Am 16.09.2018 um 18:13 schrieb Sven Littkowski:
> It just happened that my laptop had many shutdowns until it completed
> the rendering of a simple scene.
> 
> POV-Ray already offers Render Priority and Duty Cycles, but apparently
> that was not enough. The problem is, that I am located here in the
> tropical Caribbean, and because of Global Warming we're getting insanely
> high temperatures in the shadow: over 43°C! The air temperature adds to
> the inner temperature of the laptop. Using already "Background" for
> Render Priority and "10%" for the Duty Cycles, it is still not enough.
> Thus my suggestions here:

Judging from both the source code and observable behaviour, I don't
think the duty cycle mechanism is even functional at the moment.

Also note that if your CPU has multiple cores, you can reduce power
consumption and thus thermal output simply by using fewer render threads
(`+wtN` option).

That said, if your computer shuts down due to overheating (as opposed to
e.g. throttling down), there's actually something severely wrong with
its thermal design - or the place you typically place it (make sure to
not cover any air slots, and don't place it in direct sunlight). While
computers may not be designed for 40°C and over, they should provide
enough margin for the CPU to enter throttling modes rather than brutally
shut down.

> - add a feature that halts the render if a user-defined processor heat
> level has been reached (like "80°C") and that continues when the
> processor has cooled down to a user-defined temperature (like "60°C").
> Allow to switch between C, K, and F to accommodate each user's preference.

That would be seriously non-portable; while modern operating systems
seem to provide /some/ standard interfaces for such stuff, not only do
they differ between operating systems, but on top of that they are
reported to not work reliably. So it would be back to reading hardware
registers - which are non-standardized and may only be accessible by
device drivers.

This stuff is so non-standardized and whacky that even specialized CPU
monitoring tools don't always get it right when a new generation of CPUs
is released.

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