Large Images and malloc errors ...

as a software engineer, i know that a malloc error means that software could not allocate a chunk of memory big enough to hold a specific piece of data. i'm using Aperture 2.1.? on my MacPro dual quad core and i've got 6GB of RAM. Aperture usually seems to take up about 2GB or so. when i send the 21MP images from my Canon 5DMkII into photoshop, they usually wind up having 6 or 7 layers when i'm done and the resulting images are about 600MB or so. i also shoot a lot of film with my Mamiya 6x7. these negatives are scanned at 2400dpi and result in a 6000x5000 pixel image. again, edited with photoshop with 4 layers or so, i wind up with a 800-1000MB file.

the problem with Aperture is that it fails when generating previews for these images and often fails to load them into the viewer. if this happens, trying to create web galleries or JPG exports for client reviews fails because it can't load these large images. information on the console shows that Aperture is consistently experiencing malloc errors. what i see on-screen is a deep-red image area with the text "Unsupported Image Format". if i quit Aperture and restart, it usually fixes the problem. however, last night when working with some particularly large film scans, i couldn't get it to generate previews successfully until i reduced the file size somewhat (going back to greyscale, reducing some of the layers, although flattening is generally not an option for me...)

so, my question is, if i add more memory (say, get another 4GB taking me up to 10GB total) will Aperture be able to take advantage of this additional RAM? i know that Photoshop sort of has this 3GB limit. i wonder if Aperture has the same issue (with Leopard)? would Snow Leopard and the 64-bit addressing help here? i'm reluctant to upgrade to Snow Leopard because i've seen some issues reported here.

thanks,
scott

Message was edited by: scott nichol

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