Well, I've completed the migration of my A2 library over to A3, but it still needed to do some processing. I left it overnight and awoke to find a "Warning: Your startup disk is almost full" message, Aperture 3 paused, and everything else paged out of main memory.
Of course this has nothing to do with an overfull HD. I experienced the same thing and... I even have a cure!
This happens when Faces is working to detect photos with faces. It goes away when you switch off faces in the preferences, and in my case it didn't come back when I switched Faces on again (after restarting Aperture as well).
Yes. Huge memory leak in Aperture 3. It's amazing this got passed internal and beta testing. Surely one of the beta testers had to have experienced this if they were migrating over their legacy libraries. What's frustrating is the background processes are slowing this app down, which the average user doesn't realize is happening unless they choose window>show activity. Forcing Aperture to run in 32-bit mode seems to alleviate some the problem for me but I've read that some users are still experiencing memory leak in 32-bit mode. Once the background processes are completed though, the system returns resources back to the user. Aperture 3 is a significant upgrade and IMHO an awesome one that was well worth the wait. Unfortunately first impressions are everything and users migrating over from Aperture 2 with huge libraries may have reason to migrate over to Adobe LR. I have to admit that I had thoughts of doing just that run through my head but I'm glad I stuck it out.
Apple needs to address this issue sooner than later and I'm sure they are working on it.
Correct, but the point is that Aperture sucked up every ounce of available free HD space for virtual memory to the point it hung itself. The image processing is a serial action (i.e., one at a time), so there's no reason for the memory to balloon.
I have face detection turned off currently, so that isn't the culprit here. The activity log just says "Processing" and has a count of about 6500. It made it through 350 before the hang. Switching it to 32-bit mode won't eliminate the problem, but it will lower the amount of memory that Aperture 3 can address (though I can't recall how that affects the maximum virtual memory offhand).
I had this problem when my aperture 2 "thumbnails" got imported into aperture 3, everything would lag and aperture would fail to respond.
It seemed like a permissions related issue with the library trying to load the old file, so on a test library I wiped out the AP.minies and thumbs/etc Files and all previews, and the problem went away.
I just completed an overnight run of rebuilding all the thumbnails on my main library and it worked! Took quite a while but if you are having any issues with scrolling speed in the browser, or just general loading of albums and beachballing this may be a good thing to try.
Disable faces, and auto preview generation, and if you still have the problem, select all your images in the library and click photos->generate thumbnails
All my "clean libraries" are working great without issue.
My Library that imported an aperture 2 library of about 30k images had major lagging in everything but adjustments (30-60 second hangs trying to load a book, album, scroll the browser, etc.)
Turns out it was thumbnail problems bringing the app to its knees. It looks like aperture 3 doesn't update the thumbnails of an aperture 2 library, just updates the previews.
I had to force a thumbnail rebuild and now I'm in LOVE
I just thought I'd weight in and say I too had this problem. I left Aperture 'upgrading' my library and went away all excited and when I came back my computer was at a crawl (I mean, it took several seconds just to check my password coming out of screensaver lol) and I had an autodialogue saying OSX had no more memory to run applications and suggested I quit several apps, nothing big, just Textedit and Safari etc. I clicked Finder and saw that my available disk space was...0Kb!
I agree with the previous poster, first impressions are important and this is a REALLY poor first impression. Fortunately I love Aperture so I'll forget about it in time I'm sure but it's poor that this was missed in the testing, it's clearly a non-local enough problem it should have been spotted.
I have to add that I typed the last paragraph about 10 minutes ago, my computer slowed to a virtual stop as I typed as Aperture again killed me.
After an absolute dearth of information about the very existence of Aperture 3 leaving the community of loyal users in the dark to an almost embarrassing degree for a year, this is hardly as auspicious start. When I have to force quit an application the very first time I use it, I'm not impressed. Rather an excitedly flicking through the new features, I'm trying to figure out how to stop my computer falling over every time I start it!
The problem seems to be specific to the master migration that it prompts you to do when converting over an old library. I have 7,132 left, and it appears to be stuck on one of them though it doesn't indicate which. After a rebuild of the library, I was able to pause the task in Aperture's activity viewer before it started and currently have a fairly responsive Aperture. Right now it's rebuilding all the thumbnails per the suggestion above, so we'll see if that does anything.
Agreed, I tried to cancel Faces whilst typing my last post but it just said 'cancelling' for several minutes and in the end I just right clicked the icon and chose close (not force close). After a minute or so it closed.
Then I started up System Monitor and started Aperture again. Immediately the paging starting to build up and up so I decided to bring up Aperture's Activity window quickly, selected the Faces process and hit cancel. It stopped immediately this time as my hard disk hadn't been gobbled up yet by the page file. After that, everything was stable.
I continued to have major performance issues after I turned off Faces although not as bad as before.
I force quit Aperture and rebooted. After the reboot I started Aperture again. Faces began its work but after a minute or so the page file started ballooning again. I went into Preferences within Aperture and all the pain went away.
I will come back when my 8k or so images have finished processing and I have turned on Faces again. My hypothesis at this point is perhaps Faces is trying to scan images that are busy being processed rather than restricting itself to fully imported/processed images.
