Sllooooooowww Aperture

[pdpfilms]

Howdy-
So I've been using Aperture since the beginning. I think it's seen minor improvements with the incremental updates, but recently I've noticed a HUGE slowdown. I mean HUGE- quite literally unbearably slow.

For instance: In selecting a new album to view, it takes usually 20-30 seconds to come up, sometimes a few minutes. And that's just to look at an album. When inside the album, scrolling image to image takes upwards of 5 seconds for each picture. Adjustments are incredibly slow, exporting has become even slower. I noticed that over time, it gets slower and slower... initially when the application is open it's pretty speedy. But once I start working, it gets slower annnnd slooooowwer. I start getting beach balls everytime I click anything, and other applications start choking. My activity monitor shows minimal CPU usage, so it's not that.

Here's my setup:
Quad G5
4.5GB RAM
2x500GB HDD's, both 7200rpm (Entire ~120GB Aperture library contained on one of them)
GeForce 6600

Here are some of my theories:
-Even a quad can't handle the 15-20mb NEF files from a D2X
-Having my Aperture library on my startup disk is causing slowness
-My Aperture library is too big (??)
-Aperture is not installed correctly

What do you think? Is anyone here working with a large library and large files on a similar system? Using Aperture is becoming more and more tedious, and the performance is pretty astounding given the setup it's working on.

 

[Abstract]

Is your hardware working properly? Maybe your video card is messed, or your RAM dislodged. You shouldn't be having any problems with that machine. Even iGary stopped complaining after he took his machine to the Apple Store.

 

[pdpfilms]

Is your hardware working properly? Maybe your video card is messed, or your RAM dislodged. You shouldn't be having any problems with that machine. Even iGary stopped complaining after he took his machine to the Apple Store.

RAM is fine, each stick registers in both the system profiler and the activity monitor. Video card seems to be working fine, but even if it was quirky I don't see how it would cause such huge delays. I was hoping iGary would comment on his performance... we've talked a bit about how Aperture is so slow, but it's since gotten much worse for me. Any other suggestions/tests that I could run to find the problem?

 

[snap58]

RAM is fine, each stick registers in both the system profiler and the activity monitor. Video card seems to be working fine, but even if it was quirky I don't see how it would cause such huge delays. I was hoping iGary would comment on his performance... we've talked a bit about how Aperture is so slow, but it's since gotten much worse for me. Any other suggestions/tests that I could run to find the problem?

While in activity monitor under CPU look and see if you are paging out. If you are then you are using virtual memory which is SLOW. Reboot and the page outs go away, for a while. If you are running other programs that like lots of memory (like PhotoShop), they could be sucking your memory up.

 

[pdpfilms]

While in activity monitor under CPU look and see if you are paging out. If you are then you are using virtual memory which is SLOW. Reboot and the page outs go away, for a while. If you are running other programs that like lots of memory (like PhotoShop), they could be sucking your memory up.

Thanks for that. Activity monitor reads: 1052761/9518 (ins/outs), and it's under System Memory btw. Is that a lot? I would have thought 4.5GB of RAM would do me well... maybe not? I'll restart to resert those page ins and outs, see how that works...are you pretty convinced that's the problem?

EDIT: Activity monitor also tells me my virtual memory size is 13.88 GB. I'm guessing that has something to do with it... any way to decrease the size of that?

 

[Mydriasis]

No, thats not a lot of outs (depending on how long your computer has been running). And yes 4.5GB should be fine.

Try repairing permissions, using the hard disk utility. If that fails, trash the preferences (keep a copy somewhere though).

I have a 1.8DP G5 with 3Gb RAM and Aperture runs fine, but then I don't have the library on my boot drive.

 

[bearbo]

No, thats not a lot of outs (depending on how long your computer has been running). And yes 4.5GB should be fine.

Try repairing permissions, using the hard disk utility. If that fails, trash the preferences (keep a copy somewhere though).

