This is the fourth in a series of posts about my out-of-box experience with a Dell T7920 workstation. The series starts here.
I copied over the Lightroom catalogs from the old workstation. I had made sure to install the photo files on drives with the same letter and in directories with the same names as the old workstation, so the catalogs came right up. Then I started to look at how well Lightroom used machine resources.
I set up Lightroom to run from one of the NVMe drives, and to cache on the other. I put 750 images on the striped SSD drive, imported them, and watched the CPU load while Lr generated the previews:
There are 16 physical cores, 8 on each Xeon processor. Lightroom is using most of them. It’s not using a lot of memory.
I exported the set of images as TIFF files to the same NVMe drive that Lr was using for caching:
It started out using all the cycles available, but soon became disk-bound.
Although the active time was 100%, the transfer rate was pretty poor for a NVMe drive.
The GPU was hardly being used at all:
After that export finished, I exported the same set of images back to the same striped SSD drive that they came from:
That made the write speed much higher. The whole export went much faster. I’m not sure why this is the case.
While I was at it, I looked at the way that Helicon Focus used resources during batch processing of 50-image stacks:
It uses a fair amount of memory, and there is high CPU utilization for part of the time.
This is the activity of the disk with the source images. It apparently reads all the images into memory, and then stacks them.
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