The first frame is a doozy!

For an animation of 100 flocking objects,  I first create an INC with an
array of 100 actors x 6 coordinates x 375 time periods.  I then read the
INC to make my animation.  As the animation starts up, there are 100
actors in the first frame, 200 in the second, up to 2400 in the 24th,
with 2400 thereafter.  The animation in effect makes 100 growing sea
snakes which have reached maximum length at frame 24.

If I just start up naturally, the first 24 frames take longer and longer
to trace: an average of about 6 extra seconds per frame. One might think
this were reasonable, as I'm adding 100 new objects in each frame...  An
overnight render was once taking 7 minutes per frame after about a
hundred or so frames!

Then I got the idea of stopping and restarting the animation after about
the 4th frame.  Now, every frame takes about 4 seconds, with no increase
in render time with increasing objects, and at worst 8 second render
time by the 375th frame!  I also noticed that once I've done the stop at
frame 4, further stopping provides no benefit!

Doctor, give me the news. Do these data provide any hints at making a
small tweak to povray 3.1h to fix this animation slowdown without a
total rewrite from scratch? Is it making some BS calculation in the
first frame that uses up gobs of memory and is not really needed?  The
problem is in the first frame, it seems.   Apologies if this is a dumb
question.  Povray is the only language I'm fluent at; I know more about
chip attach and substrate ceramic materials science than I do about how
computers "actually work."

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