Help - iMac too Slow for 6MP Digital Rebel Photos

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csr

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Hi everyone. This is my first post here. This problem is what finally drove me out of the woodwork to post...


I'm a classic "switcher", having bought my iMac after 10 years of buying PCs. What can I say? I fell in love with the design. I have one of the first gen 17" iMacs running Panther. I bumped the memory up to 512MB when I bought it.

I am finding that my iMac is too slow to manage pictures from my Digital Rebel. In fact, last night I went to my husband's computer (a 2 month old eMachine!) to download my photos because Windows XP handled them much faster.

That's just shameful, really. I bought the iMac because I knew I would be doing more graphic stuff and I thought it would handle it better. But it just chokes on these larger photos (3.3MP from my Olympus was fine). At this rate, I'm considering switching back to a PC. I NEVER thought I would say that, but I'm really let down by this iMac's speed. And worse yet, it's embarrassing because I'm the "computer expert" in the house and my husband keeps saying, "I thought you said the iMac would handle graphic stuff well."

The programs I am using to manage my photos are listed below. I'd appreciate any suggestions or comments. ALSO - I would VERY much like feedback from anyone using the "new" iPhoto when it comes out, letting me know if it's faster.

iPhoto - Even using a library manager and making every single new download of photos its own library, iPhoto is slow. It often takes 2 or 3 seconds after clicking on a photo to bring it full-size to see the final image.

Adobe Photoshop Elements - pretty slow, can't open more than a few pictures at once.

Any suggestions on how I can make my iMac faster? I'm about ready to toss it out the window at this point. :(

Thanks!
 
A few questions:
Has it always been this slow in iPhoto or has it gotten slower?
How many images do you have in iPhoto?
Have you used any of the tricks to speed up iPhoto such as turning off shadows and borders and closing film roles?
What application in XP was so fast for what you were doing?

I'll post on the iPhoto 4 experiences in a few days, should arrive at my house on Friday :)

Brian
 
Hi Brian. Thank you for responding. Answers to your questions:

- It has always been slow with these 6 megapixel images from my new Digital Rebel. Previously I was using iPhoto on 3.3 megapixel images from my Olympus and iPhoto was much speedier (at least until the library got too huge).

- The number of images I have in iPhoto varies wildly because I use an iPhoto library manager. With the serious slowdown that's been happening, I tend to make a new library for every import (which is becoming seriously unwieldy). It's not working very well, still slow.

- I was not aware that turning off shadows and borders would speed up iPhoto. I will try that tonight when I get home. I also don't have any film rolls (since each library is just my last "Last Import" so they're not there slowing it down either.)

- I was just using XP's photo manager and Photoshop Elements on XP. Basically I plugged the full CF card into the built-in reader (I have a USB one right now, but since my old iMac only supports USB 1.1 I am going to buy a Firewire CF reader). XP brought up an interface and asked what I wanted to do. I said simply import the images using their little import wizard. Once they were imported I just went in and browsed through them using arrow keys from within the folder, deleting the ones I didn't want. They were displayed smaller than their actual size (enough to fill up the screen) but at around 800x600 I could see which ones were keepers or not, easily.

I would be very interested in hearing what iPhoto 4 is like and how fast it is.

I am also wondering, could it be a config problem or a memory usage problem? I am only used to diagnosing Windows errors, my troubleshooting knowledge under OS X is minimal at best. I know in Windows you can create swap files which improve performance, but I don't know of any performance tweaks that can be done under OS X.

Thanks!
 
Wait until iPhoto 4 comes out with the new iLife 04 suite. I think you'll see a marked improvement in speed, both in terms of large photo files and large libraries.
 
Brian, I just turned off borders and it did improve the performance somewhat, which is nice. :)

Now, is there any way to somehow boost memory or resource allocation for this app? And for Pshop Elements while I'm at it? Just wondering.

El Diablo.. I am going to wait for the feedback from the street before taking the $50 dive on the suite of products (frustratingly, I only care about iPhoto). I hope people will post their experiences/impressions here. When is it due to be released again?

Thanks!
 
If you order online, then Apple's trying to get it into the customers hands on the 16th... I'm not sure when it will go into retail stores, but I assume that it would be the same day... not too far off!

