Love Aperture 3's new features, but finding it too slow to be usable.

Question

About a year ago I took on photography as a serious hobby, and have been looking for a good photo management program. I have a Nikon D300s camera and started with the nView software, before upgrading to Photoshop CS4. Bridge was fast, but a bit too utilitarian for my liking so I began looking into alternatives like Lightroom 3 and Aperture 3. My goal is to find a program that is quick, responsive, and capable of performing the majority of my basic editing, while allowing me to maintain a nicely organized photo library. I shoot in the .RAW format and have about 7k photos in a referenced library. I have installed all system updates, including the prokit update.
So as the title suggest, I love almost everything about the new Aperture. Its interface is beautiful, photo organization is a snap, and it has some very powerful editing tools. That being said, it is unbearably slow. Brush edits can take up to 3-5 minutes to show, while the brush tool tip chunks around the screen. Even showing the color overlay can take a few minutes. Zooming into a photo can also take upwards to 2-3 minutes. If I have made more then a few adjustments, toggling them on and off can take a minute or longer.
During these delays, I don't get a beach balls, but my computer slows to a crawl. According to Apertures activity center it is "processing." Some times it is so many processes behind, that I wonder if it is processing adjustments that I have already changed. Bringing up the activity monitor usually shows that cpu usage is 40% or below, with Aperture rarely taking more than 2.5gb of RAM.
I have tried all the tricks I have read about online, faces off, places off, preview sized maxed out, preview size minimized, prokit update, deleting cache files, starting new libraries with fewer pictures, and creating Steve Jobs effigies to place around the office. It feels like I have tried it all. I am even willing to format my computer and start from scratch, even though everything but aperture runs great.
My trial is about to run out again and I am just so frustrated. I want to buy this program, but at the moment the lightroom 3 beta runs circles around it performance wise. Is there anything I haven't tried that might make Aperture useable?

Answer 1

I share your frustration.
I am in love with Aperture's features, its workflow, and its OS integration. But I can't live with its behavior. I postponed my final decision to put Aperture on the shelf until this week, when my new MacBook Pro arrived. I bought the latest model, Core i7, 8GB RAM, 1TB HD. I have 700MB of free space on my new HD, and there is no fragmentation. You could say that I have about as snappy a system as Apple makes these days.
Using A3 on this system is generally OK. But working with the retouching brush, while a lightyear better than my late 2008 MacBook Pro, is still dreadful. I want to use the retouching brush to remove blemishes and wrinkles from photos of women. This usually requires lots of small brush strokes. After the first few brush strokes, A3 slows down to the point of frustration. It takes about 20 seconds for the effects of the brush stroke to appear, which makes it not a productive use of my time.
I don't understand the constant need for Aperture to be "processing" something in the Activity window, but I've learned that when it's processing, you can't really get anything else done.
Exporting versions to disk is the final indignity. It's usually the last thing I do before quitting a session in Aperture. Yesterday, I wanted to export two retouched files to JPG for an email proof. This took several minutes for my MBP to complete. Lightroom's beta version completes the task in a few seconds.
Inexcusably bad performance on my high end hardware.
Sorry Aperture, but I'm back to Lightroom and Photoshop. I'll check back when Apple releases Aperture 3.1 and hope they figure this out.