Aperture running at a crawl since lion upgrade

i have one of the fastest or the fastest macs

mac pro, 2 x 2.66 6-core intel xeon

32(!) GB ram!!

and now the fastest SSD start up disk you can get for money on the planet! and guess what, Aperture still runs very questionable-

its slow, somethimes crashes, if i zoom in and want to work with a brush nothing happens, the frame freezes for a moment etc etc. basically it *****.

Allen,

Point well taken, and what was going up breifly wasn't page outs, but rather page ins.

I ran a breif test and here's the outcome:

Starting point - quit all programs except TextEdit and ActivityMonitor.

Page ins: 7.62 GB

Page outs: 1.28GB

Swap 239.5 MB

Start aperture - wait for all disk activity to settle

Page ins: 7.64 GB

Page outs: 1.28 GB

Swap: 206.6 MB

Go through multiple photos deselect & reselect edits:

Page ins: 7.76 GB

Page outs: 1.28 GB

Swap used: 212 MB

The page in count increases steadily, but the page outs remain constant. Since it's already up int the gigabyte range I'll probably retest later after a reboot. I'll post updated information if it turns out that anything changes.

What I will say though is that I thought that Snow Leopard was 64-bit kernel. But looking through the internet posts, it appears as though the kernel defaulted to 32-bits unless you took action to change that. So all the time I was running Snow Leopard it was with a 32 bit kernel. The upgrade to Lion changed the default to 64-bit kernel (among other changes of course) and my memory usage went up.

Changing my kernel to 32-bit has shown a drastic reduction in memory usage (hello, little green slice of pie-chart in Activity Monitor - haven't seen you in a while) and together with disabling facial recognition has improved performance of Aperture.

The frequent crashes I found originally when running Aperture in 32-bit mode (and a 64 bit kernel) disappeared after cleaning the system with Onyx. (http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx)

After making these changes (32-bit kernel, 32-bit apps, onyx cleaning, disabling facial recognition), I feel that my early 2008 iMac with 4 gig of ram is running Aperture and Lion to my satisfaction.

For those of you experiencing instability with Lion, I highly recommend running Onyx. http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx

I am not associated in any way with this software other than having run it on every system since Tiger.

If you experience random crashes etc. then just start Onyx, allow it to do the pre-flight checks it requests (SMART and verify start disk) then go to the Automation tab and hit execute. Reboot. You will likely have a more stable system afterward.

Standard disclaimer - have a recent backup before running Onyx.

I had issues with Aperture in 32-bit mode. I ran Onyx and since then I have not experienced those crashes. Correlation does not imply causation, so your milage may vary. 😀

Stephen

I'm on a 2.4Ghz i5 Macbook Pro with 8GB of ram as well, and also have a fast 7200rpm HD. Although switching to 32bit, degragging my drive and doing various other things that have been suggested here has helped a lot, I can't say Aperture 3 is all that fast.

To check if I wasn't imaging things, I downloaded a new demo of LR3 and put a fair amount of RAW files in there. The speed difference was quite big, bigger than I could remember from previously using LR3. Interface-wise I still think LR3 is a dog compared to Aperture, otherwise I'd have switched already.

I really wonder why Aperture is more optimized, especially since Apple builds both hard- and software.

I'm also a long time Logic user, and when comparing that to competitors such as Digital Performer or Cubase, Logic is far more processor efficient, capable or running and rendering more softsynths/audio tracks.

Now I know that Logic doesn't depend on the GPU, and Aperture does, but regardless of this, I still feel Aperture is far from optimized.

Raphael Brand wrote:

i have one of the fastest or the fastest macs

mac pro, 2 x 2.66 6-core intel xeon

32(!) GB ram!!

and now the fastest SSD start up disk you can get for money on the planet! and guess what, Aperture still runs very questionable-

its slow, somethimes crashes, if i zoom in and want to work with a brush nothing happens, the frame freezes for a moment etc etc. basically it *****.

You should start a new thread with a title like "Fast Mac, slow operation" and give very complete details of your workflow, OS/apps versions, drives (how full, how connected), etc. so we can help you to troubleshoot your box because the problem is in your specific setup. Aperture rocks on my weaker 2011 MBP.