I would say that I'm willing to take the leap to iPhoto 4 as a first-adopter. When Steve says, "fast," he means fast. They don't throw that word around lightly, and when a major feature touted is speed, then it's always mean a significant boost in speed. Apparently, iPhoto 4 now has some sort of databasing feature that will cut own preview and load times significantly.

I'll be sure to post here when I do get it and give you some feedback.
 
odd, i have a digital rebel, and my 800mhz g4 is fine with handling the pictures... maybe its a ram issue, i have 896mb and a seperate disc for scratch....

but 800mhz in general is real slow these days :(
 
Jason, how do you set up a separate disc for scratch? I have an external hard drive. Could I use that? Any other suggestions for optimizing performance in any way?

ElDiablo - thanks for the response. Please do keep me posted on what you think about iPhoto4!
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
If you order online, then Apple's trying to get it into the customers hands on the 16th... I'm not sure when it will go into retail stores, but I assume that it would be the same day... not too far off!
Click to expand...

It will show up in retail stores, atleast Apple stores on Friday. My copy shipped today via 2 day shipping, so in theory it should arrive Friday :)

Oh, just as a hint for ordering pre-release software from Apple, always pick the cheap ground shipping. Every piece of pre-release software I've ordered, Jaguar, Panther, and now iLife arrived on the day of release, the same as the people who paid for overnight shipping.

Brian
 
I tried iPhoto 4 at MWSF, and it was quite fast. The iMac I used had about 3000 pics on it, and it scrolled through them and resized the thumbnails on the fly. It should definitely make a difference for you.

And if you do decide to throw your iMac out the window, let me know so I can catch it. :)
 
I'd also recommend holding further judgment until you update iPhoto. The current version has always been a dog.

My guess is iPhoto 4 will suit you just fine.
 
Well I am going to take the plunge into the world of OS X. I have been using 8.6 for years now. I want to get the Canon Rebel that requires OS 9 or X. I only have a 333MHz with 160 mb Ram. I am worried that will be too slow to handle the large files from the camera. Any thoughts?
 
This is quite telling... I opened up a terminal window and nothing else. Then I ran 'top'. Then I opened up iPhoto. Look at the memory usage!

Processes: 52 total, 4 running, 48 sleeping... 147 threads 19:54:26
Load Avg: 2.39, 1.55, 1.16 CPU usage: 78.6% user, 21.4% sys, 0.0% idle
SharedLibs: num = 131, resident = 20.9M code, 2.00M data, 4.36M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 9622, resident = 296M + 7.39M private, 76.9M shared
PhysMem: 60.1M wired, 279M active, 165M inactive, 504M used, 7.51M free <<==
VM: 5.32G + 84.3M 1775249(32) pageins, 1782240(0) pageouts

I am a little concerned about the high CPU usage as well (78.6% on the 2nd line) but there's nothing I can do about that.

I will see if iPhoto 4 plays better. If not I'll look for another solution, or perhaps just up my RAM, as has been suggested.
 
i would spend money on ram before iphoto, but thats just me... osx loves ram... max your machine out, i would if i could, but i got no more money to spend...

as far as a firewire swap, that would be slower than having your swap on the system partition and therefore not worth it
 
csr said:
PhysMem: 60.1M wired, 279M active, 165M inactive, 504M used, 7.51M free <<==
Click to expand...

You are misreading this line, as do 99.5% of people who look at top :) There are 4 states used memory can be in in OS X, wired, active, inactive, and free. They are as follows:

Wired: memory that is mapped to an appliction (ie. used), and can not be swapped out to disk
Active: memory that is mapped to an application (ie. used), and can be swapped out to disk
Inactive: memory that contains data, but is not mapped to an application
Free: memory that contains no valid data

Most people see the small free number and freak out, but you real free memory is actually inactive + free. So on this you really have 172M of free memory. When the free memory amount goes below a threshold, the system starts pulling memory out of the inactive pool and puts it into the free pool.

The whole reason to keep an inactive memory section is very simple, it speeds things up. It is a waste of resources to wipe memory clean after it's been used. What the system does, is keep the memory intact, and keeps track of where it came from. If for instance you started Safari, the closed it, then started it again, the system would already have the application in memory, and would not have to load it up, this significantly increases load time. This is why many people who have large amounts of memory in their OS X systems see the speed of the system increase after it's been running for awhile.

