11-09-2007, 08:55 AM

Hi

I am a recent switcher, and have purchased two Macs with Tiger OS a month ago. We are two, so we needed to host our iPhoto and iTunes libraries on a Shared drive, and since I had a linux box, we went with SAMBA.

The performance was really slow already with Tiger, as we have 15000Pics, and the Wireless connection allows 22MBit/sec only. However, when I upgraded one of the computers to Leopard (no real upgrade, fresh erase and install), iPhoto performance is down by half at least. This makes it really annoying, my wife's iMac still pulls pictures rather decently, but my MacBook is dead slow. We are about 3 foot away with our computers, and she outperforms me in terms of iPhoto a lot.

What may have happened? It was a fresh Leopard install. The OS seems responsive. I have 2GB of Ram and a Core 2 Duo, in fact both system's hardware is identical minus the Video card.

Otherwise Leopard doesnt seem slow, but iPhoto really lags.

I also tried to copy a file from the Share, and copy speed is the same on both machines.

One thing to note, I installed Leopard, and I used my original Tiger CD for installing iLife '08.

iPhoto also seems to crash for a few seconds when I double click an event. For one sec, it will show an all-photos page, and then it switches to the event. This didnt happen in Tiger.

What I mean is that I have the 200 events, I double click one of them, wait, suddenly I get a crippled view of random photos, then it shifts to my Even that I have chosen.

Sorry for not being able to explain perfectly, basically I am just wondering why iPhoto is slow on Leopard.

Thanks

Ben

11-12-2007, 03:16 PM

Hi

Any help would be appreciated.

I have Tiger and Leopard right besides eachother, accessing the same Share, with the same version of iPhoto, and the difference is huge.

Why is Leopard slower with iPhoto?

Thanks

Ben

11-12-2007, 04:27 PM

I replied to a similar thread recently. Try a search for more info.

My idea was that the jpg compression is at 'fault'. When you view a 2MB jpg, it's requires 14MB of working ram.
Your images are not local, so some kind of swap environment is needed.

I think its the coupling of a remote library and jpg decompression requirements that is killing your experience.

Try running the library locally and see what happens.

Run MenuMeters to see your throughput when simply copying files (not opening an iphoto library).

I'm interested in seeing the results of your tests.

11-12-2007, 05:49 PM

Hi

I think you replied then to my older thread, which was simply about Samba share's speed when doing iPhoto with Tiger. It was slow, but not this slow. And also if you followed that thread to the end, I describe that I plugged my MacBook in the LAN via Wire, but still going through the same environment, it works just like a charm. So its definitely the WiFi speed what dragged it down. Now that I have established that, I am waiting for my new fast router. Meantime I upgraded to Leopard, and its painfully slow, twice as slow as it was with Tiger. In fact, the iMac is still on Tiger, so I can compare them side by side, and its really amazing how different they are. Both machines are on the same WiFi, all they differ is the OS version.

Any help is appreciated regarding why Leopard might behave in slow motion with iPhoto.
Thanks

Ben

11-17-2007, 07:01 PM

Hi

So I Launched iPhoto today and it asked me for an update. I pressed OK, and the system updater showed another update for Leopard as well, which required a restart. I enabled both of them, the MacBook was rebooted in a matter of 10 minutes having all patches applied, and my problem with iPhoto is gone. Its still slow, but that is because of the Router's speed. My Airport Extreme station is on its way from Ebay, cannot wait.

Thanks again, seems like the patches and updates fixed my issue

Ben