From the first version of Graphics Mill for .NET our customers report our technical support department with “out of memory” problem. The problem arises when somebody tries to handle images of large size. And the most annoying moment that errors take places sometimes, it means that the application worked with the file yesterday but today you get “out of memory” when you try to open it.

Mainly this issue is based on the limitation of Windows architecture. It is well known that 32bit Windows provides a process with 2 GB of address space only. 2GB of memory per process is not so much for image processing. Say we need to load RGB image of 10000x7500 pixels. It requires about 225MB of memory – and it is almost 1/8 of available memory for a process. Moreover the address space is always fragmented. And it is not guaranteed that memory manager will find a memory block of enough size. As a result we will get “out of memory” problem.

Microsoft has released x64 family of operation systems which are good way to get rid of memory limitation problem. All previous versions of Graphics Mill work on these operating systems perfectly because Microsoft included backward compatibility with 32bit code. But to get all advantages of operating system and support more than 2GB of memory, we needed to adopt source code and recompile Graphics Mill with 64bit option of C++ compiler. Now we are on the finish line. 64bit version of Graphics Mill passes the major part of unit tests and we are ready to give Graphics Mill x64 publicity.

Graphics Mill x64 is available as beta version. The new beta would certainly be of interest to developers of memory critical solutions, such as high-demand pre-print preparation and document imaging systems. To download Graphics Mill x64 Beta you need to sign up for beta testing program on our site in beta testing section.

Graphics Mill x64 Beta requires the following:

• If you have Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 which includes II7.0, you need to make sure that you have the optional "IIS 6 Management Compatibility" option installed within IIS7 before installing Graphics Mill x64.
• You need to install Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x64). You can download it from Microsoft site.

We appreciate any feedback concerning the functionality and runtime of Graphics Mill x64. Relevant reports and requests will be considered and answered with highest priority.