MS Paint Using All My RAM

[Zink]

oh hai
I have a legal (semi) fresh install of Windows 7 and when I open this PNG from Wikipedia my computer plays games. Task manager reports that when I just open the image and don't edit it at all that it uses almost 400MB of RAM.
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/HuVQrhVwXCNQsNsErf8DZg?authkey=Gv1sRgCN_t0fKyy9qA0AE&feat=directlink
Copying the image to clipboard uses another 400MB in the same thread. The image is only 3MB. I had Windows ask for more RAM (4GB DDR3 1600) when I had the same image open twice and had copied the image from one Paint to the other. Paint works fine normally:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/KiG55ulS6bwOmZcg8nrZhw?authkey=Gv1sRgCN_t0fKyy9qA0AE&feat=directlink
Someone could test out the same image for me.

 

[sminlal]

That's a huge image - 6708 x 4443 pixels. Even though the image file is only 3MB, that's due to compression - when you decompress it into a 32-bit-per-pixel bitmap as MSPaint would do in order to display and manipulate it, the result is over 100MB in size (6708 x 4443 x 4 bytes/pixel = 119,214,576 bytes).

When I open it in MSPaint, MSPaint consumes a little over 300MB of memory, which doesn't really surprise me all that much since it's probably got a couple of extra image-sized buffers for display and undo purposes.

Now you know why 64-bit operating systems and machines with 4GB+ of memory are becoming popular...

 

[Zink]

Thanks a lot. I don't do a lot of image editing so if figured that 12GB of RAM in a workstation was always for video and rendering but I can see there would be a lot of advantages for image manipulation as well if you have a 25MP DSLR and RAW images to work with. I installed PAINT.NET and it uses almost the exact same amount of RAM when editing the image. It also used about 40% of my i5 750 quad core CPU just doing erasing without soft edges which also surprised me.