Also do note that the stock GPUs on many MPs are limiting to Aperture.

-Allen Wicks

macsterdam wrote:

I'm on a 2.4Ghz i5 Macbook Pro ... ...I can't say Aperture 3 is all that fast.

Aperture has always heavily utilized the GPU, and your box is weak in that area. Unfortunately, older or less than top boxes will always provide lesser performance. 😟

Adobe apps tend not to take good advantage of the GPU so they do not usually take a big performance hit with lesser GPUs.

-Allen Wicks

Why then is LR3 so much faster than Aperture 3 on my machine? Apple should be able to at least match that speed I think!

macsterdam wrote:

Why then is LR3 so much faster than Aperture 3 on my machine? Apple should be able to at least match that speed I think!

Like I said in the previous post:

Aperture has always heavily utilized the GPU, and your box is weak in that area.

Adobe apps tend not to take good advantage of the GPU so they do not usually take a big performance hit with lesser GPUs.

Certain LR actions are faster than Aperture on less-than-the-best Macs. However overall the start-to-finish Aperture workflow is in my experience faster. And with a properly set up high end 2011 Mac (mine is a 17" MBP with 8 GB RAM) Aperture absolutely rocks.

-Allen Wicks

Can anyone else with a 4 gig system confirm or refute my findings that switching to 32-bit kernel and all apps to 32-bit has gotten Aperture back to Snow Leopard speeds? I'd like to have more than one data point.

Also, can you check if running Onyx seems to help Lion stability.

There are a significant number of users with 4 GB Systems, myself included, that are experiencing Aperture crashes when running in 32 but mode. In 64 bit mode, as described in many posts here, Aperture is generally not usable on systems with 4 GB of RAM. A possible exception might be if you have your swap file configured on an SSD.

Apple has been provided with debugging information regarding these issues.

However, your best bet to get Aperture to a usable state on a 4 GB Mac is to switch it to 32 bit mode. In my experience it is not necessary to switch everything to 32 bit at the OS level since other applications behave properly in 64 bit mode. Caution though, while in 32 bit mode Aperture cannot use 64 bit plugins, so those will have to be switched as well.

I can confirm the information contained in another post regarding the size of the VM for Aperture in 64 bit mode: it seems to hover slightly over 7 GB in normal conditions. I have seen it go up higher to the point where my 12 GB Mac started paging out.

I bought 8GB for my MBP thinking how much better Aperture will work but did not see any improvement in performance whatsover. It works sort of ok at the beginning but the longer I am in it, more editing, the slower it becomes showing beach ball and quitting unexpectedly. All this in 64 bit mode.

Ok.... since we're talking RAM and Lion.... I thought I'd throw in a curve ball.... While working in iMovie tonight I got this message when trying to share my little 2 minute movie to iTunes. Keep in mind I have the fastest iMac Apple makes with 12GB of ram and not much else running. I have almost 6GB free! The warning says "Sharing requires more memory to be available. Quit iMove and relaunch."

Any thoughts on this?

My thoughts would be this...you have posted to an Aperture thread regarding an iMovie issue if you are having trouble with an iMovie issue please post this to an iMovie thread or start a new thread instead of hijacking an existing thread with an off topic post...thanks.

I get it: "Dark Angel".... Your job is to swoop in and save threads. That's exciting! I bet you wear a mask and a cape too.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the VM size for Aperture in 64 bit mode frequently tops 7 GB. If you add the physical RAM used by the O/S you quickly exceed your 8 GB of RAM and start paging out (using swap space on disk), which will considerably slow down your system.

Whether using this much memory is normal or not is debatable. What is certain is that Aperture 3.1.3 on Lion is a memory HOG and you need at least 12 GB to avoid having to work around this.

"Work around" may mean

- getting rid of anything that uses memory while you use Aperture (close Safari, etc)

- optimize your Aperture workflow

- disable face recognition, remove Aperture libraries and files from Spotlight, etc

- periodically restart Aperture or even the Mac

I have 12 GB on one of my Macs and I frequently max it out when using a complex Aperture workflow.