I switched from PS to Aperture 3 in March 2010 and I am not sorry I did so. But, many times I find it slow, unresponsive, or will just quit. Is there a reason for this?
I switched from PS to Aperture 3 in March 2010 and I am not sorry I did so. But, many times I find it slow, unresponsive, or will just quit. Is there a reason for this?
Robert,
This is my information below:
VM=34.00 GB
IN=1.43 GB
OUT=173.72 MB
Swap used=436.23MB
Memory=1GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Do I need more memory? If so, how do I proceed? Thanks-Stephen
stephen r justice
Hi,
Most definitely. Running Aperture at 1Gig of RAM, especially the 667Mhz, is suicide. your swap used is real high, it accounts for half your memory.
Go as high as you can on that mac. Memory for it is super cheap these days and you’ll feel like you have a new machine working for you.
R
Robert,
How do I proceed to upgrade the memory capacity?
Thanks, Stephen
stephen r justice
I used crucial ram, their website is spot on for finding the right ram for your mac. I used the download app or identifying the computer and it worked a treat.
http://www.crucial.com/index.aspx
What Chris did is great. I like my RAM from OWC (Other World Computing). Taking a cursory look at OWC, you can jump that mac to 6Gigs for $122.00… surely that doesn’t break may people’s budgets :) But use the tool at crucial because you’ll make sure to get the right ram. I just guessed what year and version your iMac is based on RAM Speed.
If you’re not comfortable doing the RAM upgrade yourself, there are many local apple dealers (not apple themselves) who offer maintenance and would likely be more than happy to install the RAM in for you for a small fee.
R
I purchased 4 GBs of RAM from Smalldog for my mid-2007 model IMAC and that solved the problem–thanks to everyone here who helped–cannot believe the difference.
stephen r justice
Like I said, it will feel like a new Mac. :)
It is amazing how something as simple as more ram can make your computer feel as if it has just been given a new lease of life.
I am aiming to have my mac upgraded to the full 8gb by the end of the year.
Hey welcome to Aperture :)
That’s a really broad question. The short answer is: Yes there can be reasons for it.
If you can elaborate on your hardware and what your Aperture library looks like, I think it will offer Joseph and others some clues as to where to look. For example, there have been discussions in the forums about aperture slowing down if you have way too many images in one project. Or, if you have faces turned on and you import a lot of pictures, it may be faces taking processing power off of your machine to get facial recognition set on your images.
There can be a few reasons, it’s a matter of figuring out your setup, and pattern of when you notice it.
R
I have an IMAC OS X that is three years old. I do not use Faces or Places yet, but have 182 projects including the ones brought over from I Photo. The biggest project has 700 images. How do I know if Faces is turned on? Aperture gets real cranky in the Adjustment tab when I’m fine-tuning the image and will just stop processing. Generally, I will just get disgusted, turn the MAC off, then back on. I like Aperture, but this is driving me crazy. I shoot race cars for a track and a couple publications and this is slowing me WAY down.
BTW, I bought the e-book and have a recurring membership
stephen r justice
RE; over post: I have 24,228 images in the Aperture library-Stephen
stephen r justice
I don’t know if this will solve your Aperture’s responsivness problem, but I can suggest to download Maintenance 3.8 from Apple website and run all the tasks.
In any case it won’t hurt (apart erasing caches, which you can always un-tick in the tasks list).
Hope this helps.
Ciao!
How much memory do you have in your iMac?
If it is 3 years old I am imagining, unless you have upgraded, that you have 2gb.
Aperture can never have too much memory. I recently upgraded my mac from 2gb to 5gb and all my aperture slow downs disappeared (I ended up with 5gb as i bought a 4gb module and then left one of the original 1gb modules in it).
However everything started to run smoothly, from exporting, making adjustments and running other apps while aperture is working away.
You can also try some Aperture 3 Troubleshooting Basics:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3805
I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake moving to Aperture from Lightroom 3 on my Macbook Pro 13” because it would take so long just to apply a simple adjustment. Everyday I’d lock up at least once and be able to make coffee while it sorted itself out.
So i decided to try upgrading my RAM before moving back to see if it helped as I really enjoy the program. I was on 4GB before and I’m now on 8GB and it flies along. Hardly any slow down at all.
Thats not to say that you need that much ram to run it but its fixed the issue for me too.
Hope you get it working for you
Matt
Folks,
As mentioned above, it’s not always about Aperture being slow, there could be other things running on the system, even in the background, that are competing with processor power and memory with aperture (even your Dashboard widgets).
One way to tell if you need more memory is to take a quick look at Activity monitor. Here is what you do:
- Start Activity monitor
- In the bottom part of the window there is a System Memory tab
- In the second column you’ll find 2 entries: Page Ins and Page Outs
Page Ins and Page Outs should be fairly small (depends on system) The smaller the number the better. Page Ins and Page outs simply indicate the amount of information stored in memory that the operating system’s had to swap in and out to make room for more information. So think of it as a bucket. You fill it up with warm water, and now you need to make it hotter. You can’t just add more hot water it will over flow, that’s not good. You need to take out some of the water in the bucket (page out) and put some more hot water in (Page in). You keep doing that in order to keep the water at the same temperature. The more often you do it, the more work it takes for you (the CPU) to get things flowing smoothly. So what you want to do is go buy a bigger bucket to put things in :) WHen the computer pages out btw, it moves those things in RAM to Virtual RAM which is stored on Disk. So you end up with a situation where the computer is writing RAM to disk in and out, and Aperture is using the disk to work with your image. 2 words collide in a perfect storm to give you the pizza wheel of death.
My pagein/out ratio on my MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of RAM is 2.95GB to 98MB respectively. That means my computer’s shoved a ton of stuff in RAM and hasn’t had to take much of it out. That’s a good thing.
Hope that helps.
R