Gaussian blur out of memory

I tried to make a wrap blur plugin for bluring tilable textures. I linked two blur nodes after each other, one gaussian and one non gaussian, just to have more control over bluring. Anyway, on a 2048x2048 texture FForge starts to compute the blur, and when the memory consuption of the plugin reaches ~400Mb, it crashes in various ways, but most of the time mentions the lack of memory.
I had ~1Gb memory free out of 2Gb.
By the way, do you know a free tilable blur plugin?

I had 3Gb free on the scratch disk.
Unfortunately I was not able to send az error report. I mean I clicked on the appropriate button but nothing happened. (Next time I'll copy the error messages.)
I restarted the system and defragmented the partition for good measure. FForge worked like a charm while consumed 450 Mb of memory.
But I didn't stop there! I disabled all page files, loaded a few images to PSP, and feed FForge a 4Kx4K texture to blur. PSP ate 600Mb alone, FForge started processing the image. The mem consumption rocketed up to 750 Mb, then fell back to 140 Mb and the I got one of the errormessages I saw previously:

<class XFW::Kernel::StdException> bad allocation

Windows was also whining about "low on virtual". I dismissed both error messages and to my surprise FForge kept working on the image. It showed a few "bad allocation" ocasionally, but eventually finished the preview and also applied the effect to the final image. FForge has the edurance of a cockroach. Well done guys!

FYI: "bad allocation" is just "out of memory". There are some circumstances where we cannot allocate more memory (running out of Windows swap space, processing large images and having a deep component tree with multiple blur-based components on one of branches, and some others). I will look into the "deep tree" case, probably I can reduce the probability of the error in these cases by trimming down the internal cache more aggresively.

zoltan, if you're going to stress test a particular piece of software, it shld be done on a clean boot, having run no other software before it. because of the way windows handles memory and page filing and the rather poor freeing up of said resources, the only fair test is on a clean boot.

sure, you want to test after running some other heavy applications to check that aspect also, but your best test of a specific piece of software is on a clean boot.

if i run FF after booting up i can run it quite a long while. if i run it after running other heavy applications like photoshop or paint shop pro or some heavy graphics game, i start to see the swap file come into play quite quickly. this is just a windows thing. it's a hog and hates to give back resources.

craig