Aperture 2 and 3 and Snow Leopard

Question

My system with Aperture 2 was perfect.
Then I believe that Snow Leopard killed Aperture 2.
When I first installed Snow Leopard my machine felt like new again but slowly and slowly over the last few months the whole system seems to feel less and less snappy.
I don't use many video-intensive applications - my main one is Aperture 2, so this is where I find my main cause for concern.
Painfully slow adjustments with lagging, beach-balling, CPU-hogging, and RAM theft.
The main culprits seem to be Highlights/Shadows, Straighten, Crop, and Retouching… although my open mind says that could simply be because they form the latter part of my tweaking process.
There seems to be a thumbnail generation issue. Every adjustment that is made generates a new thumbnail - as you work through your tweaks that process seems to get backed up and slow everything down.
There seems to also be a video issue. Tweaking horizontal photos in full screen causes twice as much lag as a vertical image. Why? Take a look - it's obvious - in full screen edit a vertical image is about half the size of a horizontal one.
There seems to be a memory issue. Aperture seems to use a large amount of processor and RAM and sometimes doesn't let go of it or it gets caught in some kind of a loop. I've no idea what I'm talking about here. All I know is when I look at Activity Monitor the numbers are going through the roof and I can barely concentrate on them because of the noise from my fans.
There have been various and quite diverse suggestions on this and other forums as to what the underlying problem is and I have done my best to look into those and see what can help.
I have an early-2008 MBP 4,1 - 2.6 Intel Core 2 Duo - 4GB (factory-fitted) RAM - GeForce 8600M (512MB) GT.
I have done everything possible: all software totally up-to-date, re-installed combo updates, rebuilt Aperture libraries, run consistency checks, fresh Aperture install, fresh Snow Leopard install, repaired permissions, booted in 32bit, booted in 64bit, run hardware tests, deleted plists, cleared caches, downloaded and run applications like Onyx and Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner (amongst others) to ensure everything is in ship-shape along with various test applications to gauge if components like my hard drive are dying.
I keep my system clean and tidy. I have now stripped out bloat. I even took out iPhoto in case its 'iLife' browser link to Aperture was an issue. I have 85GB free on a 200GB. All components are original as factory-fitted by Apple.
Everything that any seemingly intelligent person on any decent forum has suggested has been done - in particular I thank the many users here on the Apple forum for all their information sharing… I try to read them all.
From what I see on the forums, I am not alone.
Nothing has fixed this problem.
I (and no doubt many others) have fed this information back to Apple.
Aperture 2 and/or Snow Leopard has a problem that has not been fixed.
Aperture 3 got released and I trialled it and swiftly uninstalled it because the exact same problems are there - even with one single photo in it.
My concern is that Apple will not fix the cause of the problem which seems to lie outside of Aperture.
If Apple concentrate on making Aperture 3 work better inside a possibly shaky Snow Leopard then I will be very disappointed.
I'm not forking out for a new version of software just because Apple broke my current software. Don't get me wrong - I do actually WANT to buy Aperture 3 because it has functional improvements and advancements that I would love to be using providing it works properly - and for me (and it appears for 'quite a few' others as well) it just simply doesn't… and neither does Aperture 2 any more.
I am no technical expert (as you've probably noted already) but a MAJOR bug seems to lie in the relationship between Snow Leopard, graphics cards, and the way it handles memory - and so in turn graphically-intensive applications like Aperture are high-lighting these problems more than others.
I am sure there are people without these problems. Perhaps these problems relate to specific hardware configurations. My configuration is Apple standard. I really shouldn't have these problems.
Until Apple fix this major bug I cannot remotely consider Aperture 3.
Until Apple fix this major bug I could never buy Apple again.
Up until Snow Leopard you had a VERY happy camper. I had a perfect machine and I was shouting Mac from the rooftops to anyone that would listen.
And then it seems Snow Leopard broke my machine.
What a shame.
I really want to use Apple, I actually really like Snow Leopard, I really want to use Aperture, I really want to carry on telling people how wonderful the Apple Mac experience is (or was...) but Apple are currently making it very difficult for me to continue doing so.
Please fix Snow Leopard.
This will hopefully fix Aperture 2 and Aperture 3.
Unless anyone else has a fix?
Sincere apologies to all for banging on for so long !!

Answer 1

Thanks for your input setwart.
When I make adjustments I do want Aperture to provide me with a new version so that I can see the original image and also that I have a version which I have already adjusted. I've previously tried changing that preference before with no improvement in performance unfortunately, but it's not really what I was referring to.
Versions, thumbnails and previews were very confusing terms to me for a while… actually, in some ways, they still are but my understanding is 'a little' better now.
That said, I probably used the wrong term.
What I meant was that every time you make an adjustment Aperture seems to produce a 'record' or 'snap-shot' of your image including that latest adjustment. In so doing you have an entire history of each adjustment you have made. In my head I picture this like a movie film-strip with each frame differing slightly. You increase your saturation by a single point? Another snap-shot. Fancy another single point on your saturation? Another snap-shot… and so on.
It is typical that I will make a bare minimum of 20 adjustments on each image, and that's before even thinking about straightening, cropping, and retouching… and then maybe I'll go back and tweak everything again !!
Somehow, my system is having difficulty in keeping up to speed with all of those snap-shots of individual adjustments. Certain adjustments will drastically slow things down more than others, and then I get to play with the beach-balls.
But - it used to handle these things just fine and that's what I'm trying to get back to.
Thanks again for getting involved.