ImageMagick memory problems

I noticed my Windows development machine had slowed to a crawl recently, and I assumed it was something to do with the new plugins to convert images that are in development. Turns out it was, but not in an obvious way. Because the plugin requires ImageMagick, any EPrints process will load ImageMagick; this includes the scheduled task to run the indexer which I had installed and promptly forgotten about.

It looks like that because I had installed ImageMagick after I created this task, its environment didn't include the necessary paths for the Perl module to load correctly. It could find the Perl component, but not the XS part. Because of the way it autoloads unknown functions, this was causing an infinite recursion every time the indexer ran, which Perl eventually caught but not before it had used 2GB of my swap space and all my physical memory.

Recreating the task (in fact, just changing a property and changing it back) seems to have got rid of the problem. Maybe tasks store the path from the environment when they are created. This just proves why scheduling the indexer has to be done carefully; the Unix version has a complicated script to check that everything's running successfully, which I'm hoping Task Scheduler can duplicate under Windows.

On the positive side, the new plugins to convert images using the Perl API look to be working fine. Next stop, GhostScript—and the Windows version is getting closer to feature complete relative to Unix.