Major Aperture 3 memory leak

I don't think what I have is different to many of the despairing AP3 users here. I have tried for several days to get through "processing". It has said 5 of 11 for about three days, and just winds the machine down to a halt and then crashes. Faces etc. is off and I tried starting in 32 bit but it opened, thought about it and then crashed. I have looked for signs of some kind of activity the other side of the Apple wall but, as usual, I suspect we are on our own until we receive an update disguised as unspecified improvements. My question concerns a last ditch attempt to sort this out, just in case Apple are going to take weeks to sort it out. The likeliest advice I have read is to scrap the library and start again but by importing the library project by project but no-one has described how to do that. If I am going to hand feed this beast I would like to think I have all the right ingredients for success. So if anyone can suggest a good way to preserve masters and versions while introducing the library in small gobbets I would be grateful. I know how to get into the library but then start to become uncertain. I often yearn for good old "destructive" editing, life seemed a lot easier then.

If it's not done after 24 hours I find it hard to understand why someone would allow their computer to be hung up for three days?

After following the advice here, I have managed to process my images in one of my 3 libraries. I'm not going to touch the others until this is sorted out. While it is running, it is extremely slow in 32 or 64 bit. Faces and places are off.
So...the rendering of existing edits from version 2 to version 3 has changed drastically on quite a few images and I have had to re edit. Will be interesting to see how they print. Also, previously when editing an image, A2 would create a new version showing the edits and maintain the original untouched. In A3, it is creating "Version 2" which remains untouched and the edits are applied to what is by default the original...it's back to front. Have looked everywhere but to no avail to see if I have something checked or unchecked that shouldn't be. A few other small niggles which I will try to sort today.
The small amount of editing I have managed to do has shown it to have some amazing new features which makes it all the more frustrating cos you just want to get stuck in and have a play.
Thanks to all contributing to this thread for shedding some light. I am no computer wizz kid and have no desire to be, so when I installed A3 and had the problems as already discussed here, I was pretty mad with apple and frustrated because I don't have the knowledge to fix it myself. So thanks for all the advice on all 8 pages!

Good for you Terence. I too have had the occasional bad memory leak and crash when using brushes and faces. When not using those features my memory usage is generally between 800 and 1.2GB memory; with the occasional ballooning to 2-3GB (which is a bit much on the late-2008 MBP that only supports 4GB RAM).

I wish I had a choice in the matter Michael. If you read it again you will see that I wrote that (the activity monitor) had said 5 of 11 for three days. If I start AP3 and run it for a few minutes it slows to a crawl and if I walk away to see if it will maybe move to 6 out of 11, when I come back it has crashed again. I cannot use AP3, there is no fix from Apple so my only option seems to be to start again but all the evidence here suggests that if you have a fairly substantial library it might be a waste of time.

Woo hoo! Update is out. I'm in Australia and it has appeared overnight my time. I installed it at 9 am on the morning of Feb 25 here and all appears to be quite good now. When I open my imported and upgraded library it still shows as completing the processing, however I am able to work within the program, open images, do adjustments etc at a reasonable speed, whereas before I could barely access my library. It was taking about 5 min to open one image then the system would stop and show not responding with massive memory use. I'm still going to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store tomorrow to get everything checked.....but hopefully....fingers crossed...this is fixed now. Good luck everyone!

Same here. The problems seem to have gone away with the 3.0.1 update, just released. Too late to do much but will report back if any ongoing problems but it seems to be running fast and processing ran for a bit and finished within a minute. Have not yet tried editing.

I believe what you are saying may be true depending on your system. I have a library with about 75k pictures which did take a long time to upgrade but other than that and some random crashes it's worked great and is very fast. However, my machine's hardrive crashed last week and I put in a new drive and a clean OS install. So, I think the programs has bugs, but all .0 releases have bugs. I believe that the program has bugs which is exacerbated by systems that have some problems as well. For example, I found out that the DDServiceD service which runs in the background as a part of the Drobo Dashboard had a bug which slowly use more resources and slows your system. So, after a few months one's system becomes quit slow. I kept thinking Aperture was so slow until an did a clean install of the system and Aperture was much faster.

I have installed the 3.0.1 upgrade. Aperture seems to be more snappy, but the memory leak is still there when Faces is activated. After a short while Aperture is hoging most of the CPU and soon have eaten all my 4GB of RAM, before it starts "eating away" on the harddrive creating a huge swap file. After the upgrade it has become easier to close Aperture by X-ing (had to force-quit before), and use other programs while Aperture is running with Faces ON, but the end result is still the same.
Btw: I upgraded from A2 and migrated about 10k pictures to A3, mostly RAW. If I turn Faces OFF Aperture seems to behave...

Glad to see this before I moved my 80,000 images to Ap 3. I'm all finished with the move now, and here's how it went with my 330Gb Aperture library:

1. I ran Aperture First Aid (command-option on starting Ap) on my Ap 2 Library and repaired and rebuilt my database. (Should have done this long ago, as upon finish 'All Photos' came up instantly in the browser, instead of taking 5-6 minutes before).

An AppleCare guy says expect upgrade to use 50% additional disk space than the current actual library size.

2. Created new vault on new external HD, just so I'd have someplace to go back to if there was a serious problem.

3. Installed Ap 3. Running 2x3.2 Quad-Core with 10Gb RAM, 4x1Tb HD in RAID 5:
12:15 pm - start conversion of old library
2:20 - 8% done
3:30 - 20%
5:30 - 50%
7:20 - 88%; Activity Monitor says VM size is 150Gb, as predicted by AppleCare.
9:20 - 93%
10:20 - 95%
10:40-11:05 - 96%
11:15 - finished! Seems to working ok. Faces is turned off. No probs with memory usage.

I don't seem to be out of the woods yet. Although AP3 opens and runs fine, it only takes a few moments of retouching an image to make it hang up. I have been trying to spot an old black and white image (5MB) and can get through six or seven small specks before it just grinds to a halt with "processing" going on and on and on. With a white dot on the screen where I made the last mark, if I scroll the image the white dot stays still. I can move to another image and back again but cannot get out of that edit without quitting and I am only offered a forced quit.

@Drieu: I think what you are describing is very similar to the thread I started here, so you might want to take a look and add your experience to that thread as well: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2349461&tstart=0

I also have biiig problems with B&W photos. I am scanning in B&W photos using a Nikon scanner and if it is set on B&W photo, I have problems with them in AP3. Sooo, I set it on color photos even though they are B&W and I can work with them most of the time. I had a problem several days ago when it wouldn't export an old color photo that had a lot of touching up. I was able to deal with it by dragging it directly to the desktop and then dragging it to the screen in SmugMug online where I wanted it. I am now working on transferring over 20k photos project by project which AP3 failed to import. And yes, I continue to have momentary probs with AP3 but I have hopes it will get better. Think Apple should refund our upgrades since we had to identify so many of the program's problems?

That's a great idea Vincent.....can't see them handing over too many cheques though.....but it would DEFINITELY be a nice outcome!

Drieu wrote:
I don't seem to be out of the woods yet. Although AP3 opens and runs fine, it only takes a few moments of retouching an image to make it hang up. I have been trying to spot an old black and white image (5MB) and can get through six or seven small specks before it just grinds to a halt with "processing" going on and on and on. With a white dot on the screen where I made the last mark, if I scroll the image the white dot stays still. I can move to another image and back again but cannot get out of that edit without quitting and I am only offered a forced quit.

Drieu,
try doing the same process under another user account. Sometimes errors can be isolated to one particular account, and if you log in as another user, things can work fine. Always good to have a second admin user account for troubleshooting.

Message was edited by: vdrummer1