Aperture 3 hanging... and hanging... and chewing...

I am not certain that I am completely out of the woods yet but . . . I took this advice and switched to 32 bit mode. After 4 days of not being able to process past 5 out of 528, it has started to process and is now up to 24 make that 27. It feels like progress at last.

I feel really let down, and extremely aggravated. I have tried practically all the solutions in this forum... Deleted all Aperture preferences etc, created a fresh user account, started with a new blank library, imported projects one by one, imported images directly, switched to 32 bit, etc etc... Still no matter what I do I experience a kernel panic at some point. Sometimes it's after 10 minutes, sometimes 60 seconds, sometimes close to an hour (which is the worst, because during that kind of time I've been able to gather some hope again - only to be crushed with defeat once more). This is ridiculous. I wish Apple would release an official statement of address, or respond publicly in this forum, or let us know how long it will take to release a patch update. Apple, if you're reading this, email me and I'll be happy to reproduce the error as many times as you like and send you all the reports. I'm running Snow Leopard on a MBP 2.33GHz with 3GB of RAM.

can someone give me advice on what the best way to import my pictures into aperture from lightroom, i am going to aperture from lightroom with about 10,000 pictures.

mine Library consists of 11000+ photos, 100 Gigs has been upgraded in about 50 minutes in 32-bit mode. Earlier, when it was in 64-bit mode progress stopped on 80-90 percents on the step of processing photos and lasted for tens of hours... hope you'll get it finished soon.

I tried a reinstall. Nope, can't do the 32-bit thing. Not sure why. I've also tried dumping the Aperture 3 Library and uploading the files from my backup. Still hangs, etc., and then I get a "Aperture unexpectedly quit" message. Very frustrating. I sent this thread to the Apple Help Desk person I spoke with last night in hopes that the message is getting out that dozens of users are experiencing the same apparent problem.

I was able to import photos and start using Aperture 3 fairly quickly. The software isn't using a lot of resources either. Still, simple things like "Zoom" take seconds. For comparison, I tried the new beta of Lightroom, and it's lightning fast even when applying batch adjustments. So, what's going on with Aperture?

After reading all the problem reports in this thread I just want to report that my upgrade from AP2 to AP3 went without any problems. I was a little intimidated after having read this thread but I thought I would give it a try. My library is about 22K with about 3,500 pics. All I did was delete all previews in the AP2-library and give it a go. I did the standard update procedure and checked that all pics be updated. The update of the library took about 30 minutes and then I could start using it. There is remarkable background activity in terms of building previews and face recognition but my machine is still responsive and useable. Just wanted to report this to tell that you don't run into trouble necessarily. Be on the save side and do backups before you start but give it a try. Just my personal experience.

Wanted to add my anger/frustration to what looks like, overall, a very very poorly rolled out product. Apple must realize people actually rely on their software for being (relatively) major bug free.

In all my Apple Years (starting with a Mac Plus back in the '90s..) the AP3 "upgrade" Apple released has a typo: "downgrade" is more appropriate. 8+ hours to move 11,000 files, beachballs of death every 15 seconds, 60 seconds or just to tease me ever 5 minutes (hope goes up.... ) 8 hours later, I thought I'd finally finished and things would start running normally (ie: quickly) again. No. I started running the "face detection" software. Very bad mistake. AP3 once again become about as lively as a corpse. Tried turning that OFF when AP3 was running.... took 15 minutes just to get INTO AP3 prefs.

Would seriously advise people with decent size libraries to hold of "upgrading" because unless you have a thing for beachballs of death, the issues with AP3 and ridiculously slow processing speeds/conversion from AP2 speeds means the program - and evidenced by this thread - has serious design flaws. Most disappointing, most un-Apple like.

Sorry, I didn't read all eleven pages of this thread, but I'm wondering if anyone has tried just upgrading your libraries one project at a time, sure might save a little frustration?

I got through! Moved to 32bit and restarted Aperture whenever it hung for a bit. It slowly processed the 528 images. I had to go back and forth between 64bit and 32 bit a couple of times when I thought that 32bit was hung too. I had been waiting 4 days for the 528 images to process and got through them in 40 minutes using this technique.

I had 8000 images in my library (still have them all). A few weeks ago, I made a decision to move to Nikon NEF. At a different time a few weeks ago, I decided to relocate the masters for a few projects. One of the two decisions (or the intersection of the two) may have been contributing to the problem. I feel that there may have been about 528 images in one or the other. I suppose that I will never know.

