Unfortunately this is not yet the full story. This still requires one full input and output buffer, but intermediate buffers can be made small enough to fit everything into the hardware’s limits. Instead of processing an image in one big chunk, darktable splits the image into smaller parts for every processing module. This is the absolute upper limit of memory that can be used by a process and it constitutes a tight situation for darktable as we have seen above.ĭarktable’s escape route is called tiling.

For a CPU with 32-bit address registers, this is 2^32 bytes, which makes a total of 4GB. How much memory can be addressed by a process depends on the number of address bits your CPU offers. 🔗available address spaceīesides the total amount of system memory there is another limiting factor: the available address space of your hardware architecture. A solid-state drive can ease the pain slightly. We have positive reports that this functions well for several users, but it still might get extremely slow for others. However, you this could cause your system to “thrash”, as it reads or writes data pages to and from the hard disk. Theoretically, you could run darktable with lower amounts of physical RAM and balance this with enough swap space. We suggest that you have a least 4GB of physical RAM plus 4 to 8GB of additional swap space installed. 🔗total system memoryįrom the above analysis, it is evident that your computer needs a sane memory setup to properly run darktable. On top of that we have darktable’s code segment, the code and data of all dynamically linked system libraries, and not to forget, further buffers where darktable stores intermediate images for quick access during interactive work (mip map cache).Īll in all, darktable needs a minimum of about 4GB of memory to run happily. Without further optimization, anything between 600MB and 3GB would be needed merely to store and process image data. If we have a more complex module, its algorithm might additionally require several intermediate buffers of the same size.

As we want to process the image, we will at least need two buffers for each module – one for input and one for output. Each full image of this size will therefore need about 300MB of memory. If you have a 20MPx image then, for precision reasons, darktable will store this internally as a 4 x 32-bit floating point cell for each pixel. Darktable’s memory requirements are high.

Darktable 2.0