Further to my original observations, here is something more detailed: Gimp is set to ~24M tile cache, on a 64Mb machine with ~64Mb of swap The TIFF is enormous (see previous post for exact dimensions) and as a naive RGB array (3 bytes per pixel) would use ~210Mb of space Stage ---> Size of gimpswap Fresh gimp, no images N/A not yet created Begin loading TIFF 10Mb almost immediately 50% loaded 98Mb 99% loaded 196Mb (just as TIFF loader exits) Starts displaying 250Mb 50% complete display 380Mb 100% complete display 508Mb Then, as tigert says, the Gimp continues to trickle data into the swap file for some time, but only a few Mb per minute. The TIFF loader created (by my estimate) 210Mb of tiles. There are now 508Mb of tiles on my disk. What is in the 300Mb of tiles which were NOT created by the TIFF loader? Suggestions of how to find out are welcome, but a fix is preferred :) Nick.
