jhu wrote:
> with compiler options (and possibly installing a new OS)! All on an
> AMD Phenom II x6 1090T @ stock (3.2 GHz). Still plan on installing
> FreeBSD on this computer eventually just for Povray speed
> improvements...

Did you read up on the schedulers on these various operating systems? 
They can often be configured to your needs in case the OS doesn't choose 
the best scheduling parameters itself. On Linux, you find documentation 
about the scheduler in the documentation of your kernel. The tool 
"schedtool" is useful and in its manpage, it is noted:

"SCHED_BATCH  [ since 2.6.16 in mainline ] SCHED_BATCH was designed for 
non-interactive, CPU-bound applications.  It uses longer timeslices (to 
better exploit the cache), but can be interrupted anytime by other 
processes in other classes to guaratee interac‐tion of the system. 
Processes in this class are selected last but may result in a 
considerable speed-up (up to 300%). No interactive boosting is done."

(On Debian, you will find schedtool in the packages with the same name. 
As far as I know you can also set the scheduler parameters via /proc)

So if povray is already running you could do something like
schedtool -3 `pidof povray`
or to start povray using SCHED_BATCH:
schedtool -3 -e povray

In theory, this should speed up things if your running other processes 
besides POVRay.

Greetings
Urs

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