Dang, it's a dog

I have the same combo, but with 8GB.

It is of no help for you, BUT:

Aperture 3 is a whole new game. Its FAST. Really. Changes are instant, scrolling is fast, zooming is fast, loupe is fast...

(You switched of "longer battery life" in System Preferences, Energy Saving?)

wok4

i had to turn spotlight off...made a big difference....or at least turn it off until you can walk away and let it do it's thing....

Well I did shut off dashboard...no love. I found if I don't do full screen and shrink the window to 1/3 normal size making the photo about a 4x6 I can do just about anything including use the brush. Hip hip horay for little tiny photo application.

BTW, Aperture 2 still runs great.

Everything has been noticeably faster for me, except for some odd beachballing, even when no background processes were running.

I removed all my plugins and did this:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2332345&tstart=0

And I am flying now.

That's interesting. I haven't run into any Lags during adjustments, just library, thumbnail, and book tool loading - which all went away after I fixed previews.

I suppose you've already tried to rebuild the library?

NO, it most certainly is not a dog...

Try rebooting the computer into 64 bit mode. WHile this may cause problems with older software and drivers, and that seems to be why Apple does not make this the default.

HOWEVER...

On a clean system, restart and hold the 6 and 4 keys down. You can verify the 64 bit boot by looking in About this Mac... More Info... then click on the Software title header in the left column and in the second to last line you should see " 64-bit Kernel and Extensions: Yes"

Launch Aperture, and Activity Monitor...ONLY to test.

Aperture should now be SMOKIN fast. I can hold the arrow key down in full screen and D3X .NEFs render almost immediately, smaller files no issue. 6GB will give you no pageouts running just Aperture 3.

Imports with backups are so fast I cannot believe it, I think it is faster than Photo Mechanic, which is my gold standard for import/ingest speed.

Now the 6 and 4 reboot method is only temporary, the next reboot, it will revert to 32 bit mode, which is handy at this point in time if you run into problems.

If you find you have a clean system you can make it boot into 64 bit all the time, but that is part of a larger performance discussion...just try this and see if you are doing better in terms of performance.

Try this with Aperture only PLUS Activity Monitor running to capture performance data.

Sincerely,

KJ Doyle

Turns out my slowdowns weren't the previews, they were the thumbnails... I rebuilt all the thumbnails in my library by going to photos->generate thumbnails and things are a lot faster now.

You can try this on one project if you don't want to do the whole library.

Re-doing the thumbnails helped a bunch. -thanks for that. Still.... brush is slow on any adjustments, 32 bit plugins crash in 32 bit mode, zoom takes forever to come into focus, and it crashes. LR3 BETA works like a champ, PS is fast, Final Cut is fast, this program was not ready.

Brand spankin' new library (no transfer from AP 2) nets same results.