I know I've been posting a lot of questions recently so I'm sorry if this
one is obvious but I thought it was interesting none-the-less.

In a scene I've been creating it is using many (millions) of cylinders to
create an effect for me.  Something interesting I discovered about the
memory usage of POV-Ray while rendering my project are as follows:

(All values are rough and from Task Manager in Win XP SP1 under similar
conditions)
Description of modification     Total Memory Usage by system
Original Scene  -  849MB
Grouping all cylinders in 1 union  -  807MB
Grouping cylinders into 100's of unions - 807MB
Rotating and Translating the cylinders using vector functions before
invidual declaration (1 union) - 680MB

I only got a clue about this having an effect after POV-Ray crashed during
parse with something like "could not allocate 256 bytes for translate".

The memory usage appears to have an inverse effect on parse time, but
considering that I am avoiding HD swapping, it is well worth it.

-Nathan

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