There are reports of Aperture [1] being slow and my own views were that it was too slow for me to use. The important thing to note here is that the hardware I'm using may not be appropriate and I accept that - the hardware (a Mac Pro with basic graphics card and a Macbook 2.16GHz) wasn't purchased for photography.
I originally found Aperture too slow [1] on the Mac Pro but I've recently seen reports that state that you should wait for Aperture to finish importing the files before you use it. If you don't, then it will still be working in the background. So it pays to accept the initial import time as part of the installation and let it finish before doing any image management or manipulation. Depending on the size and number of the files to import, this can take upwards of several hours.
I obtained the trial version of Aperture 1.5.2 and installed on the MacBook running 10.4. I then imported a folder of 596 images with 5Gb of image data.
10 files were jpgs of 1.1Mb each
10 files were TIFFs of average 30Mb each
the other 576 were RAW NEF files on average about 8Mb
The import took over an hour to complete and that was with no other major applications running. Actually it took between 1 hour 15 minutes and 1 hour 45 minutes - I had other tasks to attend to after 75 minutes, but it had finished by 105 minutes. That to me was too long.
A typical shoot for me and I can take over 100 photos. That's a long time time to import. Get me outside for a couple of days or on a project photoshoot and that can reach 300 photos and above quite easily. On a recent three day trip to the west of Wales, I took 328 photos stored in RAW (NEF) only at a total of 2.76Gb.
This will be the second test of import speed. To give some idea, it took about 4 minutes to drag the images off the card in the camera on the MacBook into their own folder on the desktop.
Opened Aperture, created a new project and imported folder to project, opting to store image files in their current location. then launched Activity Viewer. The only other applications running were Mail, Simultron (just a very basic text editor for this document) and Activity Viewer. CPU usage for Aperture alone was running from 80%-150% (I don't know how Activity Viewer gets to over 100% - that's something to research another time). Throughout this, the MacBook always had between 250Mb and 350Mb Inactive memory with a small amount, say 10-20Mb Free. The import time was just over 25 minutes. That's almost acceptable.
I'd like to know more about what it's doing with the imports. I notice there's an option in the Preferences pane about generating previews on import. The manual mentions reducing the image quality for MacBooks and MacBook Pros, I wanted to try a step further and not actually generate them at all during the import. So I deleted the previews, deleted the versions and deleted the project. After changing the preference so that previews were not generated, I created a new project and imported the same 328 photos again. This time it took less than 10 minutes. Much more acceptable. And it doesn't seem to make any difference to how I use the application either.
I also tried Lightzone [2] (3.0.6) with the same 328 photos. That took about 5 minutes to generate the thumbnails. At least that's what I think it was doing when it replaced the default egg-shapes with the image thumbnails. It was ready to work after those 5 minutes.
Overall, I still find Aperture to be slow when editing images with a lag of over 10 seconds being common when switching between images and delays of over a minute aren't rare. Let's face it though, the screen of a MacBook (or similarly-sized laptop) is not going to give you the best results. It suffices for those times when you don't have more processing power, but is not really that comfortable to live with.