Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Yeah. Although the fact that it takes a minute or two to start up makes 
> me think it's spending time trying to find a free machine to run it on. 

It might be that, altho I'd expect it's more a matter of transferring the 
multi-gigabyte OS from S3, decompressing and decrypting it, putting it on 
the disk as a virtual drive, and then booting it up.

> Maybe each physical machine runs up to X virtual machines or something? 

That would be my guess, especially since they guarantee a certain amount of 
performance, and they let you pick how many CPUs you'll have, and so on. :-)

> (I would imagine transfering a runnin image from place to place would be 
> infeasieble, even in a datacenter.)

Shouldn't be *too* hard, if all you're talking about is moving the disk 
image. It's not like you get to hook up special devices or anything. It 
would lose all the TCP connections, most likely.

> individual user who just wants some POV-Ray time... EC2 does not, even 
> remotely, make sense.

Unless you want to spin up 20 machines for one hour to do a trace, say. :-) 
Or if you don't have access to the sort of thing you're talking about.

> Well, you need to own a PC in order to design it in the first place. ;-) 

True. Depends of course on how studly your machine is. You started this by 
complaining you couldn't let the render run overnight, didn't you? :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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