I have never seen anything like that and am not aware of reports similar to yours.
Just a wild guess: it might be that the configured tile size is too big, so instead of using tiling to keep everything in RAM the system starts swapping.
Ah - thanks; I have discovered that although I have assigned half my RAM (8 Gb of 16) in “host memory limit in MB for tiling” the "minimum amount of memory in MB for a single buffer in tiling takes precedence - at least, that is what the tool top says if it set to a positive non-zero number.
The trouble is, I cannot set this value to zero (or a negative value). Trying to overwrite it, or using the plus/minus buttons, I cannot get a lower value than 2. How to override this?
Maybe i just set it to a huge value - 1024MB?
No, no greater than 64MB allowed.
And no less than 2MB.
Hmmm…
That is what I wild-guessed as well. Anyway, I don’t use dt much but out of curiosity I have a copy handy on my win7 system (4GB RAM). I tried the equalizer module on DSCF1719.RAF (PlayRaw) using a preset with normal bounded the only history item. Sure enough the fan whirls and the processing takes a long time to complete. My fan never turns on using other apps that we talk about on this forum. I just want to confirm that @Isaac isn’t the only one encountering this problem, though for reasons I mentioned in another thread, I won’t be able to investigate further any time soon.
Thanks @afre for the confirmation! I will be examining a good processing tool chain in darktable for underpowered machines. I might write a short blog post about it if I get time…