GIMP not responding on high file sizes.

[Ofnuts]

Looks like you have a fairly small system for what you want to do.

Gimp tells you how much memory it uses in the status bar at the bottom, next to the name of the current layer, when this area isn't used to display a message (so move the mouse outside of the image display, for instance to the toolbox).

IMHO Gimp is using much more than 2GB and you have two overlapping problems:

• The 2GB of RAM for the tile cache are above what the system can really provide (what else is running?) so even before Gimp tries to use its own disk-swapping mechanism, some of its memory is swapped out by the system (the pagefile.sys file you see in the monitor panel)
  
• At some point Gimp has more than 2GB of data, so starts its own swapping mechanism  in addition to what the system already does.
  

So you get twice the disk I/O: Gimp paging and system paging. Two ways to improve on this:

1. set the tile cache to something real big (8GB or more) Gimp won't do its own swapping (until you reach that limit...) and you will onlt have system swapping
   
2. set the tile cache to something small (down to 1GB, and then try increasing if see free RAM) so you system never swaps and Gimp doesn its own swapping
   

Other things to do:

• reduce RAM usage elsewhere in the system, stop any non necessary processes (web browsers are great memory hogs)
  
• reduce RAM usage in Gimp (use 8-bit precision, use a small undo stack...)