Hi,
I am trying to write a program, which will let me arrange 5 5x7 images
into an A3 sheet(12x18), 600 dpi.
I have a 3Ghz 512MB RAM machine.
Basically, I make a 7200 by 10800 pixel (12x18) bitmap and then arrange
every 5 by 7 picture in this bitmap. Needless to say, my machine slows
down like crazy, accompanied by a HUGE amount of swapping. after I
finish running the program, its best to reboot as my machine looks
"tired" from all that work.
My question is, how can i optimize making such big images? Is there a
way out?
Thanks!

Nikhil wrote:
Why not add 5 picture controls to a form that was A3 in size, add in
the pictures and then output the whole form (i assume it is possible)
as a bitmap?

Nikhil wrote:
Why don't you just set the printer to 600DPI and output each bitmap on
the apropriate place and scale on the canvas? There is no need to create
a bitmap that large in memory unless you want to save that to disk or
something. The bitmap you're creating now is somehere between 200 and
300MB (depending on the colourspace), no wonder it's slow.

Yep, I need to save the image to disk - I dont have a 600 dpi color
printer - I give it someplace to print.
I do free up the images once they are placed on the A3 canvas - but the
garbage collector seems to pick up lost memory really slowly - should i
invoke it programmatically?
If I look at the memory utilization of the program, it shows that my
program gets 340MB in a jiffy, then suddenly loses everything to be 14
MB - and from there on, I get 1 MB at a time. Its a pain to wait. What
im trying to do here is that I am arranging photographs of children for
the year book. So I have an input file and I do batch processing.
Needless to say, after generating about 3 A3 size images, I have to
quit the application, restart, and start over again. There has to be a
better way to do this!

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