Now, the line
VM: 5.32G + 84.3M 1775249(32) pageins, 1782240(0) pageout
Click to expand...
might be a little more interesting. How long has your machine been up? The area for pageins and pageouts is not looking that good. Basically the number 1782240 means that the systems had to to write memory to the swap section on the disk 1,782,240 times. 1775249 means that 1,775,249 times that system has had to read memory back into RAM from the disk. The number 32 in parens means that it has copied 32 pages of memory back into RAM from disk in the previous second, the 0 in parens means it hasn't had to write anything to disk in the last second. You never really want your system to have to be writing to swap, and your system is, and if your machine had not been up long when you ran this, it's doing it _alot_. At the current time you ran top, the system had plenty of free memory, but previously it had not.

I am a little concerned about the high CPU usage as well (78.6% on the 2nd line) but there's nothing I can do about that.
Click to expand...

This is most likely due to the iPhoto itself, and the top application.

Load Avg: 2.39, 1.55, 1.16 CPU usage: 78.6% user, 21.4% sys, 0.0% idle
Click to expand...

What this means is, you over the last minute have been averaging 2.39 processes wanting to use the CPU at any given time. 1.55 over the last 5 minutes, and 1.16 over the last 10 minutes. So, it looks to me as if you're running top, while something else is running, which you said it is, iPhoto. When top is running, it's running alot, so thats really why it's at 2.39 intead of 1.39. Now, the 21.4% system is saying that the OS itself is using 21% of the CPU, which based on the memory stats from above, this is due to the swapping of memory to and from the disk, which is CPU intensive. This most likely accounts for the .39 of the current load. You application can actually be sitting and waiting for the system to get the memory into RAM, and it shows up as using CPU while it's waiting. CPU load showing up in the sys section will have a greater impact to your application then being in the user section, ie your app will be alot slower with 100% cpu being used with 78% user, and 22% then with 100% user.

I hope this makes some sense, it's kinda hard to go into light details on how the memory system and processing system of unix based systems work without going into alot of detail, and I have left out alot :) But, more memory is always good :) I have 1G in my G4 tower and 768M in my 17" iMac.

Brian
 
Whoah. I'm blown away by how much you know about memory and CPU usage.

My computer had been up for 18 days. I rebooted it after running Top. Haven't run it again yet. :)

So I've read your post about 3 times and I'm still unsure. What is the main problem you see in this? You've reached some (very accurate) conclusions about what state the machine was in - but does it mean I need to add more memory definitely? Just wondering what should be first on my list to buy. Thanks for sharing all of this information. I never fully understood what that stuff in Top meant...
 
csr said:
Whoah. I'm blown away by how much you know about memory and CPU usage.
Click to expand...

My job is to know that type of stuff :)

As to which problem is the greatest, I'd reboot the box, start no applications. Open terminal. Run 'vm_stat 15'. Then start up iPhoto and do a few things that are slow, and make sure that they are slow while you're doing it. Exit iPhoto, then go back to the terminal window and hit CTRL-C. Post/Email/attach/etc the output of the vm_stat command and I can tell you if it truely is a memory issue.

Brian
 
Brian - I really appreciate your offer to help me out. I will run the command when I get home tonight and drop you a line. Thanks!

I have one question related to what you said earlier: You mentioned that the pageins and pageouts looked high, which is how you figured out it had been awhile since a reboot. I have always been under the impression that Macs don't need to be rebooted, since they're UNIX (and UNIX servers stay up for YEARS sometimes) and in general, just because they're not Windows.

Should I be rebooting my Mac every so often? Would that clear up general slowness and such?

Thanks again!
 
csr said:
You mentioned that the pageins and pageouts looked high, which is how you figured out it had been awhile since a reboot. I have always been under the impression that Macs don't need to be rebooted...
Click to expand...

That number is just a counter, doesn't effect performance. But, because the number was pretty high, I was assuming it had been up awhile to have had that many pagein/outs. If you rebooted on a daily basis, you'd still have the same number of pagein/outs, the counters would just be a smaller number as it is a count since boot.

As to rebooting, the only time I reboot is really when I have to apply system updates that require a reboot :)

Brian
 
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