High RAM Consumption in GIMP

[Dunham]

This week I noticed my system was crashing when I used GIMP. So I monitored it with the Missions Central application and discovered that GIMP was using 9.5GB, even though I wasn't doing much editing. Today I'm using GIMP 3.0.4 and Linux Mint. I noticed that just opening GIMP consumes about 5GB.
I managed to solve the problem as follows:

I went into the preferences section and made some changes to the system resources section, as follows:

Minimum number of undo levels: 10
Maximum undo memory: reduced to 1024MB
Fragment cache size: reduced to 1100MB
I left the other settings as they were.
This reduced RAM consumption during editing, but when opening GIMP it remains at 5GB.

For my current tasks, I haven't noticed any significant performance losses yet. Regarding GIMP opening with 5GB, although I'm not sure, I think it's due to having the following installed:
GMIC Plugin
Resynthesize Plugin
Remove BG Plugin
Several extra brushes
Thank you
My question, however, is this: is it normal to have this %GB consumption only when opening GIMP?
Are the settings I made in preferences relevant?
Here's my machine:
Acer Nitro 5 AN515-45
RAM: 16GB 3100MHz
Processor: AMD Rysen 7-5800h with integrated graphics
Dedicated graphics: RTX 3060

[Ofnuts]

Plugins run as distinct processes. They don't run until they are called by Gimp, so they don't use memory most of the time (and when they do, the memory is reported separately).

The 5GB are probably a "virtual address size" and not actual RAM. See Windows > Dockable dialogs > Dashboard for your actual RAM usage. 

When I start Gimp (3.1, on Linux) the Gimp dashboard reports 96.1MB. The process monitor reports:

• 96.1 of RAM used (so it agrees with the dashboard)
  
• 66MB or shared memory (most likely code (EXE and DLLs, for you, DLLs being shared with other apps))
  
• 3.8GB of "virtual size" (which looks like what you see on your system monitor).
  

In these conditions, when I start/stop Gimp, it hardly shows on the RAM usage graph.

Resources do consume RAM. If I do a thousand copies of the same 12KB pattern file, the startup RAM climbs from 96MB to around 200MB. So if you have a significant number of brushes, patterns, palettes, gradients... You may want to do some cleanup. I have a plugin to keep collections of resources offline and bring them in quickly when needed.

The tile cache size at 1100MB is going to hurt you. This means that if the image is over 1GB (and this comes faster than you think) Gimp will swap to disk instead of using the system RAM. A good setting for this is about all the free RAM you have before Gimp starts: if you have a 16GB system, and your baseline RAM consumption is around 6GB, you set the cache size to 10GB, which ensures that you will always have 6GB of RAM left for your usual apps so they won't be slowed by being swapped out.

[Dunham]

Hi
Thanks for the reply
I have 16GB of RAM and use Linux Mint. When I open the system without opening any applications, my RAM consumption is 2.5GB. I changed the Fragment Cache Size to 8GB, and when I open GIMP without any images, its consumption remained at 4.9GB, and the total system RAM consumption shown in the Mission Center or System Monitor was 7.3GB. I opened an image manipulation file, and GIMP's consumption rose to 6.7GB. I opened another image manipulation file without closing the previous one, and this time it was 9.4GB, and the system total was 11.5GB.
I think it's possible to work this way.
On Windows, when I had high memory consumption, I used a Microsoft application called PCManager, and it provided a RAM booster. I don't know if something similar exists on Linux.

[Ofnuts]

(Yesterday, 06:00 PM)Dunham Wrote: Hi
Thanks for the reply
I have 16GB of RAM and use Linux Mint. When I open the system without opening any applications, my RAM consumption is 2.5GB. I changed the Fragment Cache Size to 8GB, and when I open GIMP without any images, its consumption remained at 4.9GB, and the total system RAM consumption shown in the Mission Center or System Monitor was 7.3GB. I opened an image manipulation file, and GIMP's consumption rose to 6.7GB. I opened another image manipulation file without closing the previous one, and this time it was 9.4GB, and the system total was 11.5GB.
I think it's possible to work this way.
On Windows, when I had high memory consumption, I used a Microsoft application called PCManager, and it provided a RAM booster. I don't know if something similar exists on Linux.

What says the Gimp dashboard?

Also, using top:

   

• This also agrees with the Gimp dashboard: (165448-68320)/1024 is the 94.9MB reported by the dashboard.
  
• The VIRT column reports nearly 4GB, but the same column reports insane sizes for chromium, so these are not usage of real memory (1TB and even the 32GB would be seriously hammering my 32GB PC).
  

So, until you show me what the Gimp dashboard or top/htop say, I'll conclude that you are looking at the wrong place.

And yes, loading images takes memory, 4 bytes per pixel in 8-bit, 32 bytes per pixel in high prevision, and this per layer, plus at least one canvas-sized buffer for display, and about as much per undo step. Loading one 32Mpix image from my camera adds 380MB (without even an alpha-channel), so, at roughly 92MB/layer, Gimp keeps 3 additional copies.