New iMac slow rendering images

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Hello. I am a photographer and I have been using a MacBook Pro for many many years. I just moved to an iMac.
My iMac is the 5k retina 27" 4.2 ghz intel core i7 32 gb ram radeon pro 580 8192 mb as far as stats
My MacBook Pro is 15" 2.5 ghz intel core i7 16 gb 1600 mhz ddr3 Nvidia geforce g7 750 2048 mb as far as stats

Before I print some images large I upsize them and sharpen to print. I have a 32x40 print Im working on and the file size is 84 mb.
When I open it in preview on the new iMac it won't render it for about 3 minutes. My laptop renders it immediately.
I'm concerned about this performance but the new one should be much faster. I've also hardly used it; it has no programs on it and it's not near full. My MacBook is always near full and using all my ram non stop with programs. Yet it renders the images fine. What's going on? Thanks
 

chscag

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Welcome to our forums.

Your new iMac should likewise render that print immediately. What program are you using to edit the photos and has it been updated for Mojave?
 
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Thanks chscag

The problem isn’t even editing software..I don’t think: this is an image I edited on my laptop in photoshop before I bought the iMac. I upsized it and sharpened it for print. I always look at the final image full screen using “preview” which in my laptop takes a sec or two to load if it’s a very large file

When I got the iMac I moved the file there to see it on the big screen. Upon opening it in preview it’s there but slightly blurry for 5 min till it sharpens and fully renders. I considered maybe it was just the image and tried opening other large images I had set for print and same problem on all

I do have lr on the new iMac it seems to run a little slow loading and scrolling through images but I haven’t used it much yet. Just did a test on Corel painter it seems to work ok so the issue seems to be mostly loading large images for viewing

The image is 32x40” 300 dpi about 84 mb in this example. Other test images were around 40” on the long side 50 mb.... all same results blurry for 5 min then finally sharpens in focus

The computer loads smaller web sized images fine

I didn’t have other programs running hogging ram and I don’t even have hardly anything installed on this iMac yet

My laptop runs the old os this new imac has Mojave

Si what gives???
 
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What drives are in each of them? Are they both SSDs or Spinners? And how full are these drives?
 
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The laptop. Which works fine is ssd and has 20g free of 500
The iMac is a fusion 3t drive with virtually nothing on it basically out of the box
 
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And there is the difference. It takes a while for the spinner drive to read the 84 MB of the file.
 
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Well, three minutes, if it is actually that long, is a very slow read, so there could be something else happening, but a fusion drive is never going to compete well with an SSD. Particularly if the fusion drive is in heavy use so the image you want is most of the time on the spinner part of the fusion.

Have a read of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Drive

It will tell you how the fusion drive works.
 
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Well, three minutes, if it is actually that long, is a very slow read, so there could be something else happening, but a fusion drive is never going to compete well with an SSD. Particularly if the fusion drive is in heavy use so the image you want is most of the time on the spinner part of the fusion.

Have a read of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Drive

It will tell you how the fusion drive works.

thank you. yes it is taking that long. I talked for a long time with AppleCare chat they basically couldn't tell me anything other than try to reinstall OS (I don't think that's the issue) or that "it just takes that long b/c it's a 5k screen and the file is big". But it seems like a very long time to take for brand new...I may take it to the apple store and let them run some tests. Updating the ram from 8 to 32 didn't make any noticeable diff in any performances so far. Tomorrow My cd drive arrives and I'm gonna install photoshop and that will be the real test.
 
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I did not have any other programs running when trying to open the image. I shut it all down except for that to see if that was the problem. I also tried scaling the screen, etc and setting preview to load low resolution. No noticeable difference in load times.
 
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If you had an external USB 3 SSD drive, then you would see a speed increase.
 

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If you had an external USB 3 SSD drive, then you would see a speed increase.

Her machine has USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports. A compatible portable SSD such as the Samsung T5 series would be even better.
 

chscag

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Welcome to the forum.

Do not run that software. About the only cleaner that is useful is OnyX (You can search for it.)

That said, what are the "speed issues" you are having? Most speed issues have to do with failing, or full, drives. What Mac, what version of the OS? How much space is free on your boot drive?
 
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Welcome to the forum.

Do not run that software. About the only cleaner that is useful is OnyX (You can search for it.)

That said, what are the "speed issues" you are having? Most speed issues have to do with failing, or full, drives. What Mac, what version of the OS? How much space is free on your boot drive?

Figured that was an advert of sorts
Plus my iMac is new and has virtually nothing on it. It simply won't load large files. Before printing an image large I upsize it to the proper dimensions and sharpen it. Ex I'll upsize it to 30x40 at 300 dpi and sharpen for print. This yields large files: 50-80 mb easily. My new imac takes 5 min to load them and fully render them via the preview app which I do after editing to view them full screen.
the consensus seems to be it's due to the spinner drives as I'm running a fusion drive
 

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