I've googled this half a dozen different ways and never came close to finding the information I am seeking.

Forgive me if this sounds silly: In Windows you could set the memory allowance for applications and viewing higher if you exceeded the default allowance. (Or at least I thought you could - I only use Windows for business these days).

My question is: Is there a way we can raise the allowance on memory for images edited in GIMP using Ubuntu? Because my images are increasing in size to the point GIMP locks up on my laptop. My image sizes are relatively small in size (usually 640 x 480).

Any help or information is appreciated.

My Redhat linux image settings are located in an index.php file. I haven't the first clue if Ubuntu uses such a file.

If Ubuntu had such a file, how would you make adjustments to it to increase memory allowance?

mahvin = total Linux noob

Must have been some very old Windows version because I don't remember ever seeing this settings, despite developing some rather memory-hungry apps for Windows.

Is it Gimp that locks up? Or the whole desktop? Or the whole machine (cant 't even start a TTY console with Alt-Ctrl-F1)? How much RAM have you got? How much memory is Gimp using?

Bertrand (whose business is also on Ubuntu:-)

In Windows it was paging views. If you used up your (I'm guessing here) cached? memory allowance, you could raise your paging memory up to 1.5 times that.

It only locks up GIMP, specifically the image I am working on, more or less.

I have 2gb of RAM on my Toshiba laptop. Using 32 bit Ubuntu.

I have no idea if the same thing is occurring, such as in Windows, when app memory was exceeded, it would warn you to increase your paging memory. I figured the same thing was occurring in GIMP using Ubuntu, I have no idea if that is even the case. Just guessing.

I have no way of knowing how much memory GIMP is using (still trying to find my way around, I am sure there is a command line for that). OK, on the system monitor, with GIMP being open and only two 640 x 480 photographs open, it's using 920.8 MiB.

I'd have my business on Ubuntu if I could get my bank to open the door to using alternative browsers for their software.) I'd change banks but that would mean chaos for all my accounts.

How much swap space do you have allocated? I don't know if that has anything to do with it, but I have 8.5g, along with 3g ram. My default Gimp image is 3600 x 2700, 300 dpi and my images at times show more than 1g. You may want to lower tile cache size in Preferences/Environment in gimp settings, see if that helps.

I want to answer this correctly - where would I pull this information from? On GParted, my linux-swap is 1.73g, on system monitor it says I am using 78% of 1.8 g, and swap is 1.8% of 1.73 g.

In Edit - Preferences - Environment, its showing default at 1024 mb for tile cache size.

Must have been a version prior to 3.1

OK

Rather decent machine then

This is a very big chunk. I edited a 12Mpix photo, duplicated the layer twice, and performed half a dozen operations to exercise a bit the undo stack: only got up to 256Mbyte... Is your figure for two pictures freshly loaded, with one single layer, and nothing done on them since the load? Or are we talking about multiple layers, big undo stack, or numerous scripts run?

My bank is the last thing I'll trust on my computer especially if it runs Windows. OTOH in this neck of the woods (EU) Firefox is said to have passed IE as the most used browser, so even banks will have to pay attention (http://blogs.forbes.com/parmyolson/2011 ... -qualcomm/)

My settings from Preferences/environment:

Undo levels: 5
Undo memory: 64M
Tile cache: 1024M
Maximum new image: 128M

GIMP is freshly opened and I dropped two images in from F-Spot. No layers, no editing, just opened.

On the Windows issue. I recall XP (or it may have been Win 98, not sure - too long ago) always prompting me to increase the paging memory, quite often. I haven't used a Win 3.1 or lower version since 15 years ago? Prior to 1997, at least. I never had this issue in Vista (this laptop). It was the only thing I could relate to as far as memory allocation goes. (i.e. GIMP locking up on small images in Ubuntu).

So, from what you gather so far, what's your prognosis?

Mine is the same.

One other note:

I am expecting Firefox to be implemented with the bank's software (eventually - hopefully in the near future). When it does, I'll be moving my business accounts to Ubuntu. I say this with guarded optimism, because like EU, eventually the banks will have to give in to what the people want.

