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Is Aperture causing my system to crawl? #1
bjurasz's picture
by bjurasz
June 20, 2014 - 4:41pm

I think its doubtful but its worth investigating.  This doesn’t happen all the time but often enough that it causes grief.  Mavericks starts grabbing all available memory and then some.  Normally we don’t consume more than about 6GB of memory and 10GB maximum, so my 24GB of RAM should just never get saturated.  But sometimes it does and then the system simply crawls.  I don’t have Faces turned on either.

I’m trying to embed a picture of the memory usage but this forum refuses to play nicely with my work machine (running Solaris) so here’s a link:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/14464783762/

Aperture is only using 2GB. There is a huge kernel task.  And I’ve got significant memory pressure and swap usage, explaining the sluggishness.

Anyway Aperture is causing this somehow?

Bill Jurasz
Austin Texas

David  Moore's picture
by David Moore
June 23, 2014 - 2:46am

In AP is there anything that AP is processing  like when you look at the AP Activity, Shift Command 0.  Are you referenced or Managed?  The Kernal task is probably due to AP doing something.  Good that Faces is turned off  how about Previews?  Do you allow them to build or not?  Try turning iTunes off.  I recently had problems with AP till I disconnected the usb hubs attached,  probably not related but you never know.  Run with as few devices attached as possible, just to eliminate that as a possibility.

davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ

bjurasz's picture
by bjurasz
June 23, 2014 - 5:19am

Managed library.  Previews upon quitting or on import, though I might need to double check.  I did have Aperture completely hang my entire Mac 1 hour ago.  Had to rebuild the library.  Memory use started climbing again after the rebuild.  Then, when I quit Aperture, memory usage drops like a brick, so I’m going to not have Aperture run 24x7 anymore.  Turning off iTunes is NOT acceptable as it has to host several Apple TVs.

Bill Jurasz
Austin Texas

David  Moore's picture
by David Moore
June 23, 2014 - 7:22am

Try turning off previews and Delete all previews to see if the memory improves.  One way is to start AP while holding the shift key…that prevents the generation of previews.  These are temp solutions to figure out where the problem is.  Hoping someone else jumps in with good ideas too.  Did you change any attached devices?  Since you are running Solaris Im very limited in being able to help.  I had to look up Solaris to know what it was.

davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ

bjurasz's picture
by bjurasz
June 23, 2014 - 2:23pm

Thanks David for the help.  Clarification, running Solaris at work which makes it hard for me to do screen shots or even attach files to these postings (web browsers on Solaris are a bit behind the times).  At home running Mavericks of course.  :)

Bill Jurasz
Austin Texas

bjurasz's picture
by bjurasz
June 23, 2014 - 4:32pm

Another data point, I have two drives setup as Time Machine targets.  One of them was 93% full, and I’ve since unmounted that drive.  That might be the bigger part of my problem overall.

Bill Jurasz
Austin Texas

David  Moore's picture
by David Moore
June 23, 2014 - 5:00pm

My experience is that my Librarys  were corrupted, missing images, duplicates  etc. and that is what caused my machine to over work and crash.  Oh and a bad usb hub.  sub divided libraries a few times and imported them back into a fresh blank library.  Much better now   fingers crossed.   But back to your problem .  Running the computer over night is good for some monthly programs to kick in … but a good Re boot is sometimes better.   If you build a new user Account to log into your Mac, and run AP does it do the same?  Have you ever deleted the Cache in AP or the Plist file?   Perhaps a delete of AP and reinstall?  let us know what you discover

davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ

DEFii's picture
by DEFii
June 23, 2014 - 10:24pm

Unfortunately, I’ve had my share of this type of issue on my 2013 27” iMac (32 GB RAM) and my 2013 MacBook Pro Retina (16 GB RAM; 1 TB SSD). It was very problematic, and apparently not quite solvable, notwithstanding valiant efforts from Aperture engineers at Apple. I finally had to move my workflow to another application. 

