Significant Memory Used for a total of 276 MB Images (559 frames)

[Crear12]

ImageMagick version

7.1.1-15 Q16-HDRI aarch64

Operating system

MacOS

Operating system, version and so on

14.0

Description

I have 559 frames that I want to merge into a GIF file, each frame is less than 500 KB. The total folder size is 276 MB. It immediately eat 64GB of memory and started swapping. When I checked and stopped it, it used nearly 1 TBW for swapping.

Steps to Reproduce

I executed magick convert -delay 10 -loop 0 *.png LowH.gif to generate the GIF, it never finished and keeps swapping the memory for nearly 1TB written.

Images

[fmw42]

It is not the file size that counts. Imagemagick has to decompress any compressed files when reading. It is the number of pixels in the image that determines how much space is used 8-bits per channel per pixel. So if for example you started with JPG files, they have to be decompressed a lot. If you start with PNG, even those have to be decompressed, which is what your command uses.

Note on IM 7, use magick, not magick convert (nor just convert).

[urban-warrior]

Review https://imagemagick.org/script/architecture.php#tera-pixel for recommended practice when processing large images or large image sequences.