Using Aperture on an 8GB rMBP

Hi Folks

My 6 year old MBP and 5 year old Mac Pro are getting a bit long in the tooth. the Pro's going to retire to the cellar to live its retirement as a media server/NAS and the MBP is just about OK for the kids to play some online games... Both will be superceeded by a nice new rMBP.

Now I'm really not sure which rMBP to buy. To be honest, the base model is probably enough in most departments for my needs, but I'm an Aperture user and I've had a lot of problems in the past on my Mac Pro with memory usage. When I was running on 9GB it was swapping like hell when Aperture was running. So I'm a bit frightened that if I do buy the 8GB memory rMBP it's going to come-up a bit short.

On the other hand, if I'm going to upgrade the RAM then I may as well get the higher spec, but then we're talking some serious wonga difference in price, around €800, I'm thinking "why not get the cheaper model then hand it down to the kids next year and get a new one etc."

So, anyone here using Aperture on an 8GB rMBP and how does it perform?

Cheers!

Blah, I went for the base model in the end. Main reasons:

• I use Aperture one or twice a month, so although I'm stressed about the memory swapping out it's not going to affect me daily
• They don't have 16GB models in stock and I can't be bothered order
• They have a special offer right now whereby they give 10% gift vouchers for the shop on purchase (so quite a discount)
• As I said, I'll hand it down to the wifey/kids and then buy a maxed-out Haswell next year

Will let you know how it performs on Aperture RAW manipulations.

initialsBB said:

Don't forget to take into account the energy needs of keeping a Mac Pro running as a 24/7 home server. In that respect it may be better to resell it and buy a Mac Mini or other light PC or Qnap/Synology box for the purpose.

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Well the Mac Pro has been 24/7 for the last five years. Yeah, you're right, it is a bit power-hungry, but on the other hand what would I do with it? I can't imagine it's worth much to sell and then I'd have to buy a NAS or Mini to replace it with. Well a Mini would need external disk too as 500GB isn't sufficient.

So I would imagine the cost of just keeping the Mac Pro running until it dies is much cheaper than selling and buying an alternative.

But I could be wrong and I'd be happy for it to be demonstrated to me

initialsBB said:

Well you can get 100% renewable energy contracts in Belgium, so that offsets some of the decision. But where I am, running a Synology box can make me save close to €200 a year...

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Well I'm on 100% renewable... Maybe I'll look into it anyway, but I can't imagine a Mac Pro from 2007 is worth much.

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BTW folks, the rMBP is an absolute dream... I exported an Aperture library so I could do some editing at work (about 3000 JPEG's) and there no hint of swapping or memory naughtiness - in fact 0 page-outs since the machine was first used.

But I didn't try a lot of editing as of yet and I've no intention to keep my full Aperture library on here (won't fit on the disk anyway), rather export the current one, do all my culling - match and import the RAW's the cropping and post-production, then merge back to my Pro.

So far so good though What a fast and quiet machine - no screen lag that I can tell, no bad pixels, no ghosting. Very happy.

PieMac said:

Just curious to know how you are getting along now that you've been doing some editing in Aperture.

I also wound up getting the low end with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB HD and although it can hold it's own, I find myself quitting my other apps (email, etc) when working in Aperture to minimize paging out. I am considering returning it (have two more weeks in the return period) and upgrading to 16 GB but am not sure if it's really worth the hassle.

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Actually yes, I have the same experience. At first Aperture is OK, but then it gets bogged-down and I start looking for memory to save.

My solution is to wait until the next decent MBPr upgrade, then buy the top-end with maxed-out memory and give the current one to my wife...

But there's a serious issue with Aperture as regards memory management.

sanderf said:

I am curious what you guys are doing with aperture that creates the problem? How many gigs are your libraries? I keep separate libraries for topic areas such as nature, travel, events, portraits, etc. Never had a problem with 16gb RAM iMac. Occasional slow down on 8gb Mbp17 with large imports.

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Library size doesn't seem to make much difference, but I have to admit I didn't do any objective comparisons.

Not a bad idea to use multiple different libraries, actually seems logical as I never mix my family photos with the concert shoots I do and even then having a library per event could be quite workable.

Good news is that with the new memory management in Mavericks it's much better. Only hitch is that Aperture now crashes every five minutes, but I expect that will be solved before the public release date.