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Aperture is sluggish on my MBP 2.2

bmcgrath

bmcgrath

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Oct 5, 2006
1,078
40
London, United Kingdom
Hey everyone.

Quick question for you all. (I have read the forums but can't find an answer to the problem I am having)

I am using a 2.2ghz Macbook Pro with the nvidia 8600 graphics card. I have 4gb of ram and a 200gb 7200rpm seagate hdd.

What I want to know is, why is my Aperture painfully sluggish. I understand most computers can get bogged down with large RAW files but it's just painful now when I move sliders and get the spinning beachball for a moment or two while it has a think to itself.

My library on the Mac itself is only 26gb. I store all my Aperture projects that are unused on a external hard drive. Even if I run my library off the external hard drive it's still slow as hell.

So... Wondering if you guys could possibly point me in the right direction. Aperture shouldn't be too much of a problem for my Mac. I remember Aperture 2 working far better on my old Core Duo MBP with 2gb of ram.

Thanks!
 
What kind of adjustments are you doing? If you have high intensive effects ALREADY ON, e.g. edge sharpening, shadows/highlights, then moving basic adjustments like exposure/contrast will take forever.

Is this a new machine?

I always found Aperture too demanding performance wise. Lightroom 2 is much better in that aspect. However, I don't think it should be THAT slow.
 
It's a Macbook Pro 2.2GHZ. It's over a year old but has a fresh install of the OS recently.

I'm doing all of what you mentioned. But it's painfully slow... I remember thinking Aperture use to be a lot quicker than this.

Yes I've tried lightroom 2. Big improvement in speed but its GUI is messy and the app itself isn't integrated very well with the OS. The other issue is that I have my library already set up in Aperture and it would be such a chore the export all my photos into a lightroom library...
 
Maybe reinstall Aperture...probably a corrupted preference somewhere or something. If its only the app thats sluggish then it usually is either corrupted preferences, corrupted install or faulty permissions. Then again your 8600 may have started to die slowly but surely
 
daneoni said:
Maybe reinstall Aperture...probably a corrupted preference somewhere or something. If its only the app thats sluggish then it usually is either corrupted preferences, corrupted install or faulty permissions
Click to expand...

I have tried this already and it doesn't seem to work at all. I even re-built my library and done the (Command - option) when starting the app. I done consistency checks etc already too.

I dunno what else to do now. Extremely frustrating when I'm trying to edit photos.
 
What camera RAWs you using?

I tend to keep a max of 10gb libraries on system disk and keep all the rest on either my work drive or back ups.

Also open up the activity monitor inside of Aperture and make sure Aperture isn't building previews or thumbnails while you're trying to edit as it will bog it down like crazy.

Other than that I'd say try different approaches. In my experience Aperture 2 is great. I have all masters referenced on my FW800 drive, I keep preview levels at low and I make sure aperture isn't building previews when I need to work. Using this method, I've had no problems at all. And I'm working with either XTI RAWs, 40D RAWs and mostly 5D RAWs.

good luck.
 
I'm running Aperture on a 2.5 MBP and I've not experienced any sluggishness. I've also ran it on my older non-unibody MBP 2.2Ghz w/o any problems

Have you tried rebuilding your library?
quit Aperture; press and hold Option + Command and launch Aperture by double clicking on the application icon
 
this is no help to you at all, but i use ACR in Photoshop CS3 - lightining fast results and all the control of Aperture (atleast i think). Photoshop CS4 is suppose to be a huge step up in terms of user interface although i have no personal experience with it, I suggest giving it a go though.
 
allanibanez said:
this is no help to you at all, but i use ACR in Photoshop CS3 - lightining fast results and all the control of Aperture (atleast i think).
Click to expand...
True, but Aperture brings so much more to the table then ACR. Aperture really excels at DAM/workflow. I don't think they (aperture) can really touch Photoshop's editing capability.
 
Besides reinstalling Aperture (which you've already done), have you tried rebuilding your library?

If just adjusting exposure settings gives you beachballs then I think something must be very wrong. Did this happen just or...? Are the rest of your computing tasks affected? Any noticeable slowness?
 
bmcgrath said:
What I want to know is, why is my Aperture painfully sluggish. I understand most computers can get bogged down with large RAW files but it's just painful now when I move sliders and get the spinning beachball for a moment or two while it has a think to itself.
Click to expand...

I am running Aperture 2 on a MBP with 2.5 GHz and same RAM as you.

I get a small lag (up to a few seconds sometimes) when I initally click on a RAW preview until it loads the image, but after that all adjustments are pretty much instantaneous. Even that lag is a bit annoying sometimes but maybe I am a little spoiled...

