space_cadet wrote:
> On my last project, I experienced something similar. All of the sudden my
> renders slowed to a crawl seemingly independent of any changes I made. So I
> undid my changes that supposedly invoked the slowdown. It didnt fix it. So I
> rolled back all changes to the point of the last known successful mass
> render. It didnt fix it. I was looking at two identical files, stroke for
> stroke. One rendered fine (the previous successful launch) and the other
> one crawled, even tho they were syntactically identical, character for
> character. Finally, I constructed a new file by copying and pasting the
> code from the problem file, line for line, into a new file buffer.  That
> fixed it. Even tho absolutely NO code changes were implemented. I then
> proceeded to implement all my mods that seemed to invoke the problem in the
> first place, and there was no appearance of the problem.
> 
> I hesitate to mention that, because it makes me look like an idiot. Any
> reader is surely convinced that I missed something in the file, as I would
> be if I were reading it from another poster. But thats not the case. I dont
> even know what I COULD put in a file to slow a render by orders of magnitude
> like that, let alone something that cant even be seen in a character by
> charcter comparison between two source files.

I'd say this sounds like a memory leak.  Try this: when you get to the 
slowdown, shut down POV-Ray and then restart it.  If that doesn't fix 
your problem, shut down your computer and restart it.  See if that 
effects anything - if so, then we're dealing with some type of memory leak.

However, its difficult to know whether the leak is in POV-Ray itself or 
in the OS, although you mentioned it happened on two different 
architectures.

...Chambers

PS You mentioned you're using a large geometry file - what size & type 
of file is it, and how much RAM do you have?

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