Re: [Gimp-developer] Is there any way to free Gimp memory and avoid restarting it?

[Øyvind Kolås <pippin gimp org>]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 4:35 PM jEsuSdA 8) <listas jesusda com> wrote:
> > So the memory seems reused...
>
> I was thinking about your tests and the values seems to be a bit
> strange: I mean, I you load 5 images and Gimp takes 1.35GB Memory, why
> when you close all the images gimp still taking 1.35GB instead of less than?
>
> In the same way, if you load again the same images, why Gimp consumes
> more memory and its memory consumption rises from 1.35 to 1.40... and,
> again, when the images are closed the memory does not get back to a
> lower value.

If you need to restrict the amount of memory GIMP is permitted to use
(before swapping tiles of the image out to disk and being slower) you
should adjust the tile-cache-size in GIMP's preferences.

Apart from memory leaks which are bugs, GIMP/GEGL are telling the used
memory allocators that memory is no longer used - lower levels of the
stack however do not free up used memory. By design allocators tend to
keep freed memory around for reuse in future allocation calls, for
more information see:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5994543/problem-usage-memory-in-c/5994981#5994981