How can ANYONE be happy with this piece of junk? Seriously?

Question

I started by importing my iPhoto library. It's 10k pictures, many if
which I could probably delete if I had a good tool like Aperture to
help me. In iPhoto I have about 50 or 60 keywords and I have applied
at least some keywords to lots of my pictures. When I try to search my
photos by keyword in iPhoto, it responds instantly, much like Apple's
spotlight technology does.
The first thing I noticed was that just bringing up the filter window
takes 60 seconds. I wish I were kidding. The other thing I noticed
was, As I am adjusting the filter, or adding new criteria like EXIF
aperture setting, the software automatically starts searching even
before I have finished specifying all the criteria. Normally I think
that wouldn't bother me, but it took 60 seconds to perform each filter
operation.
OK - so filter is slow, I'll get over it. I really wanted this app for
the image management and adjustments capabilities. So, I found an
image that had a bad exposure and I selected the exposure slider and
moved it to the right to brighten the picture. My CPU pegged for
several minutes before the slider moved one pixel and any visible
changes appeared on the screen. It shouldn't take minutes, it should
take milliseconds, like in iPhoto or Picasa or any other image
manipulation program I have ever run.
I think the problem is that it was creating a new version of the
image, and I came to discover that any operation that affects the
number of images in your "working set" can take minutes or more.
There are many other really simple operations I wanted to do which I
could not do because the application pegged the CPU for hours and made
no visible progress, and I was forced to Force Quit the
application. Here's a perfect example. I noticed that all the photos
imported from my iPhoto library were keyworded with the "iPhoto
Original" keyword. How nice I thought. Then there was another keyword
called "iPhoto Edited" which I thought was even better because what I
really wanted to do was delete all my changes made in iPhoto, go back
the original files, and then make non-destructive versions of those
changes with Aperture.
So, I created a filter to find all the images that had the "iPhoto
Edited" keyword associated with them. Turns how that those images were
already automatically stacked with the corresponding original
versions. So I decided to Unstack the images so I could delete the
"iPhoto Edited" ones. Unfortunately that operation never completed
after hours. I tried selecting just 3 of the images to unstack, and
that took 10 minutes. I tried 10 images at once and that never
completed after an hour. I had to Force Quit the application many
times.
Then somebody gave me the hint that to accomplish this task you need
to do the initial filter, create an album based on the filter results,
and then perform all your operations in that album. I gave that a
try. It took about 10 minutes to set up that album because of the
slowness of the system, but once in that album I found I was able to
unstack images much faster: still hundreds of times too slow, but
still much better. 2 hours later I had them all unstacked, and had
deleted the iPhoto Edited images.
This is the kind of pain we're talking about.
I've tried importing from iPhoto without the keywords to see if that
might be what's making it slow. It appears to be a big part of the
problem but I cannot be sure.
I tried moving my photos out of individual per-roll projects that were
created by the iPhoto import and into a single large project, to see
if that would help. No difference.
Today I ran some kernel tracing tools on Aperture when it seemed to be
quite hung or at least slow, and found a few very disturbing
things. One biggy while deleting 1000 thumbnail images that got
imported when I imported my iPhoto library one directory at a time,
was that it was rewriting the same file:
1388 Aperture CALL stat(0xf0101870,0xf0100fd0)
1388 Aperture NAMI "/Users/jonathan/Pictures/Aperture Library.aplibrary/Aperture.aplib/LatestDeleteDates.plist"
1388 Aperture RET stat 0
1388 Aperture CALL statfs(0xbfffc6e0,0xbfffc5d0)
1388 Aperture RET statfs -1 errno 2 No such file or directory
1388 Aperture RET open 14/0xe
1388 Aperture CALL write(0xe,0x1eb2fa10,0x157)
1388 Aperture GIO fd 14 wrote 343 bytes
"<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/P\
ropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>latestMasterFileDeleteDate</key>
<date>2005-12-09T01:43:58Z</date>
<key>latestMetadataDeleteDate</key>
<date>2005-12-09T01:43:58Z</date>
</dict>
</plist>
1388 Aperture RET write 343/0x157
1388 Aperture CALL fsync(0xe)
It did this thousands of times, and there are several really sad
things about this:
(1) It's the same data and the same file every time.
(2) It calls fsync(0xe) after each write.
The latter means that the program is not going to make any progress
until that data is written from the kernel's memory buffer onto the
hard drive, which could take many milliseconds depending on what
sector the heads are looking at right now! This is insane.
After the images seemed to be deleted, however, Aperture remained CPU
pegged for hours. I didn't realize it and had gone to eat dinner,
dessert, clean the dishes, get beaten badly in Othello by my 7 year
old daughter again, do her piano practice, and put her to bed. So I
kernel traced it again and discovered that it was endlessly seeking
around and then reading 1k blocks from some file, without actually
causing any physical disk I/O. In other words the entire file was
somehow in memory and Aperture was just running around in circles
reading chunks of it ... for hours, CPU pegged the whole time. I had
to "Force Quit" again.
So, I ask you, What is this program good for? As far as I can tell,
nothing works properly once you pass a certain number of images in the
library.
Here's what I think Aperture can be good for: load your new "roll" of
digital pictures into it. Hopefully fewer than 500 photos. Use all the
cool tools to group and stack, adjust the color tempurature, white
balance, sharpness, crop it, etc. Then export it to some random folder
and import than folder into iPhoto (or whatever you want to use to
manage your photo database). Then delete the photos from Aperture.
Folks, I am sorry to tell you this, but this is a program with bad
bones and it's not going to get fixed soon. I hope I can get my money
back. I've already been told that I cannot because I installed it, but
I am going to complain and make sure they at least know how bad this
is.
Believe me I wanted this to be the best program ever. I have used
Final Cut Pro and Photoshop on my mac, and those programs are two of
the very best I have ever used. They are fast, extremely good at what
they do, perform well on much lower-performing hardware (e.g., my imac
G4 with 512Mb RAM), and they are just great in every way. I told all
my friends, "My love affair with the Mac can continue despite my
disatifaction with iPhoto because they have created another Pro tool
called Aperture which looks like the best thing ever!" But those demos
were all staged with very few photos in the libraries.
Mac OS X (10.4.3)
Dual 2.5Ghz Power Mac w/3Gb RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

Answer 1

I've done some research on the SQLite database. Whenever Aperture hangs up (like during auto-stack or opening the filter hud) there are thousands of SQLite queries happening. These SQLite queries cause massive file I/O because the database is stored on the disk as 1kb pages. However, the OS is caching the database file; mine's only 12MB. I'm trying to track down some performance numbers for SQLite on osx but having trouble.
It's starting to look like most of the speed problems are in the libraries that Aperture uses instead of the actual Aperture code. Of course, that doesn't completely let the developers off the hook since they choose to use them in the first place.
Oh, and if anyone is curious, the database is completely open to queries using the command line sqlite3 tool. Here's the language reference http://www.sqlite.org/lang.html
Hmm, just found this. Looks like someone else has been playing around in the db http://www.majid.info/mylos/stories/2005/12/01/apertureInternals.html
Dual 1.8 G5   Mac OS X (10.4.3)   1GB RAM, Sony Artisan Monitor, Sony HC-1 HD Camera