A Possible Fix for Some Performance Issues
04. Mar, 2010 
7 Comments
I’ve been fairly lucky with my Aperture install in that I haven’t had many performance problems. Certainly not nearly as bad as some people are reporting online. That is until yesterday. All of a sudden Aperture seemed to be spending a long time “processing” after minor adjustments. Zooming in on an Image that you were working on would take ages and other functions would get bogged down. I was kind of miffed because it had been working so well for me. Trying to see if I could find out what was going on I opened my Activity monitor and both my CPUs were working away full steam at near 100%. The funny thing was though, it wasn’t Aperture that was using all the processing power, it was the finder. I quit Aperture and still the finder chugged away. After a while and after I closed all my windows the processor usage finally fell off. Very odd.
At first I thought it might be Spotlight indexing the drives, but it wan’t that. I googled the problem and sure enough lots of others have had similar issues. It seems to happen when applications with large windows are running in the foreground. People have had similar issues with Photoshop and some other applications seemingly causing the finder to run away and hog the CPU. Some further digging and some people suggested that the issue may be caused by a corrupt preference file. So I duly trashed my Finder’s preferences, restarted and low and behold the problem had gone away. Aperture is now back to its snappy self and the Finder is now behaving itself.
So if you’re having performance problems with Aperture check that it’s actually Aperture that’s hogging the CPU and not the finder. If it is the finder then this trick may sort out your problems for you. If anyone else discovers that this solved their problems, please let me know and post a comment.
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About The Author
Wow. I’m lovin’ life even more now. Thank you!
Did that work for you ?
Leer el mundo blog, bastante bueno
Hi guys,i’m luca from italy, i’m a professional Photoshop user,and a photographer,and in the last days i’ve felt in love with aperture 3,for sure is not photoshop,but ease of use interface and pictures organizzation are amazing,and if you dont need heavy manipulation,with ap3 brushes you can do almost everything and in a non destructive way!!! But the downside is the speed!!! , i’m running it on an Imac intel 2,8ghz with 4gb of ram (should be enought for every program!!)….no way,the brushes are delayed and the preview too , is there a cure??? …..YES!!!!
Just export your raw files as DNG ,with Adobe dng converter,and then import them in aperture,it will run almost smoothly in every operation,and you ‘re not gonna loose any quality in your pics!!! Dng is still a raw format,but much better supported by aperture(i guess)……give it a try.
I figured out how to get Apple’s Aperture 3 to perform in a similar manner as Lightroom. I upgraded my Mac Pro’s graphics card from the nVidia GeForce 7300 GT to the ATI Radeon HD 4870 Graphics Card. Aperture 3 takes advantage of all the processing power of the 4870 graphics card and really improves the performance when doing things like retouching, skin smoothing, or even just changing global parameters like exposure and brightness.
Read my review at http://www.lenspoden.com/photo-topics/