New post re Aperture 3 "processing" - for ever

Try repairing your library. Close Aperture, then launch your library from finder while holding Option + Command, then select Repair. It helped me.

You might also try holding Shift when you launch Aperture. This prevents generation of thumbnails. I think there is where my installation was getting hung up, due to some corruption in the library.

I have a 750GB iphoto library and could not import it via A3. I finally made a duplicate of my drive and decided to import the library and leave it in its current position and although we are at about 24 hours things seem to be importing. Probably better to leave IPhoto as is and move pictures and folders in as I need them. Just a thought,

My Library is 216Gb. Totally fed up with this.
My symptoms - Aperture3 launches, opens after about 30 seconds ish, then consumes all free RAM, and creates MASSIVE swap file - like GB's... kills iMac. Have to Hard Reboot.
Tried creating a new library, and importing upgraded library.
This works, then when I relaunch Aperture it dies again.
Processing... gets to 5 of 20 (whatever that means) and then goes into this crazy memory leak.
I'm now going to try importing again but renaming the Thumbnails and Previews folders in the Library package. Lets see if that makes any difference what so ever.
This must be a code bug, too many people are getting this issue!!!

Are you using referenced or managed masters?

Launching while holding the shift key worked for me. No more hanging or crashing.

This worked for me too! My problem was identical to yours. It would process "x of y" then just freeze, eventually sitting at "0 of 1". 32bit solved it, even allowed face detection to run and finish.

Thanks,
-Bill

I had similar problems. 80 GB library. Continual processing. Ran the 32-bit solution and it appeared to work. Processed everything. Ran face detection and finished successfully all 35,000 pictures. Shut down Aperture and restarted in 64 bit mode. Now it hangs on processing 4 of 21 items and 1 of 28 thumbnails for faces. I dont understand how it could be needing to do this since I did no work in the program after the rebuild and the processing finished. Any tips? Run through the 32 bit solution one more time? I'm desparate.

I am guessing that a library of 633Gb on your internal iMac system drive is not a very good idea. That together with the system and some more stuff makes that things are probably so fragmented that a simple write to the Library database takes forever, let alone writing to the Thumbnail files (depending on the size of your projects), sometimes broken up into thousands of bits and pieces. OSX is fairly fragmentation resistant, but I think that incremental writing to a file fragments it if there's no contiguous free space available right at the end of the file, and with the disk filling up, this becomes worse over time. You might find temporary solace in a full defrag of your system drive, but consider getting a fast external drive. Get one with firewire 800 and eSata (you next system might have it), and/or USB 3 (they're starting to show up). Firewire 800 is as fast as the iMac goes, but I've found it to be fast for Aperture, and it's always better no to have the rest of your system come to a halt because the disk system can't keep up with the fragmentation.
J