Lightroom Slow As Molasses

I have been processing many photos and my Lightroom is becoming extremely slow. People would say that it's the size of the catalog 10,000+. It's not! I just recently changed one of my setting in the hope of making my slow computer much faster. I have already purchased a super-duper fast Core i7 Dell computer, but it will take 4 weeks to be delivered since the DDR3 memory is back ordered.

Edit > Preferences > File Handling > Camera Raw Cache Setting

Every time Lightroom opens a raw file like Canon CR2 or Nikon NEF, Lightroom reads the photo and process it. It's very CPU intensive. So by saving the raw photo to the cache, it should improve the speed. Except that if you make the cache too large, the operating system will start using the swap file, instead of RAM.

So how much to set the Camera Raw Setting to? Lightroom's default is 1Gb. You will need to experiment and find the sweet spot. For me it's 2Gb, after which Lightroom causes too much swapping to disk.

By changing the Camera Raw Cache to 2Gb, has stopped the swapping, and now Lightroom runs lot, lot faster, at least 5 times faster.