I have looked around for this answer and found a few good articles on how memory is managed, dpi vs resolution, and so on. I have seen some posts where people are trying to edit "high resolution images" but nothing near the size of what I am trying to do. I have 38400 x 21600 resolution, 11 layer, .pdn, which Paint.net is the only application where I have been able to successfully edit. Which is feat in of its own I think as GIMP and Photoshop just crash once the image is opened or can't open it due to lack of memory.
I do occasionally get some crashes in Paint.net but that's when I use some add-ons or resizing. I think the reason why is that this image is taking 28 gig of the 32 gig I have in this system. The application is trying to find a contiguous block of memory and attempts to write in a system reserved section of RAM.
Application version: paint.net 4.0.12 (Final 4.12.6099.39434)
Time of crash: 9/18/2016 7:26:53 AM
Application uptime: 01:07:25.2124908
Application state: Running
Working set: 2,495,384 KiB
Handles and threads: 849 handles, 39 threads, 280 gdi, 275 user
Install directory: C:\Program Files\paint.net
Current directory: C:\Program Files\paint.net
OS Version: 10.0.10586.0 Workstation x64
.NET version: CLR 4.0.30319.42000 x64, FX 4.6
Processor: 8x "AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor " @ ~4013MHz (DEP, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4_1, SSE4_2, XSAVE)
Physical memory: 32713 MB
Video card: AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series (v:1002, d:6719, r:0), Microsoft Basic Render Driver (v:1414, d:8C, r:0)
Hardware acceleration: True (default: True)
UI animations: True
UI DPI: 96.00 dpi (1.00x scale)
UI theme: Aero/Aero + DWM (Aero.msstyles)
Updates: True, 9/17/2016
Locale: pdnr.c: en-US, hklm: en-US, hkcu: en-US, cc: en-US, cuic: en-US
Exception details: System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.
I saw the post where it states the memory requirements for images is "(W x H x 4) x (L + 2)" so I know the simple solution would be to reduce the number of layers (or get more RAM). The number of layers can go from 7 to 11 layers as I work with the image so that's not out of the question.
TL;DR - What I am wondering is if there is anything I can do to help not only avoid crashes but improve the performance of Paint.net for an image this size.