Should GD need so much memory when resizing?

Question

I have a resize script i made in PHP that uses GD (my VPS doesn't have imagemagick installed) to resize an image, I have recently started getting memory errors so i have increased the memory_limit up to 50Mb and still get memory error.

The image I am trying to resize is only 2Mb, is this correct for PHP image stuff, something sounds a bit wrong to me.

Image size is meaningless for compressed formats. Tell us the *dimensions* of the image. — Pekka, Sep 10 '10 at 11:59
a VPS usually stands for "you can install everything you need". — Your Common Sense, Sep 10 '10 at 12:00
also, a VPS usually stands for "you can set any settings you want within your tariff limits". — Your Common Sense, Sep 10 '10 at 12:12
also, every error message contains **certain** information that is **extremely helpful** in solving problems. — Your Common Sense, Sep 10 '10 at 12:13

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 10 '10 at 12:08

To resize the image GD has to work on the uncompressed image, which is significantly larger than 2MB, I assume. Imagemagick needs to store the entire image data (pixels * bit_depth) and quite some more for the actual work in memory.

50 Megabytes is not much for working with images. For example, Drupal warns you if you have less than 96MB memory limit, if you have the image resizing, etc.. enabled. For reasonably sized images 64MB are enough in my experience, but if you put full size images from a digital camera you'll run into problems with that memory limit.

you mean `pixels * bit_depth / 8` :-) – Tomas Apr 17 '12 at 20:51 — Tomas, Apr 17 '12 at 20:51

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 10 '10 at 15:20

0

On my shared/cloud hosting (2.7£/month) I still did not see any warning/error when resizing images. I set the limit to 200MB (sometimes users need to upload very large images). As Fabian said, I guess 50 is too low.

answered Sep 10 '10 at 15:20

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Should GD need so much memory when resizing?

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