> "darenw" <Gre### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
>> For my day job, i've been asked to get familiar with Amazon's EC2.  "Cloud
>> computing" - this is a strange new thing. To get familiar with it, i thought
>> i'd try running my favorite software on it.   Has anyone tried running POV-Ray
>> on EC2? Is is faster than on a regular or fancy desktop?
>
> I just tried it out on a "Free Tier" micro instance (they have a one-year free
> trial offer running).
>
> It started off quite well, but after about 5 seconds a mystery service kicked
> in, consuming about 95% of the CPU (at least that's what it looks like in
> Process Explorer, it's the svchost service, and the thread that kicks in is from
> the service "schedule"). There were a few subsequent intervals where I got 100%
> CPU for a few seconds again.
>
> I tried it a few times with the same result. I never see this schedule process
> do anything when the instance is running idle, so it is surely responding to the
> high CPU usage. So it looks like they have automated governance in place to
> prevent applications such as Povray to "misuse" their services.
>
> It might not be fit for Povray, but it can run a website or two without problems
> :-)
>
>
>
>

svchost.exe is a hosting process for various services. It's not related 
to POV-Ray in any maner, it's part of Windows. It make it possible for a 
service to crash without bringing the whole operating system down with it.

The schedule service is responsible for starting any scheduled task. It 
can be anything, like your anti-virus, a disk defragmentation, creating 
a routine restore point, indexing files, or...



Alain

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