Creating multiple pngs with ImageMagick causes slow desktop

Question

I am running Linux Mint 17, Cinnamon 2.4.8

Hello, I am using ImageMagick to create large 500+ png images.

This causes Cinnamon to go very slow.

I would understand if Cinnamon is slow WHILE I am rendering many images, however, Cinnamon is really slow even AFTER the renders are complete.

The only way to remedy this is to do a reboot, but I would really like another solution if possible.

Command free BEFORE render

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:      16384584    1066072   15318512      20212      61948     407592
-/+ buffers/cache:     596532   15788052
Swap:     16727036          0   16727036

Command free DURING render

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:      16384584    1230524   15154060      21148      69540     457700
-/+ buffers/cache:     703284   15681300
Swap:     16727036          0   16727036

Command free AFTER render

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:      16384584    1263932   15120652      20760      70416     460352
-/+ buffers/cache:     733164   15651420
Swap:     16727036          0   16727036

Answer 1

Memory Issue

This is most probably a memory issue.

One thing to do is to limit the memory usage of imagemagick. As mentioned here: -limit type value, you can limit your usage using these options:

-limit memory 512MiB -limit map 512MiB

Further, as you're saying that it is slow even AFTER imagemagick is run, in that case look for some ghost processes left over by imagemagick which are making it not release the RAM. And kill those processes.

ps aux | grep convert    #assuming you used convert

Another Possibility : Disk full due to temporary files

Check your /tmp directory or some other directory it might be storing its temporary files and see if that corresponding to it has space or not. That might be a probably reason. Reboot usually deletes temp files and relieves space.