Disappointingly Slow

I am an Apple Fanboy to the extreme. But I gotta say... Aperture is SOOO slow, it is painful. I have a large library of 40,000 images or so from a couple of decades of avid picture taking. I have a 1 year old MacBook Pro 15" with 8Gig RAM and a 1TByte drive.

iPhoto used to be a dream to open and play and shut it off. Then it got bulky as I crossed 20,000 images and moved to Aperture. I have dealth with all the 2.x and 3.x versions of Aperture, hoping that each version would manage the library more effectively. Although there are small glimpses of improvements, overall, it is still painful to use. I LOVE the featureset and workflow, but I dread opening it to add a new 25 photos. It's a half-hour ordeal.

I have switched recently to a referenced database. So all master photos except this year are kept on an external 1TB Thunderbolt drive. All 40,000 thumbnails and this year's masters are on the internal drive.

My computer is not a slouch. Plenty of RAM. Plenty of open space (30% on internal, 80% on external).

But sometimes when I click OPEN, it will be 5 minutes before I can click my first image. And every other application feels the hit when Aperture is open.

Am I doing something dreadfully wrong? Anyone else on a MacBook Pro with 30,000 to 50,000 images?

Jim

Boulder, CO