Paul J Dunning

Q: Is there a memory leak in Aperture 3.5?

Aperture 3.5

Mac mini (late 2012), 16GB RAM

OSX 10.9

 

I’ve been doing some phto editing work in Aperture recently. This has involved painting in Curve adjustments. It’s been getting pretty slow. Then this window appeared.

Screen Shot 2013-11-11 at 14.11.48.PNG

Looking at Activity Monitor, I found that memory had become rather tight. After I quit Aperture, the memory pane zipped down to green levels. See comparison screenshot here:

aperture.png

You can actually see the point where Aperture is quit - a massive drop in memory pressure. It seems that as I edit images in Aperture (and it appears that brushing in adjustments is the culprit - I only need to do two or three images before this starts to get serious), the memory pressure increases to a point where it seems to blow a gasket, and I am invited to quit applications.

 

The images are shot in RAW, and are 14MP in size.

Posted on Nov 12, 2013 4:17 AM

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Q: Is there a memory leak in Aperture 3.5?

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  • by sorinfromtoronto,

    sorinfromtoronto sorinfromtoronto Dec 29, 2013 8:13 AM in response to sorinfromtoronto
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Dec 29, 2013 8:13 AM in response to sorinfromtoronto

    Sadly, it appears that the latest 10.9.1 O/S upgrade did not address the issue where Aperture quickly chews up all memory and comes to a grinding halt when Screen Proofing is turned on.

     

    For now, the only workaround I found was to only turn Screen Proofing On when absolutely necessary, then turn it off right away. Forgetting it on for any lenght of time will eventually force you to restart Aperture. The good news is that the memory is indeed being released by Aperture upon closing the application.

  • by tanstaafl_42,

    tanstaafl_42 tanstaafl_42 Dec 29, 2013 9:58 AM in response to sorinfromtoronto
    Level 1 (4 points)
    iPhone
    Dec 29, 2013 9:58 AM in response to sorinfromtoronto

    I am having a similar issue with aperture coming to a grinding halt, and I'm getting the message that there isn't enough room on my hard drive and aperture is running out of memory.  This makes no sense as I had no other programs running, I have a late 2012 imac with 32gigs of ram, and there is half a terabyte free on my internal hd, and one terabyte free on the disk where the actual library resides.  Hangs every time I try to import a library, even a tiny one, fresh after restart.   Both libraries were newly created, and rebuilt, and all permissions repaird on all disks. All disks also verified.  Driving me crazy.  Glad I found your posts before I went completely nuts, thank you.

     

    I'm going to try turning off the on screen proofing, in case that would help.  Where exactly is that?

  • by dsciuk,

    dsciuk dsciuk Dec 29, 2013 2:26 PM in response to sorinfromtoronto
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 29, 2013 2:26 PM in response to sorinfromtoronto

    I am experiencing the exact same issue as Paul, except I can recreate it with "Adjustments - Effects - Colors" - I'm using a new MacBook 15" Retina 10.9 with 16GB RAM and SSD 500GB Drive - Quitting and restarting Aperature works - pretty low-tech. No third party software running - when I make adjustments I can see the CPU use by Aperture and Kernel_task grow steadily until the warnings come.

  • by William Lloyd,

    William Lloyd William Lloyd Dec 29, 2013 3:29 PM in response to tanstaafl_42
    Level 7 (21,148 points)
    Dec 29, 2013 3:29 PM in response to tanstaafl_42

    View menu->Onscren proofing.  Make sure there's no checkmark next to it.  If there is, then select it and the checkbox will go away.

  • by Rich1955,

    Rich1955 Rich1955 Dec 30, 2013 6:36 AM in response to William Lloyd
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 30, 2013 6:36 AM in response to William Lloyd

    Sorry to shout but SWITCHING OFF ON SCREEN PROOFING ONLY HELPS SOME PEOPLE. Many others have the same memory leak with proofing  OFF.

