ImageMagick Using All System Resources

[No_Code]

Hi all! I've been using Coppermine with ImageMagick on this one Linux box at work to keep track of all of the digital photographs that we have taken. Just recently though, I went to add some additional graphics to the library and convert began to use so much system resources that the system failed to respond to anything including a shutdown command. The specs of the system that it is running on is a 400 MHz Pentium II with 128 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive. I was using the top command to view how much of the system resources have been eaten up, and I noticed that there are four separate convert processes running. What happens is that the hard drive starts paging excessively. I realize that this indicates that more RAM is required and that is on my to-do list for the future. However, I was wondering how/if it would be possible to turn down the nice value somehow or reduce the number of running convert processes to 1 or 2 at the most.

[moorey]

The convert utility will (well, should) only take resources during the conversion process (thumbnail and intermediate pictures generation). It obviously takes much more if you have lots of pictures uploaded, specially during batch adding etc.

I guess one possible way around this is to use the GD lib.. from personal experience, it's s lightly better in terms of processing power.