"Anthony D. Baye" <Sha### [at] spamnomorehotmailcom> wrote:
> scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> > > now, from what I've read, it takes more than a thousand iterations to get good
> > > results, but trying to do just fifty iterations makes POV do an imitation of
> > > PAC-Man with my memory and swap space.  All 16GB of it.
> > >
> > > I don't know if this is a bug or a natural limitation of the geometry parsing
> > > engine.
> >
> > It looks to me like at each iteration you are doubling the number of
> > objects POV has in memory (by creating an intersection of two versions
> > of the previous object). That means after 50 iterations you will have
> > about 2^50 objects - I'm surprised you got that far!
>
> That's about what I figured was happening.  And I didn't get that far because
> I had to shut it down.

And no matter what you do, you won't be able to get that many with POV on any
system available on this planet today. Even with references, and no
transformations, it would take 8 petabytes (8192 terabytes) just to store the
references. Realistically you might get 2^30 spheres on a PC, but not with a
regular Windows (you need the a server variant, desktop variants only support 64
GB of RAM) as you will probably need 256 to 512 GB of RAM for it. Or you need a
lot of fast swap space.

Thorsten

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