    Apple have aske me to vidoe the problem and send to support. Will report back when they do.

  • by sorinfromtoronto,

    sorinfromtoronto sorinfromtoronto Dec 30, 2013 6:56 AM in response to Rich1955
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Dec 30, 2013 6:56 AM in response to Rich1955

    I understand your frustration. I was not implying that turning off proffing will solve everyone's problem. It did alleviate mine, that's all. I did state earlier that, contrary to gurus here telling us we don't know what the **** we were doing, that is was our fault and should NEVER use non Apple software, the root cause is somewhere deeper in Apple's new memory management and it will take some time for them to fix it.

     

    In the meantime, everyone needs to tinker and find whatever workaround is best. Good luck.

     

    Sorin

  • by tanstaafl_42,

    tanstaafl_42 tanstaafl_42 Dec 30, 2013 11:21 AM in response to sorinfromtoronto
    Level 1 (4 points)
    iPhone
    Dec 30, 2013 11:21 AM in response to sorinfromtoronto

    Thank you for your advice Sorin. I am going to try it soon (I hope).  Because of all the crashes, and because I'm sure apple support will tell me to do it anyway, this morning I reinstalled Mountain Lion, Aperture and Iphoto.  Now I am rebuilding the libraries, doing all three options just to make sure I tried everything. I also repaired and verified all my disks and fixed permissions.  When done I will restore Aperture settings to default and then double check to be sure the proofing is off.

     

    After that I'm going to try to combine libraries with a new user account.  If that works I will try to combine my libraries again.

     

    If this doesn't work I'm going to brave a tech support call, unless any of you has any other suggestions.

  • by A1wsmcc,

    A1wsmcc A1wsmcc Jan 5, 2014 2:56 PM in response to tanstaafl_42
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jan 5, 2014 2:56 PM in response to tanstaafl_42

    I have commented on another thread , I have the same problem the issue is not resolved yet. I contacted apple support and they got me to reinstall sox 10.9 but this has not changed the situation. See below for last comment. Any suggestions. I am going to contact apple again latter this week when I have time.

    From other thread

    "

    I am glad I am not the only one. Since the last comment / plea for help the problem still persists. It eased a little by buying an extra 8gb of memory to make 16gb and reinstalling both aperture and sox mavericks this was done under guidance of apple. But still the mac runs at 15.98gb of memory used or occasionally over 16. This can not be correct, any more ideas?

     

    Part of changing to a mac was to avoid this memory hungry application.

     

    One other featur the application qtkitserver (some 3 or 4 digit number) not responding usually appears as the memory used steadily increases.

     

    It looks like I am also going to have to give up on aperture and swap to Lightroom."

  • by tanstaafl_42,

    tanstaafl_42 tanstaafl_42 Jan 6, 2014 10:06 AM in response to tanstaafl_42
    Level 1 (4 points)
    iPhone
    Jan 6, 2014 10:06 AM in response to tanstaafl_42

    Well, to follow up, I did all the clean-up, and reinstalls, cache and plist deleting, and rebuilds possible.  I zapped the PRAM.  I started with a new library and a new user account, and I STILL had the same issue when I went to import another library.   Again that other library was also new. 

     

    I contacted applecare, and of course the hardware people said it wasn't their fault, it was Aperture, and the Aperture people said it wasn't their fault it was something to do with the my mac.  (Which is newer, and fully loaded.)  I called back the hardware people and they tried to run the Apple Hardware Test, which wouldn't open when I held down D like they told me, or Command D like they told me the second time.  I looked it up on the internet, and it should have been option D to run it from the internet, which I did.  There were no hardware problems even with the advanced test.

     

    The Aperture person suggested it might have something to do with my hard drive.  I've had just tested those out using disk utility and they appeared to be fine. 

