Part of the problem is that only a small fraction of the population needs a high-performance photo manager. Most of the market has always been for "color snaps" and that has just gotten worth with the proliferation of cell phones.
If you are handling lots of RAWS and you care about speed then you have to start with hardware.
For instance, if you care about performance you just can't use a mac. Forget about it.
An application that cares about performance might tell you to ditch the hard drive on your computer for an SSD if you want to run it and that we'd rather give you your money than just give you the same bad performance you expect from Lightroom, Photos, etc.
Having your images on a RAIDed network server could be good but if you are using WiFi performance will be bad. If you feel entitled to keep using your 100 Mbps Ethernet hub on your DSL modem than performance will be bad.
Wedding photographers spend $5000 for a camera and would probably get much more than $2500 of value from a $2500 photo management suite, particularly if you factor the lower blood pressure from not staring at a spinning beach ball all day and the lower health care costs and extra years of life they could get.
Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of all evil" might have made since back in the 360 mainframe day when you couldn't get N very high so an N^2 algorithm wasn't as bad as it is today.
People today have the wishful thinking that they can find the "one" bottleneck and open it and that was sometime true in the past for prototype projects (eg. less so in the age of networking, deep cache hierarchy, ...) but in real-life systems there are usually 5-10 bottlenecks that all need to be cleared if you want to make a difference in performance that people will feel.
Most people think they can clear two or three of them and will spend a lot of effort for it and will argue until they are blue in the face and bankrupt that they don't need to fix the other ones.
Part of the problem is that only a small fraction of the population needs a high-performance photo manager. Most of the market has always been for "color snaps" and that has just gotten worth with the proliferation of cell phones.
If you are handling lots of RAWS and you care about speed then you have to start with hardware.
For instance, if you care about performance you just can't use a mac. Forget about it.
An application that cares about performance might tell you to ditch the hard drive on your computer for an SSD if you want to run it and that we'd rather give you your money than just give you the same bad performance you expect from Lightroom, Photos, etc.
Having your images on a RAIDed network server could be good but if you are using WiFi performance will be bad. If you feel entitled to keep using your 100 Mbps Ethernet hub on your DSL modem than performance will be bad.
Wedding photographers spend $5000 for a camera and would probably get much more than $2500 of value from a $2500 photo management suite, particularly if you factor the lower blood pressure from not staring at a spinning beach ball all day and the lower health care costs and extra years of life they could get.
Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of all evil" might have made since back in the 360 mainframe day when you couldn't get N very high so an N^2 algorithm wasn't as bad as it is today.
People today have the wishful thinking that they can find the "one" bottleneck and open it and that was sometime true in the past for prototype projects (eg. less so in the age of networking, deep cache hierarchy, ...) but in real-life systems there are usually 5-10 bottlenecks that all need to be cleared if you want to make a difference in performance that people will feel.
Most people think they can clear two or three of them and will spend a lot of effort for it and will argue until they are blue in the face and bankrupt that they don't need to fix the other ones.