[QGIS-Developer] Memory utilisation by Qgis

[Patrick Dunford]

Hi

I have some questions about how Qgis engages with the memory management 
system, specifically Linux.

I have had a few crashes on my computer where the software crashes where 
it looks like some sort of memory limit has been reached.

On each time I have seen the software unexpectedly crash the computer's 
physical memory was approximately three quarters used and there was no 
swap being used.

This computer has 32 GB of RAM and 50 GB of swap. The disk that holds 
the swap is an SSD with a / partition and a swap partition, whereas 
/home is on a separate set of disks.

I see the swap being used all the time by other applications but I have 
never seen a swap file being engaged when I am using Qgis, because it 
always would crash or show some other apparent resource-limitation 
behaviour before the physical memory was all used up and no swap was 
being used.

Swap is used regularly by other apps on this computer, notably Gimp.