In article <web.42f89fab22ec88d03b3a698d0@news.povray.org>, 
lon### [at] yahoocom says...
> "Anthony D. Baye" <Sha### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> > Lonnie wrote:
> > > This might actually be made to work with photons, although be prepared to
> > > have your