[Digikam-users] Re: Digikam eats a large part of my memory

[Martin Burnicki]

Marcel Wiesweg wrote:
> > I use Digikam 1.7 on Kubuntu 10.10 with Kde 4.5.4
> >
> > Is it normal that it uses so much memory ?
> >
> > I had also found in version 1.2 and 1.3
>
> Could be better answered with a bit more context of the current use
> pattern. Which one is the effective memory usage? The KDE system monitor is
> afaik pretty accurate to calculate that number.

I have also just recently had a bad experience with the DK memory usage.

I'm running DK 1.7.0 under openSUSE 11.2 x64, KDE 4.5.4 on a machine with 6 GB 
RAM. There are about 158000 photos in about 7000 albums in my collection, and 
I'm using mysql as database, if that matters.

If I have some applications running then e.g. a total of 1.9 GB of RAM is 
being used. Normally, if I then start DK, the total memory usage increases to 
about 2.5 GB, which I find OK.

Recently I've tried to let DK find all duplicates in my collection. First 
generated the fingerprints of all photos, and then ran "search duplicates". 
As expected, this took quite some time, but the bad thing was that this 
started to eat up all available memory, plus all my swap space. When I killed 
DK ('killall digikam') the memory was freed immediately. 

However, when I re-started DK then it obviously started to eat up all my 
memory again while the info message at the top of the startup logo 
said "Reading database ...". Unfortunately I did not find a way to stop this 
except killing DK again. The only I found to get this fixed was to delete all 
tables in the database and let DK build the database from scratch. 
Fortunately I have all attributes stored in the photos so it didn't hurt too 
much to rebuild the database. 

Anyway, this is an ugly behaviour. Maybe searches should only be remembered 
when they are explicitely saved.

Beside this, DK is a really great piece of software which I really like to 
work with.


Martin