General Performance Tips
If you feel like you've done everything possible to ensure optimal Lightroom performance on your machine and want to cut to the chase, skip over to the Smart Previews topic.
Squeezing every ounce of performance from our aging machines has become a ritual that usually begins with upgrading to the latest and greatest Lightroom release and ends with us scouring the internet trying to figure out some magic recipe of settings that return our computers to their pre-upgrade performance.
There's a vertable cornucopia of online articles and forum posts dedicated to this subject, but this is the gist of it: