Yes, it seems to have been compiled with imagemagick support. I don't have 14Gb of ram :-)So, the problem is then that this is not any kind of image. It's a text file (actually a program for http://art.kano.me, which expects coffeescript). If I run:  convert Identify nelson.artimagemagick tells me that I have a 26708x29472 1-bit ART image, which explains the problem! It loads normally if I rename the file not to have the .art suffix. So I can solve my immediate problem. It's not clear to me whether imagemagick is making a real mistake here. it doesn't seemto do any significant checking on the image header: https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/blob/7ce65e7125a4e1df1a274ce373c537a9df9c16cd/coders/art.cHowever these old formats often didn't include any redundancy anyway. However it does seem like any filename ending in .art is a bit dangerous for emacs at the moment. Alex From: Eli Zaretskii To: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen Cc: ajb44.geo@yahoo.com; 22289@debbugs.gnu.org Sent: Saturday, January 2, 2016 8:26 AM Subject: Re: bug#22289: 24.3; Emacs crashes on loading file > From: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen > Date: Sat, 02 Jan 2016 03:57:17 +0100 > Cc: 22289@debbugs.gnu.org > > Alex Burr writes: > > > 1) loaded attached file 'nelson.art' with ctrl-x f > > 2) emacs then proceeded to malloc all core, causing linux to grind to a halt. > > If I save the image to a file and then use "display" to display it, my > machine grinds to a halt for 15 seconds, and then display says it can't > display it... > > Could be an imagemagick bug of some kind... Alex, was your Emacs compiled with Imagemagick support?  Mine wasn't, so visiting that file does nothing special.