Unsuccessful attempt to print a large jpeg file: what resource did I run out of?

I was trying to reproduce an A4 page of text by scanning it in grayscale with maximum resolution and then printing it. The file was about 4 MB in size. I couldn't print it either from the gimp or from geequie. The machine just seized up. Everything stopped and the image never reached the printing queue.

Just out of curiosity, I'd like to know what I ran out of: processing power or memory? I have a 4-core 2.41 GHz Intel Baytrail SoC and 4 GB of core.