Aperture running at a crawl since lion upgrade

I to am experiancing issues with aperture or the lack of running aperture. I have a G5 mac, dual quads with 5 gigs of ram. When I run aperture it eats up about 2.5 gigs of memory leaving me with about 50 meg to play with. System slows to a crawl. Nothing seems to work. When I shut aperture off I gain back my 2 plus gigs of memory and all seems fine. I think its a joke that aperture 3.1.3 is advertised as being made for lion. I would sure hate to see it if it wasn't. I am getting 12 more gig of memory and I am curious if that will solve my issues. I can't believe all 8 threads are being used by aperture so with the extra memory I should see some relief. I should know by the end of the week.

Paradoxxx, have you checked your Page Out rate? That will tell you if the additional RAM will help.

PS I have a quad core i7 3.4GHz iMac with hyperthreading and I see CPU utilizations up to about 400% when skimming through RAW images fairly quickly

Message was edited by: John Kitchen - added PS

Same problem here. Running Aperture 3 on a (latest) MacBook pro. Since upgrading to Lion, Aperture performance is shocking. Not only is it slow and hangs often, it hangs my entire system while it's "processing". This happens even when I just open an image. I'm not a heavy user, (library has less than 3000 photos).

I sincerely hope they fix this with an update soon.

Really, try running Aperture in 32bit. Haven't had a problemcsince I did it.

Let me guess. The MacBook Pro has 4GBs of RAM. Am I correct?

Yes and it ran fine in Snow Leopard in 64 bit but in Lion A3chewed up call my RAM and the swap files skyrocketed. No problem vat all running at 32bit.

Seriously?

Maybe you can explain why Aperture 3.1.3 in 64 bit mode uses a much more reasonable VM size under SL? The same version, same settings, jumps to 4+ GB VM with Lion. The changed memory management in Lion should not trigger that. In fact, it does NOT trigger the same behavior in other 64 bit applications, like Safari, iTunes, etc.

And what exactly is Aperture grabbing 4+ GB for when browsing a few images?

While it is true that Aperture memory usage in 64bit stabilizes at 5 GB, which makes a 12 GB system less likely to experience SIGNIFICANT performance degradation, it is also true that this is SLOPPY QA from Apple. "Sloppy" is not something that characterizes Apple, so I fully expect them to deal with this soon.

In the meantime, 4 and 8 GB system users:

- switch Aperture to 32 bit

- exclude the folders containing the Aperture library and the reference files from Spotlight and perhaps Time Machine

CAUTION: 64 bit plug-ins will most likely stop working when you switch to 32 bit; you can either switch them to 32 bit or use an earlier 32 bit version.

Of course, you can always throw more resources at bad software, but then your name is Bill.

Most prob daft question. How do I change Aperture to 32 bit??

Open the Applications folder, select Aperture, type Command-I to open the Get Info window and check "open in 32-bits"

Thanks for that. I switched to using Aperture in 32 bit mode and performance is much, much faster. You're right, there is no reason why this much RAM should get eaten up when flicking through a small number of images.

I hope this gets resolved soon.

Same problem here, what's happend with Apple and it's Pro Apps?? 😟 new update = new headache

I have Macbook pro dual 3GHz 8GB ram working like a charm on Snow Leopard but now Lion is playing with beachball.... even after clean Lion install.

32 bits works smoothly but it's not a real solution, please, apple take care of your pro apps!

hiroru wrote:

32 bits works smoothly but it's not a real solution, please, apple take care of your pro apps!

hiroru,

What's the downside for you in running Aperture in 32 bit mode? I tried it and see nothing bad happening, but you say "it's not a real solution". Why?

I have the same problem. Aperture was fine with SL and almost unusable with Lion. With 4GB of RAM 32 bit helped but still the RAM would fill up. Upgrading to 8GB has helped tremendously even in 64bit but still the whole 8GB fills up and things slow down. I would say that with 8GB of RAM it is back to where it was on SL with 4GB. I have Photomatix HDR plug in and that seems much quicker now.

It may be a silly question but does someone from Apple read this forum? Can we expect them to sort out the mess they have made?

sorinfromtoronto wrote:

Seriously?

Maybe you can explain why Aperture 3.1.3 in 64 bit mode uses a much more reasonable VM size under SL? The same version, same settings, jumps to 4+ GB VM with Lion. <snip>

sorin,

I have not tried Aperture under Lion in any serious way due the lack of useful multi-monitor support, so I am now back to Snow Leopard on my iMac.

However, I can report that Aperture 3.1.3 (64 bit mode) under OS X 10.6.8 (64 bit mode) on my 12 GB iMac will quickly use up to 4 GBs with spikes up to 4.5 GBs.

After browsing through some large RAW photos in full screen mode, Activity Monitor is showing about 5 GBs of Inactive Memory, and when Free Memory drops down very low, I see Page Outs increasing.

This sounds like what you are seeing under Lion, is it not?

John,

I am sure there are usage patterns that will push Aperture running in 64bit mode to use more than 4 GB of memory even in SL. After all this is normal behavior, especially if you have enough physical memory for the O/S to allocate efficiently. Where I believe the differences are between Aperture running on Lion vs SL is when the system is memory constrained, like a 4 GB Mac.

In prolonged, heavy usage I never experienced the Aperture 3.1.3 VM going above 2 - 2.5 GB in SL. I have 4 GB in that particular system. Since you have 8 GB in your system, the O/S allocates more to Aperture, which is what I would expect. In Lion however, it immediately grabs over 4 GB, regardless of the other system memory management aspects which would require the O/S to limit the default memory allocation. It might be that some developer did not turn "off" the two extra bits by default under Lion, causing it to grab a 4 GB default working set. In this case they will come back and fix it. It could also be a decision they made, in which case they have to amend the release notes and notify users with 4GB of RAM to switch to 32 bit mode. The problem with this is that it will prevent 64 bit plugins from working.

They are currently giving 2 GB of RAM as minimum system memory requirement for A3. Granted, you don't expect stellar performance if you only have the minimum required, but in this case the product is unusable even with double the minimum recomended amount of memory.

In a nutshell, I think it is OK that A3 64 bit uses >4GB working set when it needs to and when available to it, like in your case under SL. In Lion, on the other hand, it clearly causes severe performance problems due to memory starvation.

This issue may not be very high on Apple's list, since major Aperture users tend not to skimp on their system memory, so the issue will be masked.

Hope this helps.