Converting PSDs takes 10 times as long

[rzuris]

I converted a 54Mb PSD with 5 layers to JPEG in about 3 minutes on a CentOS 4 server using ImageMagick 6.3.5. I then upgraded to 6.4.1-3 and the same conversion took 28 minutes. On a Mac Xserve with ImageMagick 6.3.7, PSD-to-JPEG conversions are regularly taking half an hour or longer. Should I revert to 6.3.5 on all servers? Is there a known issue with PSD convert performance?

[magick]

Can you post a URL to your image here so we can download it and reproduce the problem. Once we do, we will account for the time difference and apply a patch to fix the problem.

[rzuris]

Cool, thanks! I will ask the image owner for permission to post and then give you a URL to download it.

This is the same image with the layer offset problem on Linux reported in a separate message, so maybe you can kill two birds with one stone?

[rzuris]

I received permission to post a URL privately, with the condition that you destroy the image when you are done debugging with it. I can email you the URL; please let me know what email address to use. thanks!

[magick]

Send a PM to this address with a URL to your image so we can download it. We will of course destroy it once we resolve the problem.

[magick]

We tried converting your image as follows with ImageMagick 6.4.1-4 Beta:

• convert "09_KX100_LF.psd[0]" 09_KX100_LF.jpg

and it converted in 1 minute (3Ghz Intel, 2GB memory). This command:

• convert 09_KX100_LF.psd[0] 09_KX100_LF.tif

ran in 1 minute 4 seconds.

[rzuris]

Try this:

convert -limit map 256 -limit memory 256 -colorspace RGB -flatten -scale "10000x10000>" -scale "1000x1000<" -quality 95 09_KX1000_LF.psd 09_KX100_LF.jpg

That takes 25 minutes on our somewhat wimpy VM with CentOS 4.5.

Even on my 3GHz Intel desktop with Windows XP, this takes a long time:

convert -limit map 1024 -limit memory 1024 -quality 95 09_KX100_LF.psd[0] 09_KX100_LF.jpg

On version 6.3.5, this was all pretty fast, but is taking way longer on 6.5.1.

We need to throttle memory usage with -limit because we queue up several instances of ImageMagick on each server.

[magick]

Try this:

• convert -limit map 256mb -limit memory 256mb -colorspace RGB -flatten -scale "10000x10000>" -scale "1000x1000<" -quality 95 09_KX1000_LF.psd 09_KX100_LF.jpg

If ImageMagick is forced to cache the pixels to disk, processing time will increase dramatically.

[rzuris]

Ack! I see from your note that it is necessary to qualify the numbers for -limit with "mb". Didn't it used to default to megabytes without specifying? I could certainly see that being responsible for the slowdown. It seems to be back to normal speed with "mb." When was this changed?