Aperture running at a crawl since lion upgrade

That's exactly the position I'm in. 16GB RAM should be more than enough when it worked perfectly well under Snow Leopard with 4GB, even switching to 32-bit didn't solve it completely, and actually caused complete crashes rather than just slow performance, so if the next updates doesn't resolve the issue, back to Snow Leopard.

Hopefully it won't come to that, but as Allen says, I'm more interested in having a quick, reliable workflow than I am in Launchpad or Mission Control.

One thing that worked for me was to run Onyx and fix permissions, run the maintenance scripts, clear caches etc for the whole machine.

BTW I have mid-2008 iMac, 4Gb RAM with 500Gb hard disk.

It was a long shot but it has certainly speeded things up such as full image rendering in Aperture and navigating the library.

It's back to the performance that I had with Leopard but still not as quick as running Aperture on my MB Pro. I guess the ATI Radeon 2400 graphics card on my iMac has something to do with that but not a lot I can do there.

If you don't have Onyx just Google it and download the version for Lion. (Running Aperture in 32 bit mode made no difference at all).

Run Aperture in 32-bit mode. Works like a charm. The second option would be to increase RAM to say 8gb, Lion loves RAM, besides it's dirt cheap. Check the page-outs in Activity Monitor. If the number is muc greater than 0, then upgrade your RAM.

The Aperture update is avaliable ..... I downloaded it and dare I say, it fixed my ram draining issues once and for all. Sys monitor shows a significant improvement. For those of you running 4gigs of ram, you might check out the update and try getting back to 64bit mode......

Great news! I've been holding off installing Lion because of this amongst other things on my 13" MBP from 2009. Still not convinced I will do that, or just stick to SL.

Yesterday I installed new Lion and Aperture 3.2. Now it is fast enough on my "old" MacBook Pro with 2 GB RAM. The amount of used memory stays stable and does not increase as the days before. I'm shooting on a sports tournament with 100-300 photos every day. I close the other applications especially Firefox while I'm working. It is faster to load the pictures now with 3.2 and the delays if you turn or cut a pictures are shorter.

Very good work, Apple! Much faster than 3.0 on Snow Leopard. I thought about buying a new MacBook with more memory but if it works now I can do that next year.

I too can confirm that on my 2008 2.8 GHz iMac with 4GB RAM running Lion, Aperture 3.2 has sped up considerbly. I have switched back to 64 bit mode, and can now go through edits much faster. Very snappy now, and no Spinning Beachball!

Happy to report that the 10.7.2 and A3.2 combination seems to have resolved many of the issues we have been experiencing. I can confirm that after the upgrade the workflow that used 11 out of my 12 GB RAM now hovers around 6 - 7 GB. I have not tested the behavior on my 4 GB MBP, but I hear others with 2 GB systems reporting decent performance. Way to go Apple. We expected no less.

(now it is the iOS 5 upgrade that is draining my iPhone G3S battery in 4 hours while doing nothing; gotta look to upgrade my RAM ... wink wink nudge nudge ... 😉)

Now everything works fine for me.... thanks Apple for fixing the problem.

Just adding I'm another 2008 2.8Ghz iMac owner, 4GB of ram, who can once again run in 64 bit after this latest update. Honestly, I think Aperture is now running better than ever, and my need to possibly upgrade\buy a new machine has been vanquished. 🙂

Thanks Apple. Just don't take so long the next time. 😉

I have an iMac i5 with originally 4GB and I am an avid user of Aperture. When I passed from SnowLeopard to Lion, my iMac grinded to a halt when I used Aperture, literally could not use Aperture anymore. My library had 32,000 pics and I had to split it into 4 library's to be able to work. Even then...... Forget buying memory at Apple, its unafordable. I used my sisters computers supplier to find the proper memory to buy and upgraded to 16GB of memory and even now, I sometimes end up with 2 GB of "Free" memory!! I don't know how to deal with this, and I looking on these blogs to help me out, but the rule here is if you are on Lion, you need more memory no doubt about it.

Have you upgraded to the most recent updates that came out earlier thus week?

My aperture library consisted of 32,000 pictures, and with Snow Leopard it worked fine, a bit slow but fine.

When I upgraded to Lion, I found myself grinded to a halt, constantly crashing Aperture. I did some reasearch and proceeded to split my library's into 4 seperate ones, turned off "Faces" and all "Facebook" accounts. That helped but still...... My iMac i5 with 4GB of RAM was suddenly not strong enough. After talkind to a third party computer specialist, he recommended to upgrade my computer all the way to 16GB of RAM which I did with his help, because going to Apple was just outrageously expensive. Yes my computer works great, but now I noticed another problem. When I am working with Aperture for about an hour or so, the "Active"a and "Inactive" memory climbs up to a ridiculously high number, leaving me with sometimes 2GB of "Free" memory! Not sure if this is a problem or not, but surely Lion with Aperture requires a **** load of RAM and I am wondering why Apple even to this day still offers computers with only 4GB of RAM, 16GB should be the standard.

Q:? Why does Aperture build up its memory usage from 500MG all the way to 4.45GB within an hour?

You are describing some of the issues experienced with Aperture 3.1.3 on Lion 10.7 and 10.7.1.

Unless you are the unlucky one to hit a different bug, these bugs appear to have been fixed in Lion 10.7.2 with Aperture 3.2. You should be fine after upgrading.

Unfortunately, there were many posts here containing incorrect advice to rush and upgrade memory. While that would in some cases mask the problem, it is not a fix.

Talk about timing! I did check for upgrades twice this week with nothing available. After I read your post, I checked again and Lion 10.7.2 was now avaialble, but not Aperture 3.2. A couple of hours later Aperture 3.2 was now available for upgrade!!! I'll try these upgrades and let you know. Thanks