Aperture 3 Unusably Slow on MacBook Pro?

Question

Hi everyone, I have a Mid-2009 2.8 GHz MacBook Pro and a photo library of 61,000 photos. More of them are JPEG than RAW, but there is a lot of RAW in there. I have the masters stored on an external FW800 drive with the library itself on my internal HDD.
Aperture 3 is unusably slow. It takes probably close to a minute to load, freezes for five or ten seconds at a time when I ask it to do things, cannot display thumbnails as I scroll, etc., etc. It freezes a lot.
When it is doing almost anything, the whole system grinds to a halt. Finder is very slow. Mail has a hard time switching folders. Safari freezes between pages.
Yet: generally, Aperture's CPU usage is below 100% (e.g. just one core, not both), often at 60% or less even when working really hard (only occasionally tapping the second core). Disk i/o never seems to go over 6MB/s, yet the system almost feels like it would if the disk were too busy and couldn't work with the other apps.
Any idea what might be a miss? I've tried all kinds of different ideas and can't get the system to work well. It feels vastly (and I do mean vastly!) slower than iPhoto on my old PowerMac G5 2.7 GHz. I used Aperture 2 briefly, and I think it may have been a bit faster, but it too was really, really slow.
Using the 9600M doesn't seem to make much difference over the 9400M, incidentally.
Thoughts? I appreciate any help you can provide!
Thanks,
Tim

Answer 1

Turn on "Quick Preview" mode in Aperture when browsing on your laptop and you should not have any performance problems when rapidly browsing the library.
To understand what it is and how it works, see this:
http://documentation.apple.com/en/aperture/usermanual/index.html#chapter=5%26sec tion=7%26tasks=true
The performance difference between iPhoto and Aperture has to do with a significant difference w.r.t. how they store adjusted images.
Neither app will destroy the original image you import from the camera. But that's about where the similarities end.
When you make an adjustment to an image in iPhoto, iPhoto makes a copy of the original. Also, iPhoto doesn't work in RAW -- only JPEG. It can read RAW but the moment you make an adjustment, it creates a copy which is a JPEG. Thus when you scan the library, you're really scanning copies of JPEGs. JPEGs are small and open quickly. Thus it seems to be quick & snappy. Unfortunately, it's not RAW and you lose the control you would have had doing a complete RAW workflow.
Aperture, doesn't actually make a copy at all. It just stores a list of instructions for all the adjustments you've made. When it opens an image you shot in RAW, it opens the RAW file and applies all the adjustments as the image opens (which takes significantly more processing power than merely opening a JPEG). This means it takes longer, but you have a true RAW workflow with all the power and control that goes along with it.
Aperture does create a couple of JPEG copies of your RAW images -- but if you're working in RAW it doesn't use them for any purpose other than rapid browsing of the library. Just turn on 'Quick Preview' mode and you'll have all the speed you enjoy in iPhoto. If you try to make an adjustment while Quick Preview mode is enabled, you'll notice the adjustments tab tells you that adjustments are disabled while in that mode. Fortunately you can toggle preview mode on & off very quickly.