I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a huge Aperture fan and I still use the software as the very core of my studio business but over the last few weeks Aperture has started giving me cause for concern :(

I can't be 100% certain but I'm pretty sure that changes made to Aperture since version 3.0 was released have slowly but surely made things slower for me. I never had any problems with 3.0 unlike MANY people who have since commented on the increases i speed with each update, on the contrary I feel the performance has slipped away with each tweak.

What is happening now is that (very unscientific here) Aperture 3 feels about half as quick as Aperture 2 and alot slower then when it first came out. All very troubling. My workflow and the slow downs occur as follows:

1) Import files and apply presets on import (example throughout 150 files 5DmkII)

2) import finishes begins processing - tis typically will take 2-3 minutes

3) I then go through and rate and cull files

4) I go back through again, this time cropping the files (here is where the slow down starts) there is a delay each time I jump into the files to start cropping, thats not a big deal, what is a big deal is that (and as far as I'm aware this is a change from AP2 and the first release of AP3) Aperture will not start processing these crops until I've gone through all of them and stopped working, it literally waits about 3 seconds after I've stopped doing anything, then it will start processing the crops on all 150 images, this will take about 3 or 4 minutes at which time I can't do anything because it will pause the processing.

5) once this is finished I go back through again to make sure I'm happy with everything and do a quick run of cosmetic retouching on any stray bits (lights etc) this is quick wen I go through but the same happens again, ONLY when I finish and essentially stop working will Aperture start processing what I've done, I then have to wait 2-3 minutes for it to finish again.

What essentially seems to have changed is that Aperture wont (or can't) do two things at once, I'm sure it used to start processing images in the background while I was still working on them but now its like its caught a bug from the iphone and can't multitask.

At the moment I can only put this down to a few things:

1) Me running on Leopard rather than SL is causing the problem
2) Its a fundamental change in AP3
3) My failing graphics card is the problem
4) some conflict/change/problem I'm unaware of.

As a test I'm going to try the same tests on two sets of identical files one on my MP running Leopard and one on my MBP running SL. Just to see if that throws up and differences.

The result of all this is that its shaken my confidence in Aperture, things that used to take me 5 or 6 minutes are not taking 10-12 minutes and its really starting to impact my workflow as a whole :(

I hope its a software/system problem and not a fundamental change to the way Aperture works because if it is then my 3 year love affair with Aperture may be heading for rocky ground.