Aperture running at a crawl since lion upgrade

If you go to the Aperture process screen in the Activity Monitor, how much swap used does it show? Thanks

I'm going to suggest something that may explain why sometimes things go badly for one person, and go well for the next person when moving to Lion.

Again it is the RAM issue. Mac OS X (like most OSes), is a virtual storage system which squeezes a lot of potential RAM demand into a much smaller amount of RAM.

What needs to be understood here is "working set".

Looking at my Activity Monitor beside me, I see that the Activity Monitor process itself is consuming about 95 MB of virtual memory, whereas it is using less than 20MB of real memory. "Real" memory is the physical stuff with the chips etc.

So how can 95 fit into 20? It can't, but what OS X has determined is that the "working set" of memory for the Activity Monitor process is less than 20MB. The working set is that part of the process's allocated memory which is getting a lot of use, and the rest is parked on disk in case it's needed. For example, it may be program code which is only used under unusual or different circumstances, such as text strings in languages other than the one I am currently using.

The tricky thing about "working set" is that while you have enough RAM to contain that "working set", everything tends to go very, very well. Evidence that it is working well is that "Page Outs" are zero (see Activity Monitor).

But if that working set grows, then you will eventually see Page Outs happening as OS X finds that it has to swap out pages to make room for other pages. (A "page" is 4K bytes).

Within reason, a little paging is OK. If Page Outs only happen a few times per minute, they probably won't hurt you much since they represent a work delay of only about 1/100th of a second (very approximately, don't shoot me for this estimate!).

The problem is that the difference between the working set fitting and not fitting in RAM can be catastrophic with only a slight change in the working set size. One minute, all is well, the next it's a mess. Or really, I should say one millisecond, all is well, and the next it is a mess. Things happen really quickly in RAM!

The best analogy is the freeway. We are all zipping along at near the speed limit in very heavy traffic, something happens in the opposite lanes causing gawking drivers to ever-so-slightly back off on the gas and slow down just a little, and the next thing, we have a traffic snarl.

Back to your Mac. In the pre-Lion situation, if your working set for the processes you choose to use is very, very close to filling your RAM, the move to Lion may push this over the edge, causing the "traffic snarl".

On the other hand, if you had plenty of spare RAM with Snow Leopard, the move to Lion will reduce that spare RAM, but not enough to cause paging to rise enough to hurt you.

How can you get some insight into waht will happen when moving to Lion? That's really hard, but what is for sure, if you are already getting Page Outs in any significant quantity, that quantity will rise with Lion unless you change your work habits (like run fewer apps at the same time). Page Outs under Snow Leopard should send off warning bells for you to get more RAM before going to Lion.

My advice is always to have more RAM than you need.

In another thread, a poster said something like "Sure, Apple said you can put Lion in a 2GB Mac, but they didn't say you'd enjoy it!"

I still feel it is a memory leak. With 4GB on SL, I can run Ap3 AND edit a photo in Photoshop CS4 without any significant paging. In Lion, Ap3 on top of the OS alone starts swapping like crazy. The delta is too high to make a WS size issue likely. IMHO

As I said, it can take very, very little to make a huge difference. I've been working with such systems since about 1970, and my experience has confirmed this time and time again.

I agree, it doesn't make any sense. I have the same problem and I use a Macbook Pro 15'' (2011 edition, base version) with Core i7 2.0 Ghz/4 GB RAM and Aperture run so slow that it's impossible to use. This is definitely a bug and Apple should fix it as soon as possible. Otherwise if Apple thinks that's ok they should change the name of Macbook Pro in "Macbook", because it's nonsense that a Pro machine can't run Aperture. In alternative they could specify in Aperture hardware requirements that you need a Mac Pro with 16 GB of RAM.

Aperture process screen reads:

Real memory 3.06GB

Virtual Memory Size 6.95GB

Shared Memory Size 0bytes

Private Memory Size 2.79GB

Virtual Private Memory 3.12 GB

In the main ActivIty Monitor System Memory pane I have:

Free 1.78GB

Wired 1.28GB

Active 7.13GB

Inactive 1.81GB

Used 10.21GB

I have quite a bit running but Aperture is by far the biggest hog - next largest Real Memory usage is Lotus Notes with 553MB.

I think this tends to support a memory leak hypothesis which I'm coping with as I have a lot of RAM installed.

Just restarted Aperture, Memory use stabilised at about 2.5Gb, but as soon as I started paging through images in the viewer the usage peaked up at 4.6Gb for a while before settling back. Not suprising that it would struggle on 4Gb installed RAM

Whatever it was, when I excluded my Aperture library from Time Machine and then ran a "Repair Database" for good measure, I stopped seeing the beach ball.

I have a 2009 17" MacBookPro 2.66Ghz C2D with 8GB. I was experiencing this kind of crawling performance in Snow Leopard when I had 4GB but doubling that up quickly fixed the problem. I was surprised that Lion would have such a high demand for RAM but this looks like a bug to me.

In the meantime, repair your database by holding Option + CMD when you start Aperture. If it doesn't fix the over all slowness, it's bound to improve performance, specially if you have a large library.

this is horrible does anyone know how to downgrade back to Snow Leopard im a grad student and i can not work at this speed and hand in work its literaly impossible to organize, edit, and all my photos in time for mid terms with software this horrific.

Jsut stating the obvious here: repairing the database does not fix the memory leak. I must confess I did it, hoping for the impossible. It is cool to watch how the VM size grows from a few hundred meg to 4 GB while you edit the first photo.

Sorry I am repeating myself: this is almost certainly a serious memory manamegement problem in Aperture 3, triggered by the memory management changes in Lion. The only fix is a fix.

From Apple.

Or a downgrade to SL.

Check the OS Lion forum for instructions on returning to SL. How easy (or painful) it's going to be depends on how you have your system backed up. I use SuperDuper to make bootable clones on an external drive. In 20 minutes is was back on SL. If you use TimeMachine then you can make use of Apples' restore functionality they have baked into the Lion installation. If you don't have a current backup, then you are going to have to back up your data somewhere, erase and configure your internal hard drive, install SL from the original media and finally move back your data and apps. Good luck. I do feel your Lion pain.

Same issues here on a 15" Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz MBP (Early 2008), 6GB RAM. This needs to be fixed, and it needs to happen soon.

I agree, 27inch iMac i5 4Gb RAM 1TB HD - very very slow indeed.

Come on Apple, get your finger out, you have no-one else to point it to. You already updated Pages, so must be aware of these issues.

sorinforomtoronto, thank you for your expertise. You appear to be have more technical knowledge than I do. How would you explain the complete turn around that I've experienced?

I was having the same unusable slow performance described in this thread. I noticed that the problem would attenuate when I was away from home and eventually linked that behavior to Time Machine performing a back up. Now that I have excluded my Aperture Library from Time Machine, the problem has totally and completely disappeared! 😀

I've been following some of the diagnostic advice and have followed RAM and VRAM use. Page Outs are zero and I've been running through my 100,000 photo library for the past hour.

One consistent issue is full screen. It's a mess on Lion. I often get a blank screen and Aperture using 2 different spaces at once.

... also, if somebody who's experiencing these problems could try my remedy and verify it, we'd at least have an intermediate fix until Apple releases a point update.