Well, I am convinced that MacMegaPOV has the same memory leak (or
**whatever** you want to call it, Thorsten!) that plagues the Windows
version when it comes to loading and unloading lots of large image maps
over a series of animation passes. The exact same problem happened
**AGAIN** with yet another animation job... the only difference this time
around was that I started rendering at frame 1055 and it froze after
completing frame 1117--the dreaded 63rd frame.

I'm in the middle of trying to get a project finished, but when I have some
free time I'm going to upload the files to the binaries section to prove
that what I'm seeing isn't just some figment of my imagination. Who
knows--maybe I'm doing something in the SDL that is causing WinPOV and
MacMegaPOV to slowly leak memory, and I'd be perfectly happy for Thorsten
to point out the foolish error of my ways so I can continue using
MacMegaPOV on my G5. As things stand now, though, I can't reliably use
software that buggers itself after a few dozen invocations.

Remco de Korte wrote:
>Scott Gammans wrote:
>>
>> >So there may indeed be a memory leak occurring when you render
>> >animations with POVRay that need to load a lot of images.
>>
>> Yes, that is exactly, EXACTLY the behavior I have seen in the past.
>>
>> >The solution
>> >would probably be not to reload image maps for each scene but to keep
>> >them in memory.
>>
>> Would you mind explaining what you mean by that? Is this a suggestion for
>> the POV-Ray developers for the next version of POV-Ray, or are you
>> suggestion a technique that I can implement using the SDL? And if it's the
>> latter, please provide a brief SDL example of what you are talking about.
>>
>> Many thanks...
>
>It's a solution I used in the program I mentioned. It had to load
>graphics data continuously and the only way I could solve it is to load
>everything only one time and then keep it in memory.
>For a POVRay animation render that would mean that it would keep
>imagemaps and such in memory until the end of the render instead of
>loading them for each frame, but to be honest I don't know how POVRay
>handles things now, I'm only assuming it doesn't do this already.
>
>So, obviously, this is not a solution you can achieve with the SDL. It
>may only help to know that cutting down on the image loading *might*
>help.
>
>What puzzles me is how this could occur on Mac as well though...
>When I ran into this problem and found that the cause wasn't in my own
>code (eliminating almost all of it didn't solve it) I figured that it
>was something in the way Windows (98 at the time) handles files.
>Now I think that it could also have been somewhere in between (the code
>that loads and decodes the images); I realize this seems vague, but I
>didn't get any further then that... :)
>
>Remco
>

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