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.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
74 responses to “Aperture 3 users reporting serious memory leak issues”
I don’t have much to contribute, but anything may help: Aperature freezes upon opening (“processing”) and needs to be force quitted. I circumvented the problem by downloading a trial version of the software and activating it using my current product code. That worked for about 6 weeks, now same problem.
In the absence of a fix where are people turning? Photoshop elements vs. iphoto?
Isn’t Adobe Lightroom the main competition for Aperture? Photoshop Elements is a wholly different type of program although photo manipulation is a key part of both products to widely varying degrees.
I’m using Aperture 3 and it makes my computer run so slowly when it’s open. Â It also freezes up and shuts down by itself a lot, which is very frustrating since it’s usually when I’m in the middle of editing.
I have been experiencing these problems since the advent of Aperture 3, but it was more intermittent until I installed the update. Â The update causes this to happen every time I open aperture and editing is a joke. Â I have to wait so long before I can load plug ins or even edit in Photoshop and this is when the system doesn’t crash on its own which it does very frequently. Â I’ve tried everything from deleting the plist, to deleting the app completely and reinstalling and it is a constant source of frustration. Â The more frustrating component is that Apple remains silent and doesn’t even acknowledge the issue for its user base. Â Communication is key with any customer loyalty programs and Mac users are very loyal, but this lack of communication and addressing issues with Apple has been a constant issue in many different applications as well as hardware issues. Â I think that the memory leak issues are associated to the hardware memory leaks on certain models of laptop running snow leopard, but I have been unsuccessful in finding the appropriate combination to resolve it.
We noticed a problem where Aperture hung while cropping the first time we used it after installing Flip4Mac. We hadn’t noticed any other problems after installing Flip4Mac. But it was the only thing that had changed on the machine that we could think of. So we uninstalled Flip4Mac and shut down Aperture and then re-started Aperture. We didn’t even reboot the machine but Aperture seems to be working now.
I should also mention that we did not “Force Quit” Aperture.