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I happen to have a .5 Gigapixel image that I'm trying to process. I have a 24bit Mandelbrot render and an 8-bit mask I'm trying to merge together in GIMP 2.6. The images are both 23040x23040 square. I am attempting to merge the gray-scale mask into a transparency, which I did with much pain and suffering of my poor hard drive. The uncompressed 32-bit image should take up 2Gb in RAM (5. Megapixels x 4 channels). I've got 16Gb of RAM and GIMP simply refuses to take advantage of it, instead caching the image data to the hard disk while I'm trying to manipulate it.

And before anybody asks, yes I am using the 64-bit build for Windows. My OS is Windows 7 PRO 64-bit.

EDIT: Nevermind, answered my own question. I changed the tile cache to 12 Gigabytes. Heaven forbid, if I somehow fill that up, my OS will still have 4Gb breathing room. Gimp is now using 2.1 Gigs of RAM to store a 2 Gb image. Operations still take a while to process, even with dual ganged 1866Mhz OC RAM.

Now to find/create something artsy and big enough to paste behind the giant Mandelbrot, LOLz...

If anyone want's to play around with it:
24bit solid render https://mega.co.nz/#!r4tiyQRA!itnpruwOE7E1n7xT9M-AoL1OFaUO7-MZnKhMg93Sbm0
32bit w/ Alpha channel https://mega.co.nz/#!zgtiRBjD!xpbKdX8pEoEeQB51xDwMcYmtiRzNRe5n52BUgmE9w7o
8bit grayscale transparency mask https://mega.co.nz/#!mxljmapb!v1JQ8PUr5_1hHvK3zKWi9kw_EFHCHvLH3bhtZEpZ79Q