I have a 1.8DP G5 with 3Gb RAM and Aperture runs fine, but then I don't have the library on my boot drive.

why would non-boot drive make it all better (or supposedly?)

i find aperture very slow after i import photos, it takes a long time to do something mysterious... i convince myself it's processing them and making previews, but they dont really make sense to me (that's after it doesn't talk to camera anymore)

i would use lightroom, except lightroom is even slower, and i really dont like lightroom's organizational stuff... i like its editing features tho

i dont know what im talking about, just rumbling

btw, is 933281/179541 a lot of page in/out? it's been running for 1 day 3 hrs, and in the time i played with photoshop, aperture, and parallel.. i'm running mbp w/ 2.0gb ram

 

[iGary]

RAM is fine, each stick registers in both the system profiler and the activity monitor. Video card seems to be working fine, but even if it was quirky I don't see how it would cause such huge delays. I was hoping iGary would comment on his performance... we've talked a bit about how Aperture is so slow, but it's since gotten much worse for me. Any other suggestions/tests that I could run to find the problem?

Hey, Ian.

The last time I had issues with Aperture, it was the video card, which Apple replaced.

Sounds lame, but when I have issues, I back up, uninstall, reinstall, and then rebuild the library. It's very Microsoftish, I know, but until they clean it up it usually works.

I would turn off previews if you haven't already, too--make sure you do this first.

Fun being guinea pigs, isn't it?

 

[Mydriasis]

why would non-boot drive make it all better (or supposedly?)

i find aperture very slow after i import photos, it takes a long time to do something mysterious... i convince myself it's processing them and making previews, but they dont really make sense to me (that's after it doesn't talk to camera anymore)

btw, is 933281/179541 a lot of page in/out? it's been running for 1 day 3 hrs, and in the time i played with photoshop, aperture, and parallel.. i'm running mbp w/ 2.0gb ram

When a program is lauched not all of its contents are loaded into memory. So when you tell aperture to access files in the library while any program is looking up stuff on the boot drive, depending on priority, aperture will have to wait for that to finish. And you have to wait for the heads to move the correct position.

Basically page In/Outs refer to chunks of data being swapped in and out of the virtual memory store by the operating system. Which is also on the boot drive, so again your heads go flying and you waste time. If you want to know more check out: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/ManagingMemory/index.html

If you want to know what aperture is doing click the spinning progress bar and it will tell you.

 

[bearbo]

When a program is lauched not all of its contents are loaded into memory. So when you tell aperture to access files in the library while any program is looking up stuff on the boot drive, depending on priority, aperture will have to wait for that to finish. And you have to wait for the heads to move the correct position.

Basically page In/Outs refer to chunks of data being swapped in and out of the virtual memory store by the operating system. Which is also on the boot drive, so again your heads go flying and you waste time. If you want to know more check out: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/ManagingMemory/index.html

If you want to know what aperture is doing click the spinning progress bar and it will tell you.

does partition the drive help, or do i need another physical drive? is FW400 or FW800 good enough?

 

[Mydriasis]

Has to be a different physical drive, as the heads can still only be in one position at a time, and the hard disk can only complete on task at a time.

FW is much better than USB, since it can stream data.

 

[ChrisA]

does partition the drive help, or do i need another physical drive? is FW400 or FW800 good enough?

The theory of using a second drive for media storage is that there is only one read/write head asembly inside the drive and if two programs (The OS and Aperture) are both accesstheir own files there drive heads will bounce around a lot Having two drives can minimize this. Also you get almost double the bandwidth because you can read fro both drives at once.

If your meadia is on an external drive you want the fastest interface you can afford. Either FW800, eSATA, gigabyte Eithernet or fiber channel.

One reason you may have noticed a sudden change in performance is that some file thae Aperture uses used to fit in RAM and now it doesn't. We can't know much about Aperture's internals but many programs will keep small indexies in memory but give up on this if the index gets past some threshold.

Activity monitor can help. Watch it with the system is slow. look for lots of disk IO, RAM usage or CPU usage. You have to find the bottle neck. Fixing the non-bottleneck will not do much for you. It could very well be that more RAM would help