Memory use: what should I expect while processing large image files?

Nobody has claimed this yet.

I need help understanding what to expect in terms of memory usage.

For some reason, I thought that using streaming and Jemalloc (on Node Alpine-18) would let me make transformations to image files that are larger than available RAM. #179 appears to be proving me wrong. (?)

What should I expect in terms of memory usage for the following:

- Download a large image file 250MB.
- Convert the downloaded image into an uncompressed PNG. All the below pipelines except the last stream to PNG files.
- Create a small copy of that file for analysis.
- Split the large image file into 3 channels (R, G, B) and perform transformations on those channels individually (using `linear`).
- Assemble transformed R, G, B channels into a complete image.
- Convert the completed image to JPEG or another format based on user input.

My (Dockerised) app on Heroku needs about 2.5GB of RAM to safely complete the above tasks. Is this reasonable?

The issue names no source file or test; start by reviewing the listed processing pipeline and referenced issue #179. Done means documenting expected memory usage for each stage and explaining whether roughly 2.5GB is reasonable for the described Node/Docker workflow.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.