Aperture 3 Performance is Unbelievably Slow

Question

My library is not huge (~9000 images), but Aperture 3 performance is ridiculously slow. My library resides on an external drive (a Mercury On-The-Go High Speed Portable SATA Solution unit). No other apps are open. I have 2GB RAM. I have turned off the faces feature, thinking that might help. No dice. The software is unusable at this performance level. Any ideas? Thanks.

Answer 1

I have been flamed (OK, toasted a bit)for suggesting that:
-- Defragging the Aperture Library is necessary at all or helpful if done,
-- Simple copy out/copy back is not enough.
But this is precisely what I have seen. OSX does an incredible job of keeping disks A) optimised and B) largely defragged. The Aperture Library appears to be a huge exception. I suspect that this may be an artifact of the "Package" concept. It is clear that in many cases a Package is intended to look like one single file. I wonder if this keeps all of the internal files from being reorganized when copied. I hasten to add that I am way over my depth here.
I can confirm that:
-- Deleting the cache and prefs files seems to fix the major speed problems.
-- The various preview, index, and related files can become fragmented into hundreds of fragments. Master image files are typically not more than four fragments. Obviously, the faster your disk, the less this is an issue, but for those of us who are running a plane Jane mini with a slow drive, a RAID 0 is not an option.
-- As noted by many, iDefrag's "Quick On-Line" mode cleans this up in mere minutes. (Fewer minutes the second time.) And, as a side benefit, it cleans up the various Private and Spotlite files that may have become fragmented. All of this WITHOUT attempting a major reordering of the disk. (Probably just as well, because, as noted repeatedly, OSX does an excellent job of optimization.
In any case, the happy coincidence of all of this and the multiple udates from Apple is that Aperture 3 absolutely roars. I still keep my stuff backed up in three copies, but crashes, hangs, etc., have never been a problem and all of the brushes and sliders are much more responsive, on 100 MB TIFF images at full resolution, than Apeture 2 ever was.