[Linux-users] Starting to edit LARGE images need to know how to specify the correct amount of Physical RAM to buy

[James McDonald]

I have a png image that is 30mb on disk. I open it in the Gimp and it 
says the "Background" is 1.4GB.

My system has MemTotal:      1018720 kB (1GB)

I obviously don't have enough RAM.

How do I know how much RAM I need. In a non-free restricted and 
constantly rebooting OS that we may have heard of I add up the memory 
usage of each process and get my required memory figure. Is there a 
standard way of doing the same under Linux. I am a little confused by 
tops output.

Here is the output of top sorted by %MEM.
   
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  
COMMAND            
  508 jm        20   0  218m 201m  20m D    1 20.3   0:28.80 
gimp-2.2           
  422 root      20   0  119m 107m 8268 D    1 10.8   0:41.90 
yum                
32649 jm        20   0  225m  78m  36m S    0  7.9   1:31.85 
firefox-bin        
 2429 root      39  19 81048  61m 2132 S    0  6.2   9:32.20 
yum-updatesd       
24681 jm        20   0  141m  58m  16m S    0  5.9  11:26.45 
xfdesktop          
24631 jm        20   0  108m  54m  15m S    0  5.5   9:21.80 
xfce4-menu-plug    
24485 root      20   0  271m  50m 6580 S    1  5.1 661:58.13 
Xorg               
 1060 jm        20   0  177m  41m  20m S    3  4.2   0:05.23 
thunderbird-bin    
32015 amavis    20   0 68732  27m 2596 S    0  2.7   0:03.51 
amavisd            
30291 amavis    20   0 68824  25m 2596 S    0  2.6   0:05.76 
amavisd            
24630 jm        20   0 96804  22m  18m S    0  2.3   1:30.91 
Thunar             
24382 jm        20   0 84764  21m  17m S    0  2.2   0:13.90 Terminal