>I was used to adjusting photoshop to prevent it swapping, and tried to do >that with GIMP, the above figures were based on my idea that X wanted 30 >megs and gimp seemed to want about 10 or so, leaving about 20 left for the >image. All wrong, terribly wrong. I set the cache to 30 megs last night >and it sped up tremendously, although it's still damned slow. It now Exactly: Gimp's swap is the maximum RAM that the app will request for images and all related data (undos), not extra RAM, but total. >takes about 20-30 seconds or so to do a levels change, still about 1/4 of >the speed of photoshop but bearable, so no need for me to move OS yet >again ;-) Uuummm... have you recompiled with optimizations, BTW? >It is a small amount, now I've gotten over the levels problem I've tried a >few more things in gimp, and ended up halving the resolution of my image >to try gimp out, I won't be able to do any serious work until I get a >machine with more RAM at least. I've got a Seagate Cheetah on a fast/wide >SCSI adapter but even that's not fast enough to stop the swapping getting >on my nerves! Maybe your disk layout is wrong. Setting a good partitioning can be a really complex thing. Place your swap in the middle, and the Gimp swap near. There are docs that describe how to set a disk for better perforance (I have not tested, but I know that the machines do not go slow either, so the tactics at least do not hurt). And remember: 30 MB is just your image, so after the first operation, Gimp always swaps. GSR