     

    THEN all my Thunderbolt drives suddenly quit working, which I THINK is caused by a faulty wire, which I'm replacing today.  I'm hoping that this was the cause of everything, but with my luck I doubt it.  It was probably a coincidence caused by me moving the computer around last weekend.  I'll let you know.

  • by Steven Slupsky,

    Steven Slupsky Steven Slupsky Jan 7, 2014 9:09 AM in response to A1wsmcc
    Level 1 (35 points)
    Jan 7, 2014 9:09 AM in response to A1wsmcc

    Actually, I do not think the problem is Aperture.  The problem is Mavericks.  Mavericks has a serious memory problem and graphics drivers problems that are so far unresolved.  I hope Apple is aware and is working on the problem but of course there would be no way  for us to know that.

     

    My suggestion is that Aperture exacerbates the problem because it uses a lot of memory.  I use Final Cut as well and it has memory problems with Mavericks too.  I don't think switching the Lightroom will fix the problem you are having as I suspect Lightroom uses lots of memory as well. 

     

    Interestingly, I think Safari exacerabates the problem as well.  My wife has  a Macbook with only 4GB of RAM.  She typcially cannot surf the internet for more than a few hours before a kernel panic due to this problem with Mavericks memory management and/or graphics drivers.  I've re-installed the OS multiple times, etc. etc.  We have to hope that by .3 or .4 the OS will stabilize.  Unfortunately, at the rate of the updates it looks like we might have to wait a while.

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Jan 7, 2014 9:57 AM in response to Steven Slupsky
    Level 10 (107,215 points)
    iCloud
    Jan 7, 2014 9:57 AM in response to Steven Slupsky
    Actually, I do not think the problem is Aperture.  The problem is Mavericks. 

     

    I am having exactly these memory problems on all macs with Mavericks, even with only Safari, Calendar, and Mail running. I do not need to launch Aperture to make my macs unresponsive since upgrading to MacOS X 10.9.1.

     

    • MacBook Pro (17-inch Late 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.1), 2.4 GHz i7, 16GB, 500GB SSD, 1TB HD
    • iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.1), 2,7 GHz i5, 12GB RAM, 1 TBHD
    • MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.1), 2.2GHz i7, 8GB 1333MHzDDR3, 1TB HD

     

    Screen Shot 2014-01-07 at 18.56.06.png

  • by Steven Slupsky,

    Steven Slupsky Steven Slupsky Jan 7, 2014 6:36 PM in response to léonie
    Level 1 (35 points)
    Jan 7, 2014 6:36 PM in response to léonie

    only Safari, Calendar, and Mail running

     

    I do not have a screen shot to show at the moment but your screen shot shows something similar to my situations.  I think Mavericks tries to use as much memory as possible and I find that "memory used" grows and grows.  As soon as the memory used grows beyond 3.6GB on the Macbook the kernel panic is imminent.

  • by Rich1955,

    Rich1955 Rich1955 Jan 8, 2014 2:28 AM in response to Steven Slupsky
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jan 8, 2014 2:28 AM in response to Steven Slupsky

    Steven,

    that is a useful insight. In which cas Apple will surely fix it unless core to Mavericks ios compatabilities. Hope it does soon. Aperture has not had memory problems on Mountain Lion or Lion (except at early Lion OS).

    We wait and see.. Meanwhile restarting works but is a PIA.

    BTW I tried using memory clean to free up memory automatically but that doesn't work and takes more time than restarting aperture.

    Thanks,

    Rich

  • by Matt in VA,

    Matt in VA Matt in VA Jan 17, 2014 6:40 PM in response to sorinfromtoronto
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jan 17, 2014 6:40 PM in response to sorinfromtoronto

    Just wanted to chime in and say disabling onscreen proofing seems to have alleviated this problem for me. I was getting kernel memory usage of 5-6GB+ when Aperture was in use, and I think I got my swap usage up over 10GB at one point. I have 12GB of RAM in a mid-2011 iMac. Will report back after a few days.

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