The GIMP Crashing? RESOLVED!

Since my life is still infinitesimally boring, I bring you more scrapbooking!

I finally figured out this week why The GIMP kept crashing. I knew all along that it had something to do with memory, but I couldn't quite put my figure on what... All I knew was that when I was running out of available memory, 90% of the time The GIMP would not handle it gracefully. My computer would lock up or The GIMP would just randomly quit.

Ironically, my first stop on my journey to the solution had absolutely nothing to with GIMP troubleshooting... It had to do with Photoshop troubleshooting. Someone on a message board I belong to was trying to edit some large files but kept getting a message about her "scratch disk" being full. For giggles, I decided to do a little google research and learned that a scratch disk was just more or less yet another term for what I'd always known as being virtual memory or a swap partition.

From what I read, I figured out (and this is likely over simplified for clarity) that when you're dealing with editing images, all the layers and changes are saved in the computer's memory while you're working on it until you save everything permanently and close the program. When there's too much for your memory to handle, it uses the special place on the hard drive set aside for holding stuff that needs to be in memory but doesn't necessarily need to be accessed right away, and when you run out of space there... That's when Photoshop would be throwing an error.

I knew somewhere in the back of my head that The GIMP worked on the same principle, but didn't think too much of it that night.

A few days later, I tripped over a post on Scrapbooks Gone Digital about performance boosting with The GIMP, where it was shared that the Tile Cache Size in the preferences should be set to 256MB, the original GIMP documentation was cited, but other than that no other specific reason why stated... so, when I went to go change my tile cache size, that's when it hit me.

The tile cache is the max amount of MB you want allowed in your RAM at any given point, anything over that will get sent to the virtual memory. My tile cache, by default, was set to 1024MB which is equal to 1GB, which is the amount of RAM that's in my machine. Duh! Of course, it's crashing! You can't ever use 100% of your RAM on one process! Things like, say, the operating system need RAM too! If my tile cache was set to 100%, it would never reach the threshold to send anything virtual memory. So, I changed my tile cache to 256MB, and it's been smooth sailing ever since.

That said, the documentation for changing the tile cache makes me want to choke somebody. Umm... Excuse me, never in a piece of documentation should I EVER see a line that says "Forget about this and hope the default works." or "Ask someone to do it for you." Such drivel is patronizing and clutters up documentation. If I was bothered to look at the documentation in the first place, you better be damn certain that A. the default isn't working and B. I want to do it my damn self. When I first started noticing problems I read this very piece of documentation and virtually no useful information from it other than the writer must think that I'm a moron. Thanks, man. Thanks.

Moral of the story open source documentation writers? Your job is to DOCUMENT. Not tell the user to go ask someone else to do it for them.

Rant over. On to the layouts.

LouCee Creations - Freddie

Claudi Designs - Jenna

Sweet Digi Scraps - Uncertain
Chrissy W - Sample Pack 1

Sweet Digi Scraps - Round the Track

Template by Trish Heffner
Sweet Digi Scraps - It's Primary, My Dear

mlg scraps - Neon Tantrum

Scraplifted from littlehands - Steal the Flag
Elemental Scraps - Fling

Designs by Krista - Picnic