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Aperture 3 Reportedly Causing Hangs and Memory Leak Issues for Some Users

Softpedia and Computerworld have noted a significant number of complaints from users of Apple's new Aperture 3 professional-level photo editing and management application released last week. The complaints, which have been flooding Apple's discussion forums (1, 2), include crashes and hangs, as well as "out of disk space" warnings that appear to most commonly be associated with importing database files from Aperture 2. Computerworld notes:

Apple's support forums are filling up with users with similar problems: When they leave Aperture 3 to import their photo libraries, their page file balloons until they run out of disk space. The system then becomes unstable. Some users start seeing their swap disk file size balloon almost immediately after launching the app.

The issue isn't universal. A few users have chimed in to say that they've had no issues with Aperture 3. That means there might be some external issues at play here.

According to Softpedia, some speculation has centered around corruption of Aperture 2 libraries that causes issues as they are put through the upgrade process to make them compatible with Aperture 3. Regardless of whether the source of the problem is corrupted databases or issues with Aperture 3 itself, Apple has apparently yet to acknowledge the issues or offer specific suggestions or fixes.

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26 months ago
my mac just blew up

aperture causes it to hang and fill up hdd...i get errors and have to restart mac.
Rating: 0 Positives / 0 Negatives
26 months ago
more reason to stick with lightroom. i never liked the "photo library" scheme that apple does, I want to be able to easily get to my photos in finder.
Rating: 0 Positives / 0 Negatives
26 months ago
looks like Ill be skipping this update for a while... at least until they find a solution ;)
Rating: 0 Positives / 0 Negatives
26 months ago
Lightroom > Aperture

In pretty much every department - hands down...
Rating: 0 Positives / 0 Negatives
26 months ago
how the hell did this get past alpha, let alone beta. You guys at apple using i7 MBP's maybe instead of that crap you're still peddling to the rest of us? maybe it works fine on Arrandale...:rolleyes:
Rating: 0 Positives / 0 Negatives
26 months ago
Eh, I tried using a new library created by Aperture 3 and still get massive swap memory size. It's not good when my swap is over 4-5GB and I still have 500MB of actual free ram (not inactive) with only 10 pictures in the library :(
Rating: 0 Positives / 0 Negatives
26 months ago

more reason to stick with lightroom. i never liked the "photo library" scheme that apple does, I want to be able to easily get to my photos in finder.


Ignoring the fact that Aperture lets you organise your photo library how ever you please and doesn't make you use Apple's scheme?

Incidentally my upgrade was fine although I did hit this issue when brushing in a vignette.
Rating: 0 Positives / 0 Negatives
26 months ago
I have had none of the issues reported. 18.000 pic library upgraded from Aperture 2.1.4
Rating: 0 Positives / 0 Negatives
26 months ago
Wow Apple. It seems to me like they're just not getting good press lately. Hope I'm wrong and that this issue gets fixed in a timely manner :)
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26 months ago
All good for me on my 2007 Mac Mini (4Gb RAM), when I'm actively using Aperture it does use a lot of memory which I assume is Aperture caching images that I've recently accessed. If I leave Aperture running but then use another application it starts to free up the memory.
Rating: 0 Positives / 0 Negatives

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