Aperture running at a crawl since lion upgrade

To get some idea of the reason(s) behind poor Aperture performance with Lion, please post the following data from Activity Monitor while Aperture is active:-

Aperture's processor utilization

Disk I/O rate and megabytes per second

Page Out megabytes. Take a reading, use Aperture, take another reading and report the time between these readings. Activity Monitor doesn't report paging rate, just accumulated quantities.

Also, please post your RAM size.

I suspect, but have no evidence yet, that the slow down may be a result of higher RAM demand under Lion, and that this may have pushed some systems into higher paging rates. However, if we see poor performance and low paging, then I'm wrong.

John - I have 4GB of RAM (the most this Early 2008 iMac will handle).

As for the stats gathering, I fired up Activity Monitor and then started doing some "Faces" work in Aperture which is where I can easily reproduce the slow down. After 10 minutes, a few things started to stick out:

1) If I had to type in the name of the face, the chance of it "pausing" was much higher.

2) My pages out haven't changed at all (steady at 700MB). Activity Monitor also says I have a little of 1 GB of free memory.

3) When the pause happens, it looks like Aperture is reporting that it using 100% of the processor - and 50% of the time I get the pinwheel and the process goes to "Not Responding" in the process list.

4) Aperture is using 2G, which is about what I remember it using in SL.

5) Disk I/O rate during the pauses was essentially zero. 2KB to 100KB - and it could have been Chrome or Mail too…

I also fired up Aperture on my MacBook (2ghz Duo, 2GB of RAM) running SL and did some faces - no pauses or slow downs, so I'm fairly certain this is tied to the Lion upgrade.

I am running Aperture on a new iMac i5 wth 4GB of ram. When retouchning pictures it halts now and then all the time. I am quite sure this is a graphics card driver issue with Lion. Similar to iPhoto 9 brought to the older iMacs.

I hope no professionals upgraded their workhorse to Lion.

Unfortunately, yes, at least one professional did. I'm currently trying to process just over 1,500 photos from Saturday's wedding. You can imagine my frustration at not making a backup before the Lion "upgrade".

John, I'm on the mid/late 2010 21.5" iMac (3.06 GHz i3 4GB)

Whilst it starts off semi-ok, as soon as you attempt to open a picture in a project it begins to slow down. As you start to use Name, adjust for red eye, use presets to adjust the photo (pretty much is a killer), crop the photo - it progressively starts using up more and more real memory.. and then if you stop updating any photo's the Real Mem does not go back down. The overall free mem is always only around 17-30MB. Appears to be sucking up all the real mem it can and then getting stuck with it.

Once Apperture reaches real mem of about 1.81GB+, the whole iMac performance goes. i.e. can't get mission control to come up, etc.

All other applications work fine in Lion (just as fast, if not faster than SL) - is certainly only confined to Aperture.

Any thoughts?

@andy-in-la

I agree, this looks like a CPU issue, especially in the screen shot.

That said, 700MB of page outs could be a lot depending on how long ago you rebooted. The pie chart of system memory is not to be relied upon. It is a point in time picture of the RAM allocation, and Aperture RAM demand can rise and fall far faster than Activity Monitor refreshes the pie.

Keep an eye on Page Out growth, and see if things are helped by quitting all other apps.

Check to see if 4GBs is truly the max that can go into your iMac. I have a late 2008 MBP and Apple’s official line is that the max is 4GB, but I have upgraded to 8GB and have no problems.

The OWC website is worth checking to see what they say about real RAM limits for your iMac.

RAM is cheap, and Page Outs are expensive!

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@FazTweet

Have a look at Page Outs under System Memory. If it is not zero, you have been running out of RAM at times. If you see Page Outs incrementing when Aperture is running slow, then that’s your performance problem.

It looks very likely that the performance issue for you is RAM shortage. But we can’t be sure until you look at Page Outs. How much has been Paged Out, and how long is it since you last re-booted?

I have a 2011 iMac which came with 4GBs. I added 8 more into the two empty RAM slots. Even with 12 GBs I still get Page Outs in small quantities, but almost never get spinning beach balls. But it would not surprise me if I have to take it to 16 with Lion. Typically new OSes will require more RAM.

John - The pageouts were all prior to starting Aperture. The counter did not increment from the time I started Aperture during my testing. I am not 100% sure what the pages out were from - but I was in Excel doing some crunching, so I'm guessing that's where they came from.

I'm just hung up on it being a code/processor related issue. The entire system slows to a crawl during these pauses (even the mouse movement is jumpy)... As a test, I bought iPhoto 11 from the App Store and there doesn't seem to be any of the same issues when manipulating those same images or identifying faces.

As for OWC, they seem to think I can do 6GB (up from my current 4GB)...maybe I'll give that shot at somepoint, but I'm not convinced RAM is the issue--yet.

Thanks for the reply, John!

I believe I've found the culprit: Time Machine.

I noticed that I got the spinning beach ball whenever Time Machine was working. I guess if you have a large library, Time Machine will highjack your Aperture Library while it indexes the changes.

I set Time Machine to bypass the Pictures folder and things are running a lot smoother. Don't forget to back up your photos with Aperture's Vault and/or Carbon Copy Cloner.

I have the same issues since the Lion upgrade. Aperture was running flawlessly prior to upgrading.

I am running a Late 2009 27" iMac i7 2.8GHz with 8GB RAM and 1TB HDD.

No, that can't be the culprit, as I don't have Time Machine running. If I did there wouldn't be a problem, as I would have restored Snow Leopard.

am a wedding photojournal and i shot heck of lot of pics and i had the same probs as everybody in this discussion.

Am on an i7 2010 with 4gig (on which i will be adding 8gigs next week -50euros on ebay).

This is what i did these last 2 days that am going nuts with the stupid lion...

1- repair permissions and then verify them and then repair again what is still faulty.

2- turn faces off in aperture

3- put a small usb fan hitting it on the aluminum where about the cpu is (this does actually help as it cools off the metal a bit so it can absorb more heat from the processor)

4- never run aperture in full screen (it completely buggy at least on my machine it just doesn't work after lion)

5- hidden the inspector panel (i-keyboard shortcut)

6- put the image preview in the lowest pixel size but in the maximum quality

so i now work with aperture screen that is little larger than the half of my display and i only have the external inspector panel open (h-on the keyboard)

hope these help guys

I have barely used Aperture since upgrading to Lion but after reading this thread I did check out an old slideshow to see how it would play. It would not play smoothly either in the timeline or in full screen preview. Never had this problem before. This was on a Mac Pro, early 2008. Importing and keywording are the only other things I've done in Aperture since the upgrade and those worked fine.

If you look at the Activity Monitor you can see that the Swap Used goes up to several GB as soon as Aperture starts doing anything other than sitting idle. The swapping kills the machine. I strongly suspect this is a new memory leak problem that reared its ugly head on Lion. If you remember, Aperture 3 had a similar problem early 2010 when it came out.

I do hope Apple has this on top of their list of fixes, because Aperture 3 is unusable on Lion. I suspect that even if you have 32 GB (4x8), it will chew it up in no time.

OK on a 2011 iMac 27" i7/12Gb. Use Aperture all the time with a very large library and have seen no noticeable change in performance since the Lion installation.