Many people seem to be having some serious stability issues with Aperture 3, and while I did initially, it seems to be fine now. I’ve been running it for the last few days and it hasn’t crashed on me once. I’m not sure what, if anything I did – but in the interests of those with issues here are a few things I did that you might want to try.
If you’ve just got Aperture and are about to run it for the first time – especially if you’re upgrading from a previous version – run it in 32 bit mode. Apparently this seems to stop it from running away with it’s memory requirements. I didn’t need to do this but apparently it works. Once your library’s upgraded you can switch it back to 64bit mode.
To do this by the way, go to Aperture in the finder, select the application and get info on it (command+i). Then toggle the run in 32bit mode switch
If you don’t need faces, turn it off. I think this is the source of many users problems. Again, it’s more the process of upgrading an old library that’s a problem. If you do need faces, I suggest you disable it until you have a significant amount of time (like several days) to do face detection on your old library – and again, run Aperture in 32 bit mode. Make sure your computer doesn’t go to sleep – or even the display going to sleep. this seems to cause problems. If you’re worried about screen burn put a screen saver on – this doesn’t seem to affect it. Let it do the face detection and if all possible just leave it alone while it’s doing it. Like I said though, if you don’t need it – just turn it off.
Another thing I did was repair my Library’s permissions. You can do this by holding down command + option as you launch Aperture. You’ll get a dialog box asking if you want to Repair Permissions, Repair Database or Rebuild Database. I did the first one, and haven’t had an issue with it since. I don’t know if this fixed the few issues I was having but they seemed to go away around the time I did this.
This may seem obvious too – but don’t run any unnecessary applications in the background. Aperture uses a lot of Ram, and you need every bit of it you can spare. Another trick you can try if you’re running Leopard (someone will probably give out to me for this one as it’s kind of a hack) if you’re having memory issues is to delete the cached ram. When you quit an App is OS X it leaves some of it stored in memory, cached so that when you launch the Application again it launches faster. The problem is that sometimes the process of swapping out cached for new Applications can slow things down or cause issues. It’s not supposed to and it happens rarely, but I’ve seen it be an issue. Like I said, it’s not supposed to – so please don’t send me hate mail telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about. Anyway – you can free up the cached ram by issuing the following command in the terminal:
du -sx
It takes a while to run – so be patient. You can monitor the progress with the Activity Monitor Application. Freeing up the cached ram is actually a side effect of this command – not the result – so sometimes it doesn’t work as well as others. It probably won’t make much difference but it’s one to try. This doesn’t seem to work in Snow Leopard, but Snow Leopard seems to be better at managing the cached ram anyway.
Speaking of Snow Leopard, I’ve read anecdotal reports that it runs much better in 10.6 than in 10.5, so if you plan on updating, now might be the time.
If you’re running in fullscreen mode, I found that moving the hud onto the second monitor if it’s set to display the desktop rather than Aperture caused it to hang. I don’t do that any more.
Another thing to be aware of is that sometimes it gets bogged down and looks like it’s crashed but it’s just spinning it’s wheels. This usually happens if your system is out of memory and is creating another virtual memory file. Before you reach for the force quit or restart button, just be patient and give it a minute. In my experience, the few times this has happened to me it’s come back and carried on as if nothing has happened.
I hope this helps someone. It might make no difference to you if you are having issues, but it might. Please share your own experiences in the comments (and be civil) and if you’ve found anything that helps please let others know.
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Thanks for the info. I’m getting A3 up & running this week and this will surely help.
I’ve experienced all of the issues you have discussed. Another thing I’ve noticed (I’m running it on an early 2009 imac with 4gb memory) is that when using brushes the performance can be very terrible. For me this is a real showstopper – a feature I most need, but badly needing a fix.
On reflection, I think Apple might have rushed A3 in because of Lightroom. Which leads me to think that there will be future fixes and patches that will address these issues. For amateurs like myself, can live with this, but pro photographers who depend on a smooth workflow process to earn their income should keep clear until it matures.
Funnily enough, brushes hasn’t really had any major performance issues for me. I’ve found it quite responsive. What graphics card do you have?
I think Apple’s problem is that because they like to keep everything super secret, they don’t do any large scale third party beta testing. I think that’s why there’s a lot of issues with first versions of their software.
Is anyone using Faces? It seems to me that Faces works well for amateurs in iPhoto, but has critical design flaws for pro users.
Anyone who shoots events may have thousands of faces in their library. 95% of them will be completely irrelevant for recognition- permanently. But if you turn on Faces, Aperture tries to analyze your *whole* library. You can cancel the task in the activity window and analyze on a per-project basis- but the next time you launch Aperture, it will try to analyze the whole library again.
Not only is this a gigantic waste of CPU cycles that hobbles your computer, but the irrelevant faces actively screw up the relevant Faces functionality by yielding hundreds or thousands of potential false hits, in the process of winnowing out the real hits.
If you ever forget to cancel the process, and Aperture grinds away, recognizing unneeded faces, those faces are in your Faces database forever- there’s no way to turn them off as far as I can see. So every time you try to train Faces for the relevant individuals, you have these useless, legacy strangers clogging up your workflow.
You can set Faces to restrict the scope of recognition to a given project, but as far as I can tell, this is only an option if you activate recognition on an individual project- and it goes out the door if you ever forget and let Aperture do its thing on launch.
Aperture Faces is basically a catastrophe, which is a shame, because done right, it can be extremely useful. As an experiment with iPhoto, I did Faces recognition for a party I shot, and used smart albums to identify photos with all the principals in them, and automatically generated a slideshow that they *loved* – with no effort. We’re talking real, salable value- for no effort on my part.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of functionality issue I can easily see Apple just walking away from.
Aperture is now straddling pro & amateur in earnest, and the result is a mixed bag of user experience.