Bram Van Steenlandt wrote:

Hi list,

I run FreeBSD 6.2 (2 gig ram) and use gimp-2.2.17 for editing my large (10000x10000pixels) photos.
This works when the tile cache is set to 256MB but this is not enough for fast editing.
When I set the tile cache to 512MB or more it stops with error: GLib-ERROR **: gmem.c:135: failed to allocate 16384 bytes I checked in top while the gimp was opening the image and I still had 400MB free before it stopped (not counting my 4000MB free swap).

I have another computer with Fedora 7 and less RAM (1 gig) and here this does work, tile size is set to 512MB and editing is rather fast.

I found this old thread: http://www.mail-archive.com/gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/msg07633.html wich a bit the same.

So my questions are: -Is there some magic setting wich allows the tile size to be bigger ? -Can't the gimp be configured to not save to disk after every edited pixel ? If you put one pencil dot on an image it takes 4 seconds before you can do the next.
-Is there a way to work in ram only ? Can I for example buy 2 additional gig and then force the gimp to use only this memory and give me a messages "out of memory" when this does not work

ideas

As the original poster of that thread, let me tell you what I know. 1. No magic. I assume there's something bad happening between glib and the FreeBSD memory allocation routines, but whatever it is carried across 5.3 to 6.2. I'm pretty sure I logged a bugzilla case, but in the end, I switched to a linux platform and lost interest. I get the feeling that the GIMP devs don't use FBSD and as long as it builds and runs, they're not all that interested in what seems like corner cases. 2. You could try setting undo level to 0 at the risk of not being able to recover from any mistake
3. nope, at least not that I've found 4. nope

Don't bother with film-gimp or whatever they're calling the project these days. It does HDR, but their big memory handling is even worse. Turns out that the images projected in theaters are actually not all that hi rez. Your eye fills in the missing spots frame by frame. If you built KDE for your desktop, you might want to check out Krita as an image editor. Last I looked at it (which is maybe 9 mos), I still liked the GIMP better, but it (krita) handles images completely differently, so it might be worth a shot. Didn't get a chance to run any of my scans through it.

On Wednesday 08 August 2007 18:31:10 jim feldman wrote:

Bram Van Steenlandt wrote:

Hi list,

I run FreeBSD 6.2 (2 gig ram) and use gimp-2.2.17 for editing my large (10000x10000pixels) photos.
This works when the tile cache is set to 256MB but this is not enough for fast editing.
When I set the tile cache to 512MB or more it stops with error: GLib-ERROR **: gmem.c:135: failed to allocate 16384 bytes I checked in top while the gimp was opening the image and I still had 400MB free before it stopped (not counting my 4000MB free swap).

I have another computer with Fedora 7 and less RAM (1 gig) and here this does work, tile size is set to 512MB and editing is rather fast.

I found this old thread: http://www.mail-archive.com/gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/msg07633.htm l wich a bit the same.

So my questions are: -Is there some magic setting wich allows the tile size to be bigger ? -Can't the gimp be configured to not save to disk after every edited pixel ? If you put one pencil dot on an image it takes 4 seconds before you can do the next.
-Is there a way to work in ram only ? Can I for example buy 2 additional gig and then force the gimp to use only this memory and give me a messages "out of memory" when this does not work

ideas

As the original poster of that thread, let me tell you what I know. 1. No magic. I assume there's something bad happening between glib and the FreeBSD memory allocation routines, but whatever it is carried across 5.3 to 6.2. I'm pretty sure I logged a bugzilla case, but in the end, I switched to a linux platform and lost interest. I get the feeling that the GIMP devs don't use FBSD and as long as it builds and runs, they're not all that interested in what seems like corner cases. 2. You could try setting undo level to 0 at the risk of not being able to recover from any mistake
3. nope, at least not that I've found 4. nope

Don't bother with film-gimp or whatever they're calling the project these days. It does HDR, but their big memory handling is even worse. Turns out that the images projected in theaters are actually not all that hi rez. Your eye fills in the missing spots frame by frame. If you built KDE for your desktop, you might want to check out Krita as an image editor. Last I looked at it (which is maybe 9 mos), I still liked the GIMP better, but it (krita) handles images completely differently, so it might be worth a shot. Didn't get a chance to run any of my scans through it.

As a fellow and long time freebsd user I am puzzled why you should want to take such large images and process them using gimp which can only handle 8 bit per channel rather than 16bit. The concommitant loss of image quality makes this a no-no for me. I cannot image you are scanning images at 8 bit per channel.

I concur with the last poster - look at krita or if you have an appropropriate alternative platfrom one of the latest versions of photoshop might be better. I am sorry to sayIMHO that (atm) there is nothing in the open source community that matches photoshop until gimp gets its act together to provide support for 16 bit (which I understand may be with us soon) and an optional GUI that makes the learning curve transition from photoshop to gimp relatively smooth.

Personally, much as I would prefer to use gimp on my freebsd platform, I only use it for trvial image manipulation tasks until it has support for 16 bit and handling large image files more smoothly on all platforms.

Gimp could have a wonderful future but I fear, for reasons I will not discus here, that it will always fall short of its real potential.

Best of luck
Freebsd gimp user

Hi,

On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 23:17 +0200, Bram Van Steenlandt wrote:

When I set the tile cache to 512MB or more it stops with error: GLib-ERROR **: gmem.c:135: failed to allocate 16384 bytes

No idea what is causing this. You should get your hands on copies of glib, gtk+ and gimp that include debugging symbols and run it in gdb. The stack trace will help us to find out what is going wrong here.

-Is there a way to work in ram only ?

Sure, just set the tile-cache size large enough. It even makes sense to set it larger than the amount of physical RAM. If you think your OS is doing a better job swapping than GIMP does, then let it do the work and assign all your virtual memory to GIMP.

Sven

Hi,

On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 23:17 +0200, Bram Van Steenlandt wrote:

-Can't the gimp be configured to not save to disk after every edited pixel ? If you put one pencil dot on an image it takes 4 seconds before you can do the next.

One thing that really helps a lot if you are low on memory and a lot of your image data is swapped out is to disable the generation of layer and channel previews. This is a setting in the Preferences dialog. Give it a try.

Sven