"Greg M. Johnson" wrote:
> 
> WARNING: I use Megapov 0.5 but I'm sure this is a povray general
> question.
> 
> Often when doing some projects that involve really intense parsing, such
> as 50 000 interations of forces between 10 particles, I run into a
> problem.  Simple mouse clicks and even switching between programs such
> as povray and my POVRAY.INI Notepad session cause hard drive crunching.
> This is the kind of thing that I'm sure is fixable by rebooting and is
> due to povray's temporarily using up all the resources--often my Windows
> clock is even delayed a few hours.
> 
> Q: What built-in system tool could I run on Win98 to determine whether
> my fixes--closing & reopening povray, rebooting, waiting an hour, etc.--
> have brought things back up to normal:

> a) System Monitor: what do I look for?

"Memory manager: Allocated memory"
"Memory manager: Swap file in use"

The disk crunching is Windows having to swap out enough stuff to be able
to load back into memory the snippets of machine code needed to process
your mouse clicks, or open Notepad, etc...  It gets very brutal when one
app is using so much memory that Windows has to swap itself out only to
realize a few microseconds later "hey I need that DLL" and swap
something else to reload the code in memory and then swap it back out...

Make sure that if you kill (or nicely ask it to stop) MegaPov, your
allocated memory goes back down to the level it was before you started
your render.

I once had a recursive tree macro that went a few levels too deep and
the parsing caused so much swapping that even ctrl-alt-del took minutes
to be processed.

> b) Resource Meter: what do I look for?

Kernel resources.

Kernel resources measure the number of processes, memory chunks
allocated, system hooks, etc... A program that allocates a
234574897346246 small bits of memory will use up more resources than a
program that allocates one big chunk of memory larger than the total
amount of memory used by the former.

User and GDI resources are less of a problem here as they monitor the
resources used to manage the number of opened windows, controls, etc...
that are drawn on screen, which is not astronomical when using Megapov.

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