Aperture 3.5 repeatedly crashes as 'memory full' despite 32GB RAM

There was another thread here talking about a possible memory leak in Aperture. Most users seemed to get around the problem by turning off On Screen Proofing.

If you have On Screen Proofing set try it with it off. See View->On Screen Proofing. Even if you did not set it intentionally you might have turned it on inadvertently with the keyboard shortcut.

I have the same problem. My imac has 32GB of RAM and Aperture maxes out the RAM after about 10 to 20 minutes of editing. At first I would get a warning that system memory had been used up and I would have to Force Quit. That was a few weeks ago when I first updated to Mavericks and Aperture 3.5. I am now on 3.5.1. More recently, if I forget to pay attention to the Activity Monitor and don't quit Aperture before it hits the memory limit, Aperture will hang for a moment and then my entire system shuts down. I believe it is the result of a kernel panic. Everything will start back up again with Aperture working fine (unless it requires me to do a repair) until I have to quit Aperture to avoid the shut down. I have noticed that kernel_task in the Activity Monitor usually sits around 1.4GB, but grows significantly and quickly when memory pressure grows if I push it a bit before quitting Aperture. Once I quit, the kernel_task immediately goes back to 1.4GB and memory is released after a few seconds.

I use Aperture all the time for my work. I work quickly with adjustments and have not had problems with the computer keeping up until now.

Can you describe in more detail what you are doing, the kinds of editing, from the moment you launch the app to the time you start hitting performance problems?

Have you checked to see if On Screen Proofing is on? As I wrote above even if you did not turn it on intentionally you might have turned it on by mistake.

Hi Tim and Frank,

Thanks for the advice. I have turned off onscreen proofing and it seems to have done the trick on a short project I just worked on. I have much more editing for this week, so I'll let you know how it goes.

I have always used the sRGB profile for onscreen proofing since all my work goes to a local lab. The prints always are a match to my monitor which is my uncalibrated imac monitor. I've tried hardware calibrators, but this just seems to work! Does anyone know if Aperture's default color space is pretty close to sRGB since I now have onscreen proofing turned off?

To everyone here seeing this problem and getting relief by turning off On Screen Proofing, makse sure you let Apple know

See Aperture->Provide Aperture Feedback one of the report items is bug report.

I have been using aperture for several years, and have been very pleased up untill a couple of months ago. Crashes started occurring on my Macbook pro. Decided it was time to upgrade and bought a 27" I-Mac with an 3.4 i7 and 1tb fusion drive and 8gb memory. With a fresh install of aperture and a new library with only 320 pix, it crashed several times. Decided to up the memory to 32gb and a upgrade to mavericks. Am amazed to watch it drop down to 2gb after about a dozen phot edits. Very frustrated, have tried all of the suggestions and have seen no positive results.

Just an update. I turned off On Screen Proofing and things went fine for a couple of days, but today, trying to edit several hundred images, I have had two crashes. Hopefully there will be an update coming to address this issue.