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

So I'm two days into this pretty horrible upgrade experience.

First attempt I tried to upgrade my A2 library (about 200GB), I let it run over night only to find my MacPro(5GB Ram) to be completely frozen and saying the startup disk was running out of memory.

The cause of the low memory was the page file becoming so huge. I had about 160 GB free on my startup disk before starting this process. My library is on a striped raid pair, with about 500 gb free.

I forced quit aperture, loaded it up again, kept on doing the same thing, virtual memory usage got out of control but real memory usage seemed pretty in check, which was weird.

So late yesterday I ditched my A2 library that was trying to be upgraded from A3 and instead did an import for my A2 vault into a brand new A3 library...

I'm basically at the same point I was with the original upgrade process but getting close. I leave it on for a while, let it process as much as it can, system comes to a stand still, force quit, start up again...

I have about 47K masters in my library...I have about 600 left to process after this constant quiting / restarting...

I'll report back if I ever get to a final library and its no longer 'Processing'.

and now it gets really interesting!!!!

It keeps on getting into this paging loop where the page file keeps on getting larger and larger.

I look at activity monitor after force quitting aperture and see that there is only 500 MB of RAM free with nothing else open...very weird.

I look a little further and it says 500 MB is used, huh?!

I go into system profiler, it only shows 2 of my 6 RAM chips....The 4 missing account for 4GB of RAM!!!

Maybe it overheated and the OS shut these guys off????

Going to restart now and see what happens...

After about 2 hours I got the original "you need to upgrade your library" window

But this time I UN-checked "upgrade all images to aperture 3 imaging now" checkbox

Rebooted my MacPro, RAM is now recognized again. I seem to be over the hump but I'm not confident my library is intact due to all of the force quits I did...

Any advice on making sure it is?

I can see that some projects don't have a thumbnail when looking at the projects view, and then I go into the project and they have no thumbnail / preview...UGH.

I think if I do a rebuild, it will not get through the rebuild without a force quit

I'm am now 48 hours into the updating process and currently sitting at 96% complete. I haven't had any problems with the progress bar moving along until now. It finished processing the thumbnails and it's been on 96% for a while now..... I'm just hoping it moves along. I've been waiting a while...

Can we please get an update from someone from APPLE??

My library gets to processing the last 2 files and hangs every single time.

If I force quit and restart, I am at 0 of 2 processing and within seconds aperture is using close to 1.5gb of ram and I have to force quit again. I can not cancel or pause, it just hangs until the computer becomes completely unresponsive and I have to restart again.

We need a solution to this immediately from Apple.

Adding my experience: on a 2 yr old Macbook Pro 2.66ghz with 4g ram on Leopard.

Migration of libraries went fine (about 2000 photos) and re-processed the masters from the old libraries. I used A3 all day yesterday. Really put it through the paces. Worked fine.

Today, I boot it up and I get the "processing" wheel that never stops. Upon launch when I click on a project, it usually crashes. Sometimes it will access a project and I'll scroll slowly to a pic, click on it, it crashes.

I am very disappointed in Apple. This is unacceptable.

On an dual core 2.4GHz iMac, w/ 4M RAM, & 380Gb free on the boot drive

1. Reading through the comments, seems like some are having problems on the initial "would you like to upgrade your library" operation that occurs at first launch, and others get through that okay, but then the "Processing..." upgrade operation goes RAM-crazy. I made it through the initial upgrade (3-4 hrs), but not the second ("Processing")

2. Thinking that 4Gb of RAM may be insufficient, quit/disabled any other processes that I could:
iStat menus, Dropbox, firewire audio drivers/daemons, BackBlaze bztransmit, etc. I then monitored the system from Activity Monitor.

I also set MobileMe & iDisk sync to manual (duh), and turned off any time-based energysaver "display sleep," as that seemed to be adding to the clusterfunk.

3. Based on all the "let it grind" recommendations in-thread, and with maybe a fractional RAM increase from steps above, I was able to open A3 and let it grind. Here's what happened (anti-climactic):

a. free RAM instantly went from 3Gb to zero.

b. VM size started at about 160Gb and slowly increased. If I let it get up to about 200Gb (in about an hour), I could almost always quit A3 without forcing - although entire system became EXTREMELY laggy; i.e. "click menu bar, wait 5 minutes for drop-down menu."

c. Unfortunately, the activity window said "Updating 0 of 1502 items," and even after 4 "let it grind for 40-60 minutes then quit" sessions, I was still at "0 of 1502."

d. Finally, I let it run overnight, and the next morning, everything had ground to a new low. VM size had gotten up to 220Gb. Still on "upgrading item 0 of 1502," and although ActMon showed the occasional glimmer, nothing responded. Not even the "You've run out of Application Memory on your boot drive - would you like to force quit something?" dialog would acknowledge my req to force quit A3, so I had to hard shut down the iMac.

Although my Lib was bak'd to a couple vaults, and also time machined, I'm about 2 or 3 weeks behind on that, so I'm trying to avoid reverting to the old A2 Library and having to pick the newer photos out of the (now only remaining) A3 library.

Anyone else still hanging on the "second 'Processing...' upgrade?"

Don't know if this helps, but mine was also on 96% for a really long time (maybe an hour, or hour.5), then it was done.

(with the initial upgrade - the second "Processing..." upgrade after the app opened is another matter)

I am down to 1 file in the miserable "processing" step and no matter what I do I can not get it to finish. Rebooting, repairing my library, rebuilding, nothing works and I cant cancel it either.

At this point Aperture is completely unusable with my Aperture 2 library.

CAN ANYONE FROM APPLE PLEASE GIVE US SOME ANSWERS?!?!?

I FINALLY got it to finish!!

I started Aperture in 32 bit mode (Just for the **** of it), went into preferences and changed Photo Preview to "Fit within 1280 x 1280 and Quality all the way down to 0 and it finally finished.

Obviously these settings are less then ideal but they will work for now..

As soon as the process finished Aperture immedieatly went from using about 1650mb of ram to 250mb..

I'm very disappointed by the global quality of Aperture 3. I'm using it from the official release date (feb 09) and in my opinion, this isn't a product ready for the public launch. LR3 Beta, for example, is infinitely more stable and fast. AP3 has too many problems and is still at the Alpha stage (IMHO). 😟

I am upgrading a iphoto 09 library.

@doug - genius! 32-bit mode. I'm not out of the woods yet, but RAM symptoms totally gone, and A3 is actually counting through the "items to process." <fingers crossed>

Talk about your bags of hurt, lol.