iPhoto9 horrible performances in Snow Leopard

Question

Level 1

40 points

iPhoto9 horrible performances in Snow Leopard

After update to Snow Leopard, iPhoto9 very slowed in full screen editing on 30" Display (2560x1600), on MacPro with GT8800.

Keeping iPhoto window size half a screen, things work normally but at greater size all slow down drastically:

eg: Take a 15Mpix photo, go in full screen edit, do some correction: crop, angle, point light, detail
press shift key some time and boom - beach ball and slowdown

Now I've reverted to Leopard with time machine and iPhoto works perfectly without glitches, like before upgrading.

No error in console, no crash, only slow down on big display

MacPro 8 Core 3GHz - cinema display 30", Mac OS X (10.5.8), 8 GB ram - GT8800-512Mb

Posted on Sep 3, 2009 4:19 AM

Reply

Answer 1

The hatter

Level 9

60,980 points

Sep 3, 2009 4:26 AM in response to Taro-71

Is your media library on the boot drive or on another drive?

Because iPhoto basically has a huge index to its database, the ideal setup would be the index on a very fast SSD, the database files on another drive, and of course a fast boot drive for just the OS.

How full is your boot drive and have you considered moving files off the boot drive? iPhoto, iTunes etc can reside anywhere. Or even use stripe array.

Reply

Answer 2

Taro-71 Author

Level 1

40 points

Sep 3, 2009 6:40 AM in response to The hatter

My Media Library is on boot drive, a 500Gb Sata II drive 50MB/s read write capable.
Disc have 250 GB free and IMHO the problem isn't there for more than reasons:

- Leopard has no problems and works like a charm
- The drive has 50Mb/s trasfer rate, for a 10 Mb image is a joke
- During editing of one image, activity monitor reports no significant disc access, only 1 CPU core that rises at 100%
- Issues only when image is >display< big, the image weight is the same on DB, independently the actual screen resolution
- After restoring Leopard, with the same configuration, the problem disappeared

Anyway, after update I've also rebuilt the library without beneficts.

The problem seems to be in graphics management at that resolution, (I suspect the 8800GT not perfectly optimized).

Did you have the chance to try that on your machine (seems you have an GT8000 and a MacPro):

- Snow Leopard
- iPhoto9
- Screen res of 2560x1600
- Full screen edit of a 15Mpx image
- Do some corrections (the weightiest are, in order, highlights, definition, straighten and sharpness ) on same image
- try to see after/before function (SHIFT key) quickly

On Leopard all those operations are fluids and smoothly, on Snow, like on a G4 :/

Reply