Resources needed for darktable

[Misty]

I can't find any posts regarding Darktable, which may mean that no-one on the forum has experience with it, hopefully someone has though. Darktable, though an amazing open-source program does require a lot of PC resources however.
Really you do need a 64bit machine, which fortunately I have. Nevertheless, the following article (if I could fully understand it) does indicate pretty clearly the challenges because image files are so very big today. One of my RAW files would be 24Mgs !

Here is a portrait of our main PC

Anyone any comments please ? May be worth a go, or just wasting time ?
Cheers
Jim

[1101]

One of my RAW files would be 24Mgs !

24Mb is nothing
the screen shot is almost unreadable

not sure what you are actually asking.
What are the recommended spec for Darktable ? If its free why not just try it & see .

It may not even run on windows anyway
http://www.darktable.org/install/#windows

[Misty]

Apologies 1101, the screen shot is very small. Here is some of the info, this time from Control Panel, instead of Belarc Advisor, and shown bigger.



I would probably arrange to dual boot this machine, to have something in the Linux stable. Still the resources needed are very big - here is an extract from the earlier link -

A simple calculation makes this clear. If you have a 20MPx image, DT for precision reasons will store this internally as a 4 × 32-bit floating point cell for each pixel. Each full image of this size will need about 300MB of memory. As we want to process the image, we will at least need two buffers for each module – one for input and one for output. If we have a more complex module, its algorithm might additionally require several intermediate buffers of the same size. Without further optimization, anything between 600MB and 3GB would be needed only to store and process image data. On top we have darktable’s code segment, the code and data of all dynamically linked system libraries, and not to forget further buffers where darktable stores intermediate images for quick access during interactive work (mip map cache). All in all darktable would like to see a minimum of about 4GB to run happily.
Total system memory

From what I said before, it is evident that your computer needs a sane memory setup to properly run darktable. We suggest that you have a least 4GB of physical RAM plus 4 to 8GB of additional swap space installed. The latter is required, so that your system can swap out temporarily unneeded data to disk in order to free physical RAM.

Theoretically you could also run darktable with lower amounts of physical RAM and balance this with enough swap space. However, you should be prepared that your system could then heavily go into “thrashing” action, as all too many memory accesses require your system to read or write data pages from/to hard disk. We have positive reports that this functions well for several users, but it still might get extremely slow for others …

Before I download and learn to use a Linux program and then download (not the easiest) and get to know Darktable a bit, then to find that my resources might be overwhelmed, I just want to identify anyone on PressF1 who uses Darktable, so can get inside info, tips or whatever.

[fred_fish]

Before I download and learn to use a Linux program and then download (not the easiest) and get to know Darktable a bit, then to find that my resources might be overwhelmed, I just want to identify anyone on PressF1 who uses Darktable, so can get inside info, tips or whatever.

It's in the Debian repo's, so if you were to use that, a simple 'aptitude install darktable' would install and set up everything needed.
I don't have personal experience with it, but your machine should cope fine.
If not, adding RAM is a very easy (and relatively cheap) upgrade - or you could decide not to continue with it and have lost nothing (except a little of your time).