Some way to reduce memory usage?

["J.B. Nicholson-Owens" <jbn forestfield org>]

Hi everyone,

I'm using EasyTAG 2.3.2 on some folders with about 80 FLAC files in them 
combined. Each FLAC file has multiple images: a front cover, a back 
cover, a media image, and a lot of leaflet images. All of the leaflet 
images are common to all tracks.

I'm running this on a 64-bit GNU/Linux system with about 7.7GB of RAM, 
5GB of which is free when I launch EasyTAG. This RAM is being used as 
filesystem cache but the cache shrinks to clear RAM for apps as needed, 
as is common on GNU/Linux setups.

When I load the folder into EasyTAG, EasyTAG uses about 1.8GB of RAM and 
then when I select all of the tracks and click the "#" button to set the 
number of files, I see EasyTAG is using 3.5GB. I'm using the RAM 
measurements in the GNOME "System Monitor" (like a GUI version of 'top') 
and free RAM estimates to determine these numbers. I don't understand 
how counting and setting the track numbering tags requires so much more RAM.

Sometimes I don't have enough RAM to process big hierarchies with lots 
of images in each file for tasks that don't strike me as needing a lot 
of RAM to perform (such as numbering tracks). EasyTAG crashes in those 
circumstances.

I'm guessing there's some kind of issue with EasyTAG's RAM use here, but 
I don't know enough about the structure of the program to identify what 
that is.

I expect that using a GUI-based tag editor which wants to show me 
thumbnails of images will require more RAM for caching those images than 
a CLI-based editor doing the same tagging job would require. But this 
amount of RAM use surprises me and makes me think something is wrong, 
particularly when counting taggable files in a directory shows a huge 
RAM use jump.

Is this a known issue, or is there a preference I can set to reduce RAM 
use for big jobs:

- make EasyTAG not show me the images (no image processing available)?
- make EasyTAG not keep undo data (no undo/redo available)?
- make some other change that will let EasyTAG run with lower RAM use?

Thanks for your help.