Aperture running at a crawl since lion upgrade

For some time now I've had the feeling that with RAM being available at fairly low prices, programmers now expect people to have loads of ram, and the programmers themselves don't program as efficient as they used to.

I think it's plain ridicilous, to be honest. We want mean and lean machines, without software that gobbles up RAM like the's no tomorrow

Hope Appe gets this sorted very soon!!

I agree that as time progresses, more RAM is needed. However, I still believe this is an oversight/error on Apple's part. According to MacTracker (nifty little free app for the mac) the mid-2009 models of iMac could have at most 4 gig of RAM. The Early 2009 models could have at most 4 gig of RAM.

So that means that in order to run Aperture in Lion your computer can be no more than 2 years old. Typically they allow for 3 or 4 year old machines to run their software. Otherwise it limits their potential customers rather considerably.

macsterdam wrote:

For some time now I've had the feeling that with RAM being available at fairly low prices, programmers now expect people to have loads of ram, and the programmers themselves don't program as efficient as they used to.

I think it's plain ridicilous, to be honest. We want mean and lean machines, without software that gobbles up RAM like the's no tomorrow

Hope Appe gets this sorted very soon!!

Depends on what you mean by "efficient". It's not just the amount of hardware resource consumed by a program. It's also the efficiency of the human interface, the speed of coding and debugging, the resilency of the software, its ability to eliminate disk I/O operations to speed things up and so on......

Back in my early days (mid 1960s), we used to code in machine language, instruction by instruction, and even dig out the instruction timing manuals to choose the best way to code frequently used routines. In those days, that was "efficient", since people were cheap and hardware was incredibly expensive. I was part of a team that squeezed an airline reservation system into 64KB of RAM. We had to. The code was slow to code, difficult to debug and to modify as a result.

The early 2009 24" iMac could have up to 8GBs of RAM (not 4GBs as scooper said), which is probably OK for Aperture and Lion so long as not much else is running.

I have a 2008 MBP which has 8GBs of RAM, and I'm not too convinced that it is a good idea to take it to Lion. Snow Leopard is a fine OS for that Mac. With a 3 year old computer which arrived with a Snow-less Leopard inside, I am not sure that I should expect to shoe-horn an OS two generations on, PLUS a Pro app into it!

Certainly, if it's not comfortable, I don't see it as something that Apple has to "get sorted". I'll go back to Snow Leopard on that Mac with no regrets if it doesn't work out. At some point you have to call it quits and stay with the OS that best suits the Mac.

OK, I am now officially tired of hearing the umpteenth iteration of Moore's Law. We all get it. After all, as they say, a little knowledge goes a long way..... oh wait a minute, that is NOT what they say. I believe they say "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". If all we know is Moore's law, we justify bad code, bad QA and bad habits and get to preach to other lost souls ...

For those who, like me, did not have the luxury of time to wait until Apple fixes the problems and have upgraded their system memory, I have bad news: use Aperture 3.1.3 in 64 bit mode on Lion 10.7.1 long and intensive enough and it WILL crash, even with 12 GB of memory. Granted, it takes much longer to get there and the performance between crashes is good, so it will not prevent us from doing our work.

In both 32 and 64 bit, by looking at the thread dumps, it is always something related to the CoreImage classes.

For those lucky enough to be able to use their 4 GB systems (which is double the MINIMUM recommended memory for Aperture by Apple, the maker of Aperture) in either 32 bit or 64 bit, don't upgrade just because somebody is reciting Moore's Law to you. If common sense (and a quick look at the Activity Monitor) tells you that your are a legitimate heavy user, by all means, what are you still doing with only 4 GB ??!! ;-)

For those impacted by this NON-Moore's Law problem, upgrading to 12 GB WILL most likely render your systems usable again, but you will still have to put up with the occasional Aperture thread crash and the expense you may not have had to incur.

Fortunately, Moore had something to do with Intel, I heard, so it isn't a native Apple thing.... Therefore, Apple is aware of the issues and will hopefully come up with something soon. A Fix! My God, I said it: Apple needs to fix something. Blasphemy, I know. Until the next iteration of Moore's Law in this discussion thread, sayonara.

scooper4711 wrote:

So that means that in order to run Aperture in Lion your computer can be no more than 2 years old.

