09-29-2025, 03:29 PM
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:
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.
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).
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.