried it on an empty drive and it loaded quickly but it still goes out to the C drive to scan for files and cause slow downs while trying to use it.

 

Does anyone know how to turn off this scanning of all files on the drive and on the system drive behaviour.

 

Mod Note: Email address removed per forum guidelines

 

I think the scanning process you claim to have discovered is probably normal behavior, which does not necessarily mean that it is a positive or a negative thing.  It would seem that DPP may not keep track of a database, or catalog, of image files, which is dumb, IMHO, because it is easily corrected.

 

I would venture that DPP is simply looking for compatible file types, and adding them to the files display when it opens.  If that is what is actually occurring, then there is nothing to be done about it until the software designers add an "Import" procedure to the software, and maintain a database of imported files.  For now, it may look for compatible files, everywhere it can.

 

But, I don't think that is what slows down the app.  Scanning directories for file types is not a time consuming process, but it can seem to take a long time if the application is multi-tasking, splitting time between scanning your drive for image files, and another very time consuming task.

 

DPP does not seem to be very efficient at opening files for editing.  It seems to want a lot of memory, a WHOLE lot of memory.  I suspect that the real cause of the apparent sluggishness with DPP4 is directly associated with setting up virtual memory for opening large image files, and the needed scratch pad memory space for editing them.  

 

All of this setup is probably part of the initialization process for the application.  It also seems to recur every time a new image file is opened for editing.  The application does not seem to be very good at managing its' use of program memory space.  In short, it is a memory hog.

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"The right mouse button is your friend."

One thing I've observed is that DPP 4 seems to take a LOT longer to edit a file if the file is on a server. rather than on the computer doing the editing. And the lights on the Ethernet switch suggest that the delay is largely due to traffic between the two machines. I.e., DPP 4 apparently does a lousy job of caching the data it needs and has to spend an inordinate amount of time shuffling it back and forth. My testing hasn't been rigorous enough to prove that hypothesis outright, but that's certainly how it looks. I'm planning to replace my current 100mb switch with a gigabit switch in the hope that the change will speed things up a little.

Bob
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA

Unfortunately this is not normal behaviour for a program and the way they have implemented it is very bad as DPP freezes when trying to get file info from very large archive files like .zip and .pst (tasks like this should be run on a lower priority thread or seperate process).  I've verified that when DPP stops responding that it is trying to get info from a large file or archive and when it is a 100GB+ zip file it will not work until I kill DPP.


I checked it while it was doing one of the zip files and when it queried the zip files content it would get a BUFFEROVERFLOW error and jlust keep looping trying to open it. 

 

I have over 200,000 raw and jpg files (3 terrabytes) on my local computer drives.  In addtion I have non picture related files and zipped archives that amount to around 2 terrabytes).  If it only did the current drive I would be in much better shape but I tried moving the large archive files to another drive  (i have 7.5 TB spread over 4 drives and another 8TB offline on USB 3.0 connections.

 

If i saw a program that I didn't trust opening the files this does and scanning system, program and apparently every file on the drive I would assume it was malware.   I've been a programmer (database, internet and graphics programmer) for almost 40 years and this is just very bad design/programming.  

 

Despite all this I really like DPP and prefer to use it instead of the dozen or so other programs I have acquired.

fowler@bluenose.ca

FYI

 

I recently damaged my laptop by allowing it to slide off my lap, and drop a couple of feet to a hardwood floor.  I suspect I damaged the fan, because it began overheating.

 

So, I ordered a new laptop with an Intel I7 processor, 16 GB RAM, 4 GB Video card, and a combination of hard drive and solid state drive.  I loaded up DPP 4.6.1, and it runs FAST.  I think the big difference could be having a separate video card, instead of the typical arrangement of video sharing system RAM, which reduces CPU throughput.

 

I can load over 25MB RAW files, and watch the spinning icon come and go in about 2-3 seconds.  And, that is loading the file from a network location, which uses an old 10 year old machine running Windows Server 2008 R2, and a slow Ethernet card, by today's standards.  I am using a network cable to connect to my LAN, instead of going wireless..

 

The moral of the story is this.  If you want speed up DPP, then use a workstation or a gaming computer. I'm using a gaming laptop because of the built-in 4 GB video card.  I think the separate video card, and a healthy amount of system RAM are making all of the difference.  I can load files stored on the local hard drive in about one second, and the icon is gone.

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"The right mouse button is your friend."

Follow up to previous post.

 

DPP4 is runnilng like an Olympic sprinter.  In the past when I ran a batch job, it would take just under a minute per RAW file to process.  With a separate video card, lots of RAM, and a powerhouse CPU, DPP can process a RAW file in about 6 seconds.  That is a ten fold increase in speed over the budget priced laptops with 4-8 GB of RAM, and no video card.

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"The right mouse button is your friend."
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