Comment 13 for bug 414413

1) import and embed all images from the zip archive

> First i tried to select embed (logs called -embed.txt)
> Both versions stopped working at around 1GB memory usage.
> Read from Task Manager, Memory (Private Working Set).

I stopped trying to reproduce the crash after embedding 16 images, resulting in a 150 MB sized SVG file. Inkscape 0.48+devel r9762 on Mac OS X 10.5.8 produces the same repeated console messages:
** (inkscape-bin:45289): WARNING **: GC Warning: Repeated allocation of very large block (appr. size 11063296):
 May lead to memory leak and poor performance.
but no crash, and after saving and relaunching Inkscape it reopened the SVG file (16 embedding JPG images) without crash. Since my system only has a total of 2 GB RAM, the test causes a lot of memory paging and nearly freezes the system and other applications.

Personally I tend to think that Inkscape - as a vector editor - isn't optimized to handle so much embedded raster data (embedding 40 JPEG images with a total size of over 72 MB on disk) - maybe applications like raster image editors are better suited for this task when combining all images in original size and quality into one big file is required?

2) import and link all images from the zip archive

> Then i tried to select link (log called -link.txt).
> I only did this with the development version. It
> worked better with link and I got fewer log errors.
> Out of 40 images it failed with 2.

Works without issues in Inkscape 0.48 and 0.48+devel r9762 on Mac OS X 10.5.8: no errors or warnings reported in the console when importing and linking the files, though memory consumption is still high, and no warnings when loading the SVG with the collage (though that takes some seconds).

For testing see attached SVG file with relative links to all JPG files in the image archive (put the SVG file inside the images directory to allow Inkscape to find all linked files).