However, my IT folks was determined to find out the cause of the memory pressure. They ran several tests and saw the kernel panics etc. that resulted from the system resources being gobbled up. And they think the culprit is the NVIDIA cards in some machines. They tested, and I assisted, several other Macs with AMD video cards and could not duplicate the problem. These included older iMacs, and a new 2013 Mac Pro. 

I don’t think Apple has a fix for this. It is something that dates back to last year when the OS and AP were updated. I have ordered one of the new Mac Pros, but that’s an expensive solution, and certainly should not be what it takes to fix this. 

bjurasz's picture
by bjurasz
June 24, 2014 - 4:24pm

Thanks for that bit of info.  I’ve got one of the 27” Nvidia iMacs as well, with the 2GB video card.  Can’t change it to fix this problem though.  :(

Bill Jurasz
Austin Texas

David  Moore's picture
by David Moore
June 24, 2014 - 4:31pm

Bill when this happens what does AP Activity say its doing?  thumbnails previews anything?

davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ

bjurasz's picture
by bjurasz
June 24, 2014 - 8:10pm

Last time this happened I remember Aperture’s activity being empty but will check again next time.

Bill Jurasz
Austin Texas

Gordon Smith's picture
by Gordon Smith
July 10, 2014 - 6:42pm

Bill, 

Yes it is Aperture (you can see this by killing Aperture from Activity Monitor, and you will (or should) see kernel_task memory load drop to almost nothing).  And no, I don’t have a good solution.   I am having the same problem when trying to import one of my travel libraries as a project into my main library.    The kernel task goes nuts, causing uncontrolled memory pressure that causes the whole computer to grind to a halt.  

I posted about this on the Apple Aperture support forums, and the only advice I got was to repair/rebuild the libraries and try again.   I haven’t done so yet, so I’m not sure if this is a solution.   Some of the other postings suggest that it’s a bug that isn’t related strictly to Aperture.

 

Gordon

bjurasz's picture
by bjurasz
July 11, 2014 - 3:25pm

Gordon, you’re right - I kill Aperture and the kernel task starts falling rapidly.  Oh well, I just won’t keep Aperture running all the time.  Sigh…

Bill Jurasz
Austin Texas

David  Moore's picture
by David Moore
July 11, 2014 - 3:51pm

Gentleman  you can not do too many repairs or rebuilds I have found.  Each time or every other time I would find an image that was missing.  I thought I found all of them but weeks later a rebuild would find more.  Ap was not eating them but Hd failures and crashes do not help.  Smart albums for Missing / Offline, no keywords, no copyright notice, Duplicates are all ways that helped me get my lib back to a non crashing state.  Someimages with file names or version names with ” (1)” in the name indicated dupes.  Sometimes in doing rebuilds Id loose copyright notice and Keywords so I had to find them and re do…ugh, but I did get the lib back.   Also a major help was dividing the library down to smaller lib, like years.  Then after making a new blank Library I reimported the years.  This acts as a more powerful Rebuild.  Joseph calls it a Magic Solution.  And some times I had to divide a year into quarters and then months to find a file that was missing or corrupt.    If you added masks on layers in PS then you problem is more problematic but fixable, I know too well.  Happy hunting.

But then again it could be something in memory leak,    Cheers

davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ

David Edge's picture
by David Edge
July 12, 2014 - 7:12am

My own experience would suggest:

- not running Aperture 24/7 - makes it vulnerable to crashes

- switching off Time Machine while editing in Aperture

- indeed rebuilds are nothing to be afraid of

 

d.

d.

David Edge's picture
by David Edge
July 12, 2014 - 8:57am

My own experience would suggest:

- not running Aperture 24/7 - makes it vulnerable to crashes

- switching off Time Machine while editing in Aperture

- indeed rebuilds are nothing to be afraid of

 

d.

d.

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