Aperture 3 uses too many system resources

Around two weeks ago, Apple launched Aperture 3, the new version of Apple’s photo manipulation software. Among the new features, Faces, Places and Brushes: the first two come from the iPhoto features, while the third introduces a series of tools to manipulate photos.

Many users that have tried it are saying basically the same thing, however: after installed, Aperture 3 is very good at managing photos but it drains almost all system resources: the RAM is fully used and there’s an increase on the disk swap until the latter is also used. When that happens, the system is unstable and tremendously slow, which makes it impossible to use.

The support board on Apple’s forums have been swarmed by users that had the same problem. The memory leak seems to happen more frequently when importing a library in which the Faces feature has been used. But there are many other scenarios described by users: some that had the memory leak problem upon opening Aperture 3, some that managed to import their Faces library without having RAM problems.

Apple has still to reply to those problems in order to confirm them and propose some solution.