GIMP large canvas lag-time map-making question

[aaronil]

I've been getting back into map-making recently and I figured where better to start than the Cartographer's Guild!

Working with GIMP, I've been getting serious lag time issues when working with large canvas sizes.

For example, I set my canvas size to 80 x 60 inches (in pixels 7680 x 5760) for a castle project I'm beginning.

However, when I try to move, rotate, or resize anything, I end up waiting 10-20 seconds for each change I make. White lines scan across the image one at a time painstakingly slowly until it appears in the new position. Not good. This much lag practically makes it unworkable for me.

Any idea what might be causing this? And if there's a workaround?

I did some digging and found out that GIMP relies on something called "libcairo", the latest version of which MAY be causing this sort of lag. Though more of the "libcairo" complaints seem to revolve around cursor lag, which I'm not experiencing. As best I can tell "libcairo" is a resource library API that provides operations including stroking and filling cubic Bézier splines, transforming and compositing translucent images, and antialiased text rendering. (http://cairographics.org/ )

[johnvanvliet]

in pixels 7680 x 5760

that really is not very big

i work with 8192x4096 (8k) and 16384x8192 ( 16k ) px images all the time

now a 16k image will lag a bit for me seeing as i only have a i5 cpu and 8 gig ram
-- a mid price range Desktop box from 5 years ago .


gimp holds in memory , by default , 5 undo levels - this DOSE eat up the RAM and can cause the need to use the SWAP on the disk
- you can clear the undos - not the best idea !!!

Or one other way is to work only on parts

crop the upper left 30 % ( some overlap ) then the upper right then the lower right and the lower left


this ram issue is do the use of GTK ( Gimp Tool Kit )
gimp 2.9 and the 2.10 ( should be 3.0 ) are porting the rest to GEGL

Gimp 2.8.14 is still using GTK for a lot of things


you can test you the TESTING and DEVELOPMENT Gimp 2.9
it builds rather easily compared to the LAST development " 2.7 " - 2.7 was a nightmare to build from source

-- linux build ( takes about 10 min.)
http://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Hacking:Building/Linux

-- windows - using MinGW
http://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Hacking:Building/Windows

-- windows using MS visual-studio
HA! HA! HA! HA!
i did it ONE time and NEVER AGAIN !!!!


or use the prebuilt
http://nightly.darkrefraction.com/gimp/


lib cairo is causing some issues with BIG paint brushes ( 150+ px. ) in gimp 2.8

[aaronil]

that really is not very big

i work with 8192x4096 (8k) and 16384x8192 ( 16k ) px images all the time

now a 16k image will lag a bit for me seeing as i only have a i5 cpu and 8 gig ram
-- a mid price range Desktop box from 5 years ago .


gimp holds in memory , by default , 5 undo levels - this DOSE eat up the RAM and can cause the need to use the SWAP on the disk
- you can clear the undos - not the best idea !!!

Or one other way is to work only on parts

crop the upper left 30 % ( some overlap ) then the upper right then the lower right and the lower left


this ram issue is do the use of GTK ( Gimp Tool Kit )
gimp 2.9 and the 2.10 ( should be 3.0 ) are porting the rest to GEGL

Gimp 2.8.14 is still using GTK for a lot of things


you can test you the TESTING and DEVELOPMENT Gimp 2.9
it builds rather easily compared to the LAST development " 2.7 " - 2.7 was a nightmare to build from source

-- linux build ( takes about 10 min.)
http://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Hacking:Building/Linux

-- windows - using MinGW
http://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Hacking:Building/Windows

-- windows using MS visual-studio
HA! HA! HA! HA!
i did it ONE time and NEVER AGAIN !!!!


or use the prebuilt
http://nightly.darkrefraction.com/gimp/


lib cairo is causing some issues with BIG paint brushes ( 150+ px. ) in gimp 2.8

Thanks John!

I'm using GIMP 2.8.14 on a Mac.

I couldn't determine which of the options you listed would be best for me. I vaguely understood what you were saying, but not with sufficient depth to grasp the tech-speak. Any recommendations in layman's terms?

[johnvanvliet]

none of them

while Apple is a *nix in the loosest of terms it is a spin off if "Berkley Software Distribution" (BSD) after the IBM/BSD break up

-- WARNING this is 4 years old , so you would need to update it for the current OSX
http://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Hacking:_Building/Mac_OSX
https://sites.google.com/site/httimc...ld-gimp-on-mac