No. What it means is that folks should wait and see how their apps behave before choosing to permanently switch to a new OS.

Personally I have decided to stick with 10.6.x for a while. Possibly a long while, because Aperture absolutely rocks on my MBP with SSD and 8 GB RAM.

Those folks who are RAM challenged should be advised that an SSD will help performance a lot, because paging to SSD is so much faster than to a hard drive (especially 2.5 inch laptop drives).

-Allen

Just thought I'd chuck in my experience. I have a new base model 2011 MBP (2.3Ghz i5) fitted with a 128GB Crucial C300 SSD and 8GB of RAM. All relevant software/firmware updates have been applied.

I downloaded the Aperture 3 trial and shot a handful of pictures in RAW with my Sony A55.

I tried to crop one of the pictures and a "Loading" message came up over the picture - for nearly five minutes! Now, being new to RAW and Aperture, I have no idea whether this is normal or not?

Five minutes for a crop is not normal. When I crop it's over in a fraction of a second.

Can you see any reason for this is Activity Monitor? Such as, are you getting many Page Outs?

Is your system on the SSD? Where is the Aperture Library?

Did you have other apps active? Any backups running at the same time?

OK, I lied - it wasn't five minutes - the crop never actually completed - it was five minutes I waited before getting bored and deleting the app.

However, I have just downloaded and installed the trial again. The OS is on the SSD and the Aperture Library is on my second HDD (WD Scorpio Blue in Optibay). No other apps active.

Again, I have imported a RAW image and have tried to crop it - 10 mins and counting with the "Loading.." before I opened up Safari to type this.

Activity monitor shows Aperture using 0.2% of CPU, 46-50 threads and 1.16-1.20Gb.

Page Outs shows 0.

*update - maybe I'm doing something wrong here - when I close the "Crop" pop-up box it crops immediately even though it still shows "Loading" over the image.

To Crop:

1. Click on the crop tool
2. Select the aspect ratio you want
3. Use your cursor to drag the box around the area you want to crop
4. Hit "Enter" OR close the crop dialog box by clicking on the "x"
5. The image should immediatly change its shape to the new crop dimension
6. You may see the spinning "Loading" message as the image gets updated
7. If you don't hit "Enter" or close the crop dialog box, it will just sit there looking at you!

Lion - the Vista of OS X

That's not really fair...Lion is far more advanced the Vista ever was and is far more elegant as well. So it has a few problems...Vista had tons of them so much so that they released Win7 about a year and a half later which is unheard of for Microsoft OS develpement.

Bottom line is Apple will work out their issues with Aperture and like some have said I would expect a new Aperture release soon since it's long overdue and it makes sense considering what Andy said...

sorinfromtoronto wrote:

OK, I am now officially tired of hearing the umpteenth iteration of Moore's Law. We all get it.

I'm not trying to explain Moore's Law. I'm saying that it is a good thing to exploit it.

If one resource is getting cheaper when compared to another, it is a good idea to use lots of it if it can reduce the consumption of the more expensive resource. RAM is cheap, people are expensive. By "people" I mean both developers and users.

Just because this means that there comes a time when your computer can no longer keep up with the latest OS release doesn't mean this is a bad thing. Your computer will still work fine with the previous OS. It was a great combo prior to Lion and it still is a great combo!

I read in another post to force Aperture to run as a 32bit app and now it runs quite fast - this in itself means there is a problem.

I have not switched Aperture to run in 32 bit but heard the same thing from an expert who supports Macs for out company. I had a problem with Preview running out with over 4GB of RAM when viewing one of the photography eBooks. Nothing else was running. Called Apple support and was told not to use Preview for that ( I love Preview). Installed Adobe Reader just to see if book not corrutped - no problems. Also tried on someone else's Mac and same issue - that person was astonished. As mentioned, I was told to switch Preview to run in 32bit mode - BINGO, worked like a charm....but not really a solution.

gg1001 wrote:

BINGO, worked like a charm....but not really a solution.

gg1001, why is this "not really a solution"? Doesn't it work? Do you lose anything by switching to 32 bits?