Problem when combining TIFs

[umdsupport]

Hello,

I'm trying to use ImageMagick to combine a number of TIFs into one file. However, I seem to be having a problem that I believe almost has to be a bug. When I try to combine just a small number of files, I don't seem to have any problems. When I try to combine larger files, I run into serious problems.

Example 1 -- 5 TIF files
Files 1-4 are less than 10 pages, the fifth file is 29 pages. I use the following command line:

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convert _04*.tif test5.tif

It takes 5 seconds for the operation to complete.

Example 2 -- 3 large TIF files
These files are 187, 144 and 546 pages each. I use the following command line:

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convert _06*.tif test.tif

This run never completes, and my hard drive gets filled up with temporary files (to the tune of 70GB). The process may actually complete -- but I have to kill it when it fills up my hard drive.

System Stats

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ImageMagick Version:         ImageMagick 6.5.3-10 2009-06-19 Q16 OpenMP
Operating System:            Windows XP SP3 (x86) + all recent patches
RAM:                         4GB RAM
CPU:                         2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9400
HDD:                         160GB capacity / 70GB free

Please let me know what other information I can provide.

Thanks,

-Matt

[magick]

See http://www.imagemagick.org/script/architecture.php.

[umdsupport]

OK, so from this information, I'm not sure what I should be inferring. Does this essentially mean the behavior I'm seeing is by design? More information would be greatly appreciated.

If the behavior is by design, is there anything that I can do from the command line in order to speed up the process? For this particular project, we just need to be able to have someone look through all of our multi-page TIFs in order to make sure none were corrupted during scanning, and then replace them if necessary. I definitely don't need anything resampled, resized, etc. I essentially just need the image files appended as quickly as possible to each other so that they can be viewed simultaneously.

Thanks,

-Matt

[magick]

At some point your machine runs out of available memory and ImageMagick caches the TIFF images to disk which is 1000 times slower than memory access. If you want the process to run faster you probably will need to look for some other solution rather than ImageMagick. With ImageMagick you can get some speed-up by installing the Q8 version of ImageMagick rather than the default Q16 built.