> I wouldn't expect that you've got mem problems, probably just not enough > of it! Try repeating the exercise and looking at the amount of swap ( > /sbin/swapon -a ) and see if you used it all up.
I've recently tried to montage several hundred images into a multi-page page-sized image (thumbnail collation). Physical mem 0.5GB, swap 1GB. Apart from running for ages, when top showed there was nothing more to be had, montage terminated with a memory allocation error. Not the most optimised programming to read all images into memory forst before producing a single byte of output. If the system has been seriously out of memory there must be entries in syslog about the VM having killed off XYZ (and you should notice other software having stopped). The hint about memtest was a good one, but with all those tests, they can prove a negative but not a positive. I'd try a different IM version next - remember "it's the buggiest software I can't do without". In fact I still regularly use a copy of 3.x from 1997, because it's the one version I know of where all the dozen functions I use actually work at the same time. The main maintainer is good at fixing bugs (subscribe to high-volume mailing list and post report), but (s)he is under too much time pressure to branch into devel and stable. There isn't any other software for batch image processing. Perhaps netpbm, but it's more for format conversion. gimp rocks, the current version approaches professional level, but it's no good for doing the same thing on 250 images. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