I am back using 64bit. It seems a little sluggish but that may be my negative attitude at work.

Later today, I will try to add new photos from my camera.

For the record, I have a macbook2.1 w 2 gig.

this seems to be a memory allocation problem.

check with activity monitor. choose system memory. note that swap used goes up and keeps going up. eventually the system stops responding, even though there is like 0% cpu being used.
aperture allocates so much memory, that memory fills, spills out into virtual memory which is much slower. the virtual memory swap space keeps getting bigger and bigger. the system thrashes until it becomes responsive. ugh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrash_(computer_science)

I had the same problem, read all the answers here (not all posts 😉 ) and checked the mentioned KB.
( http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3945 )
Hanging several times, incredibly slow till a system reset was necessary, only got 150 images upgraded.

I retried and found the quick (well, quicker) and easy way.

Info: 2009 MBP, Core2Duo 3,06Ghz, 8GB, 500GB of which 240GB free
Aperture Library with 3500 images, 25GB in size. Upgrading from Aperture 2), library consolidated.
I run Aperture in 64 bit with OSX kernel in 64-bit mode. (changed a plist to always boot this way).
I'd recommend doing the same, at least boot in 64 bit by holding 64 down on boot.

It took about 2 minutes to update previews and then another half an hour to update faces when I did it this way.
I realize there are people here with much larger libraries but do the math to see how long it should take.

Ok, whether you start fresh or are already halfway, reboot.
Disable Time Machine, Mobileme and all enregy saving settings (sleep, screen sleep, hdd sleep).
Don't start any program, not dashboard either.
Install aperture. When it is finished it asks you to upgrade the library. Do it, the masters too.
Dont't start Aperture yet, do a software update. Reboot to be sure.
Start aperture and as soon as it launches go into preferences, the general tab and disable faces.
Leave preferences open (all the time) and open the activity window and leave that one open too.
It took a couple of minutes for me for Aperture to update thumbnails etc... then it was finished.
Enable faces. It processes about 1-2 images per second.
In case it should start to slow down, just disable faces again (your preferences are still open, right?)
and wait a minute before re-enabling it. It will just pick up from where it left off.
When it is done, shut down Aperture and restart it. Itr will take a few seconds to update the rest of the thumbnails associated with the faces.
Done! 🙂

The problem, if you ask me, occurs when it scans the whole library for faces while busy doing anything else.

So, I hope this will work for some of you and get you out of this mess! 🙂

I had the beachball problem, 64bit mode, memory allocation run amok. After letting it run all night with no apparent progress, I rebooted and now the conversion seems to be running smoothly. We'll see. Still 64-bit mode.

Also, many will tell you it's not important, but it can't hurt to repair permissions after an install.

ok... so here is my story, hoping it directs at least one person in the right direction.....

first: big mistake to jump into this head first, placing all the trust in Apple's wisdom and quality assurance....... long story short, this is my 3 day figuring all this out, here is what did NOT work for me:

Problem: computer hangs forever eating all resources and rending the entire computer useless. hanging, lagging and crashing! full ram usage, and enormous amounts of hard drive swapped. (note the entire library is 1000 images only! worked perfectly fine in A2)
- switching off the faces, geolocation: nothing
- creating 200Gb of free harddrive space: nothing
- switching between 32 and 64 bit: nothing
- preview resolution all the way down to 1: nothing
- disk permissions and disk utility: nothing
- downloading the A3 update (through software updates): nothing
- fixing database: nothing
- repairing permissions: nothing

eventually, what worked for me:
- i exported the project that i absolutely needed from A3 to the desktop (300 images took 2.5 hours creating a 3Gb file and eating 50Gb in the process: needless to say computer was unusable during this time)
- renamed the existing A3 aperture
- launched aperture, which created a brand new, fresh empty library
- imported the project back into A3 (which took a 5 to 10 minutes)
- works perfectly fine, A3 is now super fast without issues

ONE MORE THING:
- after working for 3 hours, i decided to change the preview size (preferences>previews>photo preview) from 2 to 6, and EVERYTHING went bad again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! back to square one.
- I had to do all the steps again

seems to me that touching anything in the preference that affects the library (faces, preview sizes, etc) launches the never ending cycle of 'updating library', which kills the machine before finishing the task and doing anything after that point is useless, since the process cannot be cancelled or paused.

enjoying A3 without touching ANYTHING in the preferences......

hope this helps someone, and again, thanks for sharing