Cliff Bowman wrote in message <377b93bf.459452@news.povray.org>...
>On Thu, 1 Jul 1999 10:56:47 +1000, "Martin Crisp"
><Spa### [at] tesseractcomau> wrote:
>
>>Hi Ho,
>>
>>thought I posted this last night from home, but I can't see it on the
>>server this morning (at work)...
>>
>[snip]
>>A typical frame renders in under 30 seconds. If I leave POV rendering
>>frames, by the time it's done 50 that's become a minute, by 300 frames
>>it's more like 4 minutes. Quitting, re-launching and re-rendering the
>>*same* frame shows that it's not a difference between frames causing
the
>>slowdown (time drops to about 30seconds again).
>>
>>In the original render decay thread Ken someone (not Tyler) commented
>>that as far as he knew it was a Windows only problem - not so: 3.1g on
a
>>PowerMac (sys 8.6 qt 4.0, 30MB RAM allocated to POV-Ray - using
nowhere
>>near this much, other apps open but idle (i.e. should be constant
load))
>>
>IMHO it sounds like the Mac you're using has enough similarities to
>Windoze to suffer some similar problems. I'd imagine that there's some
>grabage management/memory management that's suffering slowdown because
>POV isn't releasing enough CPU power to the OS. If I'm roughly right

Hmm, no offence but I doubt it (but I'll fiddle over the weekend and
followup if I find anything). When I say other apps:
SETI@home (not launched but it's control panel has the mac equivalent of
a TSR set to do nothing unless machine is idle for 4 hours - since it
doesn't consider CPU load in it's 'idle' calculations DUH! It shouldn't
be pulling more than a tick or three every minute or so)
Stickies (not exactly a high CPU load)
Finder (idle, hidden, also not a high load.)
The menubar clock (which seems to get a cycle every 2 seconds or so when
POV's throttle is set to 'tyrannical'.)

>then the only way to improve consistency would be to lower your
>render's priority - which may or may not end up in a slower overall
>render time.
>
>Myself I render in batches partly because a lot of my frames take
>hours to render. I have .ini file settings which allow one PC to work
>on a hundred frames or so while another PC works on a different
>subset.

Haven't really played with .ini files (briefly looked like I'd get
*free* access to a network of boxes in the States that I could use as a
render farm, but that's fallen through :-(). Haven't looked at the
scriptability that Eduard & co have put into the Mac version, but I'll
probably take that route if I want to set up an all-mac render farm
(yeah, probably easier using .ini files, but with luck I'll get finer
control about which machines get which frames from AppleScript - and I'm
fairly comfortable with AS too...)

Thanks for the comment, will advise if I can narrow down an 'optimum'...

Have Fun
Martin
--
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