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dblissmn

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 30, 2002
353
107
I'm experiencing unexpectedly slow performance on Aperture on a new 15-inch Retina MBP, 16GB, Nvidia graphics. It's not bad, per se, but what is noticeable is that it's barely taxing the processor. I've not seen it take more than about 250 percent of processor on Activity monitor whereas on my 2011 quad core it spikes it all the way to 800 percent with hyper threading. While the import from card is respectable-- a 29.66GB import from a fast CF card this morning took just over seven minutes--things like face detection run quite slowly; that same import took almost 16 minutes to go through face detection (a total of 1,600 files, a mix of JPEG and raw), with the processor all the while chugging along at a leisurely 100 percent, the equivalent of just one non-hyperthreaded core. This face detection is quite significantly slower than on the Sandy Bridge 2011 quad core, even while the import is faster due to the USB 3 and flash architecture.

Do I have something configured wrong, is there something wrong with my computer, or does Aperture simply not exploit the Haswell processor? Or is everything just fine? Or does Activity Monitor not report Haswell CPU usage properly?
 

MCAsan

macrumors 601
Jul 9, 2012
4,587
442
Atlanta
Face detection is a real hog. I would not run it when doing imports. Once you have imported and culled, then run detection as a batch process when you go to lunch, dinner...etc.. The lower CPU load may be that Aperture is using the GPU for more of the overall work.
 

flynz4

macrumors 68040
Aug 9, 2009
3,242
126
Portland, OR
Face detection is a real hog. I would not run it when doing imports. Once you have imported and culled, then run detection as a batch process when you go to lunch, dinner...etc.. The lower CPU load may be that Aperture is using the GPU for more of the overall work.

IMHO... even better is to turn off "faces" and instead use tags. Aperture uses hierarchical tags... which can come in very handy. Also view the ApertureExpert video on tagging... and you will learn how to create pages and pages of tagging buttons which can be directly mapped to the keyboard.

Faces is a pig (i.e. it is an iPhoto toy app)... and it does not scale well to large libraries.

If you already have faces investment... it is trivial to use faces to create smart collections... and then apply the corresponding tag to all of those photos.

/Jim
 
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