Aperture 3 was a much needed update to Apple’s professional photography suite, which had lagged badly behind the competition not just in feature-set, but in performance, since its predecessor did not take advantage of 64-bit processors.
Unfortunately, though, the upgrade has not resulted in measurable performance gains for most users. Far from it: a bug in Aperture 3 causes a serious memory leak on the machines of many users, filling up even terrabyte sized hard drives with bloated caches of unused virtual memory.
Apple has already patched Aperture 3 once, with a 65 meg software update meant to address “an issue affecting the playback of video clips used in Aperture 3 slideshows on Snow Leopard.” Unfortunately, that’s the most minor of bugs compared to the memory leaks now being widely reported.
On their part, Cupertino is staying mum, per usual. That hopefully means they are aware of the issue and have the Aperture team working overtime on a fix.
Anyone using Aperture 3 out there who has experienced the memory leaks? Let us know in the comments. This isn’t a universal problem, so clearly it has something to do with the end user’s machine configuration. Maybe we can figure out the common factor.
