This concerned me because this is such a trivial task: concatenate a few smallish images into a slightly larger one. And even for small images, it is taking several (5-7 seconds) per image. Using Powerbuilder and another imaging toolkit, I can do this much quicker, but it leaks memory like a sieve. I was hoping with Perl I could avoid the memory leak. Of course now I'm sucking up processor ;) I have to share this server with others, and my using too much processor is starving everyone else.

I considered using Imager or ImageMagick, but Imager chokes on multi-page TIFFs. ImageMagick seemed to work well in a brief test I ran, and what I read in the docs encouraged me:

Note that the QuantumDepth=8 version (Q8) consumes half the memory and about 30% less CPU than the QuantumDepth=16 version (Q16), but provides less color resolution. A Q8 version is fine for processing typical photos. If you are dealing with scientific or medical images or deal with images that have limited contrast, then the Q16 version is recommended. It is also possible to build a Q32 version which has enough resolution to deal with the latest reconnaissance images. Please let us know if there is any demand for the Q32 versions.

Given the nature of the task at hand, I thought the Q8 version would work well. It works, but not well :P

++ for the excellent suggestion - I will have to look into that. I hope it works as well as it sounds :)

Thanks a bunch!
MrCromeDome

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