My Aperture 3.0 is getting slower and slower day after day.... I don't have a big library ( around 3000 shots). I use it on mac book pro 17" with 4Gb of ram. Is there anything that could be done to resolve the speed problem?
Thank you Tom. As soon as I've turned off faces and previews everything got back to normal. I run my mac in 64bit mode and don't think running aperture in 32bit would help, but I'll give it a try. I wonder what system aperture is intended to be run off flawlessly.... Looks like only 4Gb of ram may be an another issue.
If you can run 64 bit kernel, stay with a 64 bit app. I think some users are experiencing better performance in 32 bit mode primarily because of video drivers that might not be up to snuff in 64 bit kernel.
Unfortunately the default settings always cause performance issues, and aperture doesn't prevent the user in anyway from doing something stupid. (If you want, you can stack 10 highlight/shadows adjustments on top of each other with a 400px radius - and the app won't tell you that it is going to take 30 seconds to render...)
Surprisingly, the app doesn't use as much RAM as people think it does, it does a pretty good job of cleanup as it only loads raw files one at a time. Don't forget to use quick preview mode.
The best speed tip you can benefit from on a laptop is good storage planning. Lots of free HD space, avoid fragmentation... If possible, use referenced masters, and put the raw files on a separate drive. It sounds like from your "symptoms" that you are experiencing fragmentation slow down...
If you do have lots of free HD space, try this. Highlight all your thumbnails in aperture, and click on photos->generate thumbnails to rebuild them. See if library operations are faster.
