Aperture2 - very slow scrolling on macpro

Question

hi guys
I have a 1st gen dual dualcore 2.66ghz macpro with 16gb ram and my aperture library is around 900gb or so and is on a 2 x 1tb Raid1 mirror. I have twin 30" screens with the 1900XT.
I have bought aperture ver2.
Never really had a prob with aperture version 1 but aperture 2 whilst being very fast on my laptop (a 2.4ghz 17" with 4gb ram) is very sluggish on my macpro. The odd thing is that it's not really slow in terms of adjusting images or exporting jpegs, but it is painfully slow scrolling through thumbnails.
I typically have it setup so that I have thumbnails on one monitor and the full screen view on the 2nd monitor. When I browse through a typical wedding shoot of approx 1500-2000 images the thumbnails view is agonizingly slow - it little crawls along and looks like it kind of pauses/jerks as it scrolls the pictures up/down. If I switch off the thumbnails and just use a "list" whilst looking at the image on my 2nd monitor it is superfast. it's just the browsing of thumbnails that crawls.
This is regardless of the filetype, whether it be from 5D's or 1Ds mk3's. There is nothing in the aperture activity window i.e. it's not generating thumbnails or previews or anything in background.
I have a spare drive that I might do a fresh install of os x + aperture on just as a test but i doubt that'll help.
The macpro in general does not run slow i.e. CS3, safari, iweb etc. are all as fast as ever. Lightroom version 2 was extremely fast but I can't stand the interface - think I'm too used to aperture.
I'd upgrade to a 8 core macpro but the problem is my 16gb ram won't work on the new ones supposedly - and in the reverse direction apparently I can't upgrade the vid card I have now to something quicker.
The things I am thinking of initially to try and fix it are ;
- reinstall of 10.5 & aperture (that will be a pain)
- change the raid1 setup to a raid0 setup for more speed
- Swap the boot drive for a WD 10k rpm drive. doubt this will help though
- buy a new mac. Would rather not as I just bought 2 x 1ds mk3's and don't want to keep throwing money away But if I need to I will.
any ideas please?
thanks heaps
Gav

Answer 1

Hi, Dave
David Barrett3 wrote:
Understand about the graphics card recommendation. Shame Apple doesn't emphasise 512mb on their system requirements page.
You're not correct on this. They have the minimum and recommended system requirements
http://www.apple.com/aperture/specs/
It's very frustrating having a powerful system (albeit "crippled" by a characteristically "feeble" Apple stock graphics card), shelling out for Aperture only to find that a system that runs just about everything else well won't run Apple's (sic) flagship photo app well.
It's not just about the processor. As the Apple site states it's a combination of processor, ram, graphics card, hard drive. And, I would add speed of hard drives and cables used.
That said we hold Aperture classes through out the nation on stock systems (sometimes on minimum default systems what you would buy from the Apple store) with large files from Hasselblad, Canon, Nikon...and Aperture rips through them. Many MBP only have 256mb graphic cards and they still run Aperture fast especially Aperture2.
So what we are attempting to do is help you find what the bottleneck is. It's not the application it has to be something else.
Maintenance: regular Diskwarrior, permissions repairs, maintenance scripts, reboots and chanting(!)
But have you placed osx in safe mode yet? safe mode is quite different than repairing permissions, disk warrior etc.
Photos on boot drive but tried them on another internal drive as well. No difference. Drives are new WD or Maxtor.
I
Thanks for the smilies.
always
victor
D