The behaviour you describe reminds me how Aperture 1.0 ran on my old MBP, and it drove me crazy. That was on a 2.33 Ghz machine but I attributed most of the improvements to the new version of the software.

It could be worth to try re-installing your entire OS to see if that solves the problem (not that you should have to) because your machine should be more than capable...
 
maflynn said:
True, but Aperture brings so much more to the table then ACR. Aperture really excels at DAM/workflow. I don't think they (aperture) can really touch Photoshop's editing capability.
Click to expand...

I shall give it a try and see what its like...and also take note of the performance of it.
 
I have Aperture 2, and also noticed it's a bit sluggish, and this is on a 2.53 15" MBP, 4-gigs ram 320 gig 5400 rpm HD.
The loupe is ridiculous. It jerks and lags all around the photo. It's useless.
So I said Eff it. I still have it with the intent of exploring it later, but I recently got Adobe Lightroom 2 and love it so far. It's pretty fast too.
 
I tried it - I didn't really like the interface and it was a bit sluggish so i imediately put it to bed :p ACR for me.
 
allanibanez said:
I tried it - I didn't really like the interface and it was a bit sluggish so i imediately put it to bed :p ACR for me.
Click to expand...
Aperture and ACR are a little different. Aperture and LightRoom are the same thing, what sets them apart from ACR is that they are both photolibraries. They're mainly built for managing photos.
 
TuffLuffJimmy said:
Aperture and ACR are a little different. Aperture and LightRoom are the same thing, what sets them apart from ACR is that they are both photolibraries. They're mainly built for managing photos.
Click to expand...

Agreed, while I do like the results of ACR and Aperture really shines in organizing and maintaining my photos. I'd rather not spend my time moving them around in folders and dealing with them in the finder. Aperture allows easy categorization and offers greater flexibility in organizing them.

I've tried LightRoom, and while its editing capabilities seem a bit superior to Aperture, its workflow is constraining and its DAM is sub par to Aperture.
 
As some posters have mentioned, are you running the latest version (Aperture 2.1) of the software? There were some changes after version 2.0 that fixed some slowdown issues.

I have 4GB RAM on a 2.5 GHz MBP and I sometimes experience sluggishness especially when undo-ing changes that I have made in full-screen. Partly it is due to the fact that my library is on an external USB Drive and there is a maximum transfer speed. For serious work, it is worth getting a high-data transfer speed external drive. eSATA for example.
 
Sorry for only getting back to you so late on this. Public holiday over the weekend and mad busy in work.

Yes everything is up to date, libraries rebuilt, previews rebuilt etc. Even if I export 1 project of around 20 images and open the project in a brand new library it's still slow and sluggish.
The RAW files I'm pushing through there are from my Canon 30D. Raw files range from 8-10 mb from the 30D so they're not "huge"

At this point I'd love to head over to Lightroom but I'm stuck with Aperture as I have 100gb of data there.
 
bmcgrath said:
Yeah I'm running V2.1.3
Click to expand...

Without seeing exactly how slow your Aperture is running it is difficult to say if it is normal, or if you have something strange going on. Unbelievably on even the fastest MBP it sometimes has some slowdowns, but I have always found them to be tolerable.
If it is really slow & unusable you could take it into an apple store and ask them about it. I guess it depends on what your expectations for the software are....

It's a shame because it is great software when working well.
 
It used to run pretty sweet before. Nice and smooth with only the minor slow downs when it tried to process photos.

Some extensive googleing has pointed me towards the Macbook Pros poor nvidia graphics driver. Which may well be the case because my friend who has Aperture running on his old MBP with the ATI X1600 has no problems.

So yeah! Still annoyed about this! :mad:
 
bmcgrath said:
Some extensive googleing has pointed me towards the Macbook Pros poor nvidia graphics driver. Which may well be the case because my friend who has Aperture running on his old MBP with the ATI X1600 has no problems.
Click to expand...
I'm not so sure its the video driver, I own a 2.53 MBP and my Aperture Library is currently at 73gig. I have no such slow downs, while my RAW files may not be as large as yours (I'm using a D70s) I don't experience any of the slow downs. Heck, I run off the integrated graphics most of the time, never mind the 9600m GPU and don't really incur a terrible performance penalty.

~Mike
 
maflynn said:
I'm not so sure its the video driver, I own a 2.53 MBP and my Aperture Library is currently at 73gig. I have no such slow downs, while my RAW files may not be as large as yours (I'm using a D70s) I don't experience any of the slow downs. Heck, I run off the integrated graphics most of the time, never mind the 9600m GPU and don't really incur a terrible performance penalty.

~Mike
Click to expand...

Hmmm.... This is really odd.
Aperture is the only problem where I'm noticing slowdowns. PS is still flying along and it uses the GFX card too.
 
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