Aperture constantly pinwheeling, what can be done?

i can only add a helpful note, that Aperture THREE has to (re import) the images that you wish to utalise, and (re manuipulate them) in some way.

ie the manual states that images manipulated in THREE can not be read in v1 or v2, so maybe its doing something with (those) images in the background.

Mine often now takes what 'appears' to be much longer with other images, other than those Only freshly imported into V3.

I might run through some of the Troubleshooting Basics found here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3805

Maybe try creating a new library, import a few images and see if you have the same problems. Would narrow it down a bit, whether it's a library problem or a machine problem. Along those same lines you can also try running Aperture on a new user account.

I'm running Aperture 3 on a 2.8Ghz MacBook Pro. I just upgraded from 4-8Gb RAM and am seeing a big improvement in performance when working with my RAW files held on the MBP HD. Have you checked Activity Monitor to see how much free RAM you have?

This is my major complaint re Aperture. It is the buggiest software Apple has ever produced. I upgraded from an iMac 3.06 Duo to an i7 w/ 12 Gb memory and I still get the spinning beach ball and can not update my Vault. I have "force quit" on speed dial and then Aperture can't find the Library unless I restart. Pretty pathetic, Apple.

Who is the resource for diagnosing these problems?

Mark

That does seem bad. I don't have any spinning ball issues with mine since I upgraded the RAM to 8GB. My library is only 40GB on a 500GB HD which is only 50% full. I can easily update my vault to an external HD without spinning ball.

A few tips:

1) A "nearly full" hard drive will perform significantly slower than a "nearly empty" hard drive +even+ if there is no fragmentation. There are several reasons for this but if you check benchmark performance studies for drive after drive you'll find that you can generalize by stated that a full drive will be only about half as fast as a new (near-empty) drive ... and that's with no fragmentation at all.

For this reason I try to keep my "working" hard drives from becoming much more than about half full. I will let "archive" drives fill up (since I don't need quick performance for them) but I keep "working" drives down to a capacity that still guarantees snappy performance.

2) If your drive never becomes more full than about 80%, you will +never+ need to defragment it. The Mac's HFS+ filesystem strongly resists fragmentation if at all possible. It only fragments things when it gets desperate for space. This isn't to say you'll never have any fragmentation... you will, but it'll be so extremely minimal that you wont see any measurable performance gain by defragmenting (defragmenting will become a waste of time and needless wear and tear on the drive. Defragmenting causes drives to heat up substantially and can be brutal to hard drive life expectancy.)

3) In "System Preferences" -> "Energy Saver", there's an option to "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible." You can turn this _off_ (no checkmark in the box) to improve performance. With this said, my box +is+ checked (my drives will sleep) and I have absolutely no problem with Aperture 3 (I _do_ have problems with Final Cut Studio and when I use that I have to un-check the box or I'll get a lot of beach-balling.)

In general, I find that Aperture 3 is pretty rock solid and very fast, but it really helps to know a little about how it's working under the covers.

Thanks, Tim. This helps.