I need to combine large number of images. I found that, I should use imagemagick, but there are some problems. The site of this software said that, imagemagick could work on huge size images like giga and tra bytes images. In 32bit windows the address space of each process is utmost 3 giga bytes. Then supposing a 4 giga bytes image, the imagemagick should not able to work on it.
Then imagemagick work on hard disk, instead of RAM, on so large images (if I mistake please tell me). Using this thought I decide to use montage command of imagemagick to combine my images in one big image, but when running the following command a low virtual memory error occurs and operation fail. My RAM are 500MB and I try to combine about 3000 or higher number of images using follwing command.

>montage -limit memory 300 -limit map 200 -concatenate -tile 100x30 test*.jpg output.jpg

please help me to know how imagemagick can work on tra-bytes images, or if you know another way or tool to doing such work, tell me.