The fact that GIMP is already using more than half of my allocated memory, makes me wonder about that bugzilla post I read that 2.6.11 had memory problems. I'd need to find the post again to clarify what the memory problems were, exactly.

Same thing if you open them from the File/Open dialog?

Ah, the global system swap. I thought you were taking about allocating swap space per application...

From your other posts you have a very small swap (more or less equal to your available RAM). On my laptop I got a bit above twice the RAM (8GB). On the other hand laptop disk drives make the system very slow when it swaps so there is little need for a big one. The bizarre thing is the memory eaten by Gimp with your two images. Care to share them with us so I can check how much memory they take on my system? Do you have similar problems with other pictures?

Bear with me, I am going to test this first, before responding. I closed GIMP entirely and will start fresh, so I can monitor GIMP as I progress.

Just GIMP opened alone is using 916.3 MiB. No images are opened just yet.

To me, this is just unreal. Wow. I guess I should have checked GIMP opened alone, first.

Yep. 18MB private and 15MB shared here. Looks like you'll have to shed fonts, brushes, patterns, whatnots May also speed the start up.

Funny you should mention that, I knew I was "over the top" on fonts and brushes. I tried using GURM to alleviate this, but I tend to like haggle-free operations (no click-throughs). So, I left it "as is" and now I am paying the price. Gulp!

Spring cleaning comes early in my situation. Thanks for your help, Bertrand? (ofnuts).

I'm known as "The Eraser" by my colleagues. I hate leftovers on disk. I don't mind the disk space but sooner or later you have to worry about these files and that's time lost again figuring out if you can erase them.

Bertrand is my first name. Ofnuts is a (rather transparent, for those who know me) handle to remain under Google's radar.

mahvin,
I'm curious: how many "accessory" items do you have? By accessory I mean the fonts, brushes, etc. I don't have many brushes, but I have what I think is quite a few fonts - over 1200.

You may remember from other posts that I use an Ubuntu-based distro (LinuxMint). Something I noticed is that there were varying recommendations when it came to configuring hard drive partitions. The most common was to make your swap partition approximately the same size as your RAM. However, I found other advice that said the swap partition should be 2x RAM. My own system has 2GB RAM, but my swap partition is 5.6GB. I also have a lot of nick-knack type desktop stuff like conky and Cairo-Dock that use RAM.

I was goofing around with an image yesterday that wasn't huge (1280x1024) but had several full-sized layers courtesy of G'MIC; I performed an operation and everything went grey and the hard drive started groaning and chirping. By the time I got the system monitor opened to see what was going on, GIMP had used over 3 GB of swap space. I decided to kill GIMP and try another approach. Fortunately I had saved the intermediate work, which meant that when I restarted GIMP and reopened the image I was up to date but without the undo steps and whatnot taking up memory.

If anybody really, really wants to stress-test their system with GIMP, how about Wikimedia Commons Whole World Lands and Oceans 24000x12000px full-color JPEG image. Load that baby up and play with it!

Bob:

Grudgingly, I set up GURM again. And dumped all my brushes into the new folder and removed 700 plus MiB of processing pull. I need to pull up the font manager and cull a lot of unnecessary fonts off my hard drive, because I don't use 90% of them. Mostly, I just use the standard and "specialty" fonts. But I got a lot of those rabid MS fonts that serve no useful purpose other than to sit there and lengthen my scrolling time. No idea how they got on this hard drive, since I don't remember dropping the whole font folder into Ubuntu.

GURM is very handy, so my comment above isn't implying something is wrong with it. I just prefer sub-category capabilities if I have to click-through. Rather than dump a whole slew of brushes of no particular order onto my dialog. Currently, my GURM brushes list exceeds one full scroll bar (1 1/2 pages?) I'd really like to condense that to one page and no scroll.

After the font cull and remaining GURM user folders are set up, I'll repost what my GIMP processing ends up, if only to show the GIMP world how much of a "hoarder" I really am. Hahaha.