MBP + aperture + external monitor = some performance issues. Ideas?

Hi. As some of you might remember, I recently got an external monitor

It has been a real revelation for my photography hobby, (and it's pretty cool for watching DVDs too )

I am noticing some performance lags in some circumstances and I'd appreciate your expertise on whether this is an issue with process, RAM or graphics card.

I have the 2.33Ghz Core2Duo 2Gb RAM model, so it's far from shoddy.

Aperture

When working in Aperture I usually have the image full size on the big monitor, and then the control panel, browser and any other apps I need on my laptop monitor.

When I make image adjustments (e.g. exposure, cropping, tilt) there is quite a lag between moving the slider and seeing the result on screen. This is especially annoying when trying to tilt an image to the horizontal, because it is quite fiddly work.

Without the external monitor there is still a perceptible pause but not enough to complain about. With it, it is a little frustrating.

Comic life

Yesterday I discovered Comic Life on my applications folder and had a lot of fun playing around. I ended up running Photoshop, Aperture and Comic Life together and I had many looooong pauses, the Spinning Wheel of Waiting and a couple of app crashes (comic life and firefox were both quite unstable).

System monitor

I've been keeping an eye on my RAM usage and although I sometimes get very low on inactive RAM I always have at least around 20% of the pie as free (or the other way around, I mix them up )

Question

I will probably upgrade my MBP at the next major apple upgrade. Any thoughts about what is the limiting factor here? Or am I just expecting too much?

By the way, I am really liking Comic Life, here is an example of what you can do (I did some of the photo editing in CS3)

 

Using Photoshop and Aperture at the same time is likely to slow you down, especially if it is CS3. Is your hard drive near capacity? Or are you pulling pictures off of an external drive for editing? Those things could slow you down potentially. Other than that I am not really sure what could cause that issue. I have used Aperture in the same view mode and I have never experienced that slow down with a 2.16 C2D.

 

This sounds weird - MBP is a powerful laptop, there shouldn't be such problems. I hope I can avoid it when buying MBP 2.2 (is there a big difference between 2.2. and 2.4?).

 

Thanks for the replies. Yes it is CS3 but the delay happens when I only use Aperture, so it does indeed sound strange.

Cashmonee are you also using Aperture for RAW editing on a large external monitor?

My hard drive has over 60Gb free and I am only using externals for backups.

 

I meant CS2, but ya, since you are using CS3 you should not have any issues. No, I was not using RAW, and that would likely cause a slow down. That is the only explanation I can come up with, hopefully someone else can come up with something else. Try it with normal jpgs, see if that changes the performance.

 

CS3 takes up lots of system resources

 

But CS3 is not the issue, as hooly said.

Hooly, do you have any problem with Aparature when everything else is closed? What about without external monitor?

Have you bought Apple or Dell?

 

Even with only Aperture running I have the same lag. When I run it just on my MBP monitor the lag is slight and not inconvenient (less than a second). When I run it on my 24" (it is a Benq monitor) the lag extends to 2 to 3 seconds, sometime less sometimes more. This means when I have a lot of pictures to edit I spend extra time waiting, which kind of interupts my flow.

I also posted this on MacRumours and found some other Aperture users reporting similar lags, it seems to be par for the course unfortunately.

 

unfortunately Aperture is just a very slow program. I used to use it and switched to Lightroom for this exact reason. try lightroom out, both programs serve the same purpose but lightroom is much faster.

 

It is said that Apple can't build properly their photo editing flag product...

 

Hopefully I won't run into these issues on my MBP. I won't use Aperture tho. I'll be using Capture NX and CS3. Capture NX seems to take up a lot of resources on my old laptop.

 

I trialled both products (lightroom first on my old laptop, I liked it but not enough to fork out the dollar). A few months later I trialled Aperture after getting my MBP and instantly fell in love with it.

Well slow performance on a large monitor has dampened the love affair slightly but now I have forked out the money I guess I am going to have to hope that release 2.0 makes the app a bit less 'top heavy'