I am currently having big trouble with Aperture (2.1.4) running on my iMac 24" 3.06 GHz (running 10.6). The problem has nothing to do with the Snow Leopard/Aperture issue: I had the same problems running Leopard.
It takes just painfully long to adjust images (white balance, rotating, etc.). I see this rotating rainbow all the time, so frustrating! I only use RAW images from my 400D.
My library is currently 135GB big. Should I split it or something, so that Aperture can handle it better?
If so, is there a 'maximum size' the library should be?
Or is there an other solution for this problem?
From my pre-Unix times what you call page-outs we called swapping but not on a page basis but a dynamic basis of whatever size was required.
Part of the aim of system tuning was to minmize swapping. One means of doing this was to limit the number of active programs at any one tiime and although that wasn't the complete picture, it worked.
I quite often have Aperture, PS, Nik Applications, Safari, Mail and maybe a few more active at any one time. I have never thought much about how this is managed but it was always clear that in this context performance was a function of Ram.
But quite simply, even though I do not have performance problems, would it help to keep open only the minium number of applications? Thus one would organise one's workflow to get as much done in Aperture, open the next App and when finished, shut down that App.? Basically aim to have Aperture as teh only App open besides the OS would eliminate competition for Ram. These are stated as questions as I am not well informed as to teh architecture of OS and Unix management.
Pageouts and swapping are basically the same thing. The bottom line is that if your system is swapping data between RAM and its hard disk in order to clear some RAM space for an active program you have impacted performance. For resource-hungry apps like Aperture, in many cases, the performance hit is severe compared to what it should be without paging.
The guideline I provided of having 6GB RAM to prevent pageouts (or swapping) in Aperture is measured with Aperture running by itself. Adding any more running apps and the minimum amount of RAM required to avoid pageouts goes up.
You mentioned you do not have performance issues, and that is great...but I have found just working with some local friends here that they have never operated WITHOUT pageouts since they have been using Aperture, and when we added more RAM and kept the number of additional running apps at a minimum as not to cause pageouts they witnessed significant increases in overall system performance they had never seen before.
One of the photographers here in my building was all set to buy a new Mac, and found by adding enough RAM to eliminate pageouts in his normal operating setup he felt like he had a new machine, saved a bunch of money. We are working on optimizing his storage setup now.
I would strongly suggest eliminating pageouts by adding RAM and/or limiting concurrently running apps to be the number one move a user can make to maximize their operational performance with Aperture.
Just leave a copy of Activity Monitor running to see what is going on with your RAM usage. Exercise your Aperture and any other required running apps, and keep an eye on the System Memory tab of Activity Monitor to see when pageouts occur. Of course, Activity Monitor itself counts as a running app, albeit a small one...
Remember, the pageout counter is measuring pageouts during an operating session, therefore, restarting your Mac resets the Pageout count to zero. I would suggest a restart before the measuring exercise as the pageout count will be more obvious.
I made a screen recording of the performance of Aperture on my 3.06 GHz iMac. Unfortunately the software didn't record the spinning beachball. But it showed up, an awful lot of times. Only Safari, Mail, Finder and the recording software are running. In the upper right you can see iStat Menus. The white bar is my memory usage, the blue bar my CPU. Neither one made it to the maximum.
So i'm guessing it's not the RAM. It's something I can't figure out. But adjusting my pictures is a terrible job this way, figured out that.
Ok, first of all the most critical question is "Were there any pageouts generated during this session?" Looking for max physical RAM usage is of little to no value, as a UNIX OS will not allow a program to run out of RAM (physical + VM).
Unlike older Mac OS 9, which involved a fixed memory allocation for each app and therefore could run out of memory on an app, OS X is UNIX, a system that uses VM or virtual memory. This is not a new idea, it is actually very old, when RAM was tiny in capacity and uber expensive...AND...when hard disk speeds reading are writing were much closer to non-VM throughput speeds.
The concept of VM is simple...the basic design is to make operation so an app can never run out of memory. Sounds great, right? Well having virtual memory comes at a cost. In today's apps, and definitely Aperture being used at a pro level...you pay in performance, expressed in delays as the system struggles to keep up with the voracious RAM space appetite of Aperture, and when it fails, and "pagesout" you experience the delays we all hate.
While modern VM operation is fairly complex, for this discussion, suffice it to say that the OS looks at the queue of commands you are asking it to execute, checking to see if there is sufficient free RAM space to accommodate the execution of the command. When it believes that a command's execution may exceed the limits of physical RAM, the OS decides it needs to use Virtual memory. In VM it just swaps a chunk or "page" of active data out of RAM an onto a dedicated space on the hard disk, then loads whatever the latest command in the queue needs into RAM. Depending on the depth and complexity of the commands in the queue, there may be a number of pageouts in the VM cache on the disk, all of which need to be swapped back into RAM (another disk read operation delay) in order to continue program execution. The point here is that a read or write operation from RAM happens almost instantaneously as there are no moving parts, and the same operation to or from a hard disk is orders of magnitude slower, a HD being a machine with moving parts and inherent operational delays compared to RAM.
So to reiterate a former statement I believe to be true, 6GB of RAM should alllow Aperture RUNNING ALONE save for standard OS to operate WITHOUT pageouts. This means no Mail, no Safari, no Screen Recorder ( a RAM hog to keep up with real-time motion) or anything else UNLESS you have more than 6GB RAM (number based on my experience, with my gear YMMV).
Ignoring any recommendation of a fixed amount of RAM, bottom line, if you see pageouts generated the culprit is insufficient physical RAM in the system. Unfortunately, in many cases I have read here the Mac that is running the program is not able to run enough RAM, like some 2006 and 07 MBPs at say 2 or 3GB max. Sorry to say, while the Aperture box says they meet minimum system requirements...if your setup generates pageouts while in normal operation...it is going to be slow and experience the operating delays like the ones seen in your video.
In ideal operation, the Pageout counter is always at zero. The os automatically resets the pageout counter to zero after a restart. You can see the pageout counter in a number of places, Activity Monitor under the System Memory tab, iStat, in the memory section, or open Terminal and type the command TOP and hit return. The counter will be at the end of the first paragraph of data.
Best way to monitor it is to run Aperture alone, and if you experience a slowdown, open up a source that will display the pageout counter and see if you got "pagedout". Fix it by adding RAM till this does not happen anymore.
I can make my system perform with these delays by opening up enough other apps so the Aperture generates pageouts. The answer is Aperture all by itself, AND enough RAM so that counter never goes above zero.
Hope this clarifies rather than confuses the issue...
Aperture is just slow. Whether the library is one photo or 10k. That's the bottom line. Will it be fixed? I wish. In the mean time LR2 seems to be my answer.
Aperture is a big hungry beast in terms of resources, but fed properly it runs fast and smooth. As I have said before, if you are seeing pageouts on operation of Aperture OR ANY app...it will appear slow. Also, if you have a large library on a single HD that is nearly full, or running on USB, or even FW800, it will appear slow compared to an eSATA RAID averaging 200MB/sec.
We have 4 systems operating all day long here, with no complaints.
In terms of demo operation on a small library go play with the demo copy of Aperture installed on any machine at any Apple store. Blazing fast even on the smallest machines....but of course with a pro size library, things change a lot.
I will admit from our tests, it seems LR operates at decent speed with less resources, but does not have the workflow we require.
Aperture is a big hungry beast in terms of resources, but fed properly it runs fast and smooth. As I have said before, if you are seeing pageouts on operation of Aperture OR ANY app...it will appear slow. Also, if you have a large library on a single HD that is nearly full, or running on USB, or even FW800, it will appear slow compared to an eSATA RAID averaging 200MB/sec.
I've never had of this. I have used Aperture since it's first release. I have used it on many Macs over the years. All with many various configurations. Aperture has been slow and the beach ball of forever on each NEW computer.
I think Apertuer is the best photo app out there. But I just do not have the time to watch and wait for each simple adjustment I make. Make a simple adjustment and watch the beach ball while Aperture renders. Hit Command Z because I don't care for the adjustment? The same stupid beach ball. Add this up and each photo can take a very long time. LR2 doesn't suffer this issue.
The perfect app is a merger of LR2 and Aperture. IMO.
Operating with enough physical RAM to avoid pageouts is the key to fast operation of Aperture, and some other high-end pro apps that are dealing with massive amounts of data, like RAW files or large TIFFs, or hires 3D rendering.
The performance difference is night and day with enough RAM, and I have found that that magic amount of RAM on our MBP setups (MacBook 4,1 2.6GHz) here is 6GB for Aperture running alone. Open other apps, while it is running, say PS for instance and pageouts, typically accompanied by the beachball will appear. Best way to test this is described in what I wrote above.
Given the MBP listed in your profile, Apple only made 2 MBPs that were 2.16GHz, and one was a Core Duo, not the Core 2 Duo you listed. So given that I am assuming the MBP listed in your profile MacBook2,2 Model A1211. Unfortunately, your model A1211 can accept 4GB of RAM but can only access 3GB, so even running Aperture alone with a decent sized library of RAW files pageouts and the beachball are going to be hard to avoid.
Machine data for every Mac ever made is available from MacTracker database, available free from many sites, one is...
Just a note for anyone who is curious and reading this thread. My aperture library passed the 500GB mark today (over 52,000 images). Until Now it has all been stored directly in the aperture library with no problems.
On Leopard I had no trouble with this database. Now with Snow Leopard aperture is crashing rather frequently and running a little slower.
I do agree with Tony. Great knowledge well presented!
On my Mac Pro with 10 GB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB, I do not get any page out.
When I bought the computer about one year ago Aperture was running smooth. Since then speed has been declining gradually. Currently, making adjustments are really slow. I cannot use the adjustment sliders as sliders, they behave way too jerky, but instead click on the sliders where I believe I want to go and wait for the SPBOD to finish.
Using activity monitor, it seems that one or more cores are through the roof performing simple adjustments.
This is extremely unsatisfying, even for an amateur photographer, who invested in this machine mainly for photography purposes. I love the app, but performance is too slow. Sometimes re-booting helps. Have tried re-install but with no effect.
My lib is 100 GB all stored on my startup drive. Have read your posts on various storage setup solutions, but when I get CPU shortage from adjusting a single image I cannot grasp how that could affect performance, but maybe I am missing out on something.
Any idea how solve or at least further diagnose in this problem?
I have read hundreds of forum support messages during my career and rarely does one find a quality and complete answer to a question.
Kevin's response regarding "Performance Issues" is the best researched and actually helpful I may have ever seen.
This article must be made a permalink on the first page of the Aperture Support section just below the notification of the latest version update as I believe it addresses 75% of the issues users are experiencing.
Kevin, I have deployed your "6GB or More" solution by upping my iMac to 8GB. All of our performance issues have been resolved, or at least satisfactorily masked, and I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to share with us such a quality response. Thank you.
I do continue to monitor the board, and it does frustrate me to read complaints easily solved by these methods. I think Apple should be automatically or systematically providing such answers. I am glad to do what I can to help my brother photographer, but Apple can spread the word here so much better than I.
Aperture as a concept and app really rocks and I am very happy I can use it with my photos.
Unfortunately, by Apple not telling people upfront what they should do to operate the app professionally, and allowing those uninformed people suffer with unreliable performance issues, Aperture gets a bad rap. As you can bear witness, this does not need to be.
My impression is that Apple does not want to admit that operating Aperture with less than the required level of hardware I have outlined does not work for professional use. It is a case of "the Emperor has no clothes", it just would help so many more good people if Apple made the strong recommendations. Treat Aperture customers as PROS, meaning they are paying salaries or expending billable time with this software. A few tweaks with your hardware is not even a single week's paycheck, and makes the app sing.
As a compromise...have Apple suggest those using the app professionally explore a forum of time tested procedures that the community of PROS have found to be optimum.
Anyway, glad you liked the material and were gracious enough to post a nice thank you. Please contact me if I can be of assistance.
Curious about what you have to say about my Mac Pro (first gen 8 Core) running Aperture just fine with only 4 GB of RAM on board? I can even have FCP7 open, and Aperture at the same time, even though that is not something I would do as a practice. I regularly use Aperture without closing sessions of multi-tab Safari surfing, which uses 400 to 600 MB of RAM.
If 6 GB of RAM is needed for the model Macs you mention, then other limitations must be pertinent.
