Picasa consumes 2 gig of memory

[carl...@gmail.com]

I have been running Picasa 2.7 on both Windows and Linux successfully
for the last month, administering 8000+ images (well over 12 GB).
Since the Ext2IFS driver for Windows finally supported UTF-8, I
decided to change a lot of the directory names, and after that Picasa
got funky... (I changed from 'oe' to ø, 'ae' to æ, and 'aa' to å).

Picasa consumes 2 gig of memory and slows my system to a crawl while
scanning the directory, and just ends up crashing, bringing the "Send
report" dialog up. Anyone knows what might be causing this?

It is really fast the first 10-20 seconds, and then suddenly it read
one picture every 5 secs, or so.

[carl...@gmail.com]

This is typical when viewing 'top':
9345 carl-eri 30 15 2975m 974m 8260 R 90 48.3 0:38.64 1
Picasa2

Only that the part where it says 974m varies between this and 1800m.

[leiz]

What's your setup here? You have an ext2/ext3 partition with your
photos, and you share your photos between Picasa on Windows and Picasa
on Linux?

[carl...@gmail.com]

Haven't seen this reply until now, sorry. I got a direct response from
one of the developers, and the discussion kinda continued there.

But to sum things up:
I have a ext3 partition shared between Windows and Linux, on which I
keep my photos. Previously, as there were no UTF-8 support in the
windows driver, file and folder names containing "extended
characters" (like Norwegian Æ,Ø,Å) were written with the normal
"Windows 1252" codepage (subset of ISO-8159-1), and subsequently were
displayed completely different when viewed on Linux. But there were no
other problems other than that.
The problems started when a new Ext2FS driver for Windows came along,
featuring UTF-8 support, and I started renaming files. As written in
the previous post, the memory use of Linux-Picasa jumped to over 2GB,
and practically stopped working. I also got some issues with the
Windows version of Picasa, but the memory just spiked 2-300MB for a
short while.

The solution
-----------------
I never got to know what caused the trouble, or why the Linux version
had problems while the Windows one didn't, but I found out how to fix
it. By some coincidence (backing up my pictures) I saw that one
Picasa.ini file was over 360 MEGABYTES! I had another big one too, but
that one was only 1-2MB big. I looked into it, and saw that for
instance, the string (in Norwegian): "Slik så jeg ut omtrent" becomes
"Slik sÃÆ'Æ’Ãâ€Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ÃƒÆ'â€Â’ÃÆ'ĉÃ
¢â€šÂ¬Ã‚ÂÃÆ'¢â‚¬â„¢ÃÆ'Æ’Ãâ€
¢â‚¬â„¢ÃƒÆ'¢â‚¬Â ÃÆ'ƒÂ¢ÃÆ'¢âÃ
¢â€šÂ¬Ã…¡Ã‚¬Ã
(repeating for about 1 megabyte) ÃÆ'ƒÆ’ jeg ut
omtrent".
I wonder if it got into some strange loop writing this garbage, and
perhaps stopping when forcibly terminated it.

Anyway, to fix the problem, I opened the file and deleted all the
garbage characters, replacing them with the right character (in this
instance 'å'). After doing that in all files affected (I searched for
all Picasa.ini files larger than 20KB), I never experienced any
problems anymore.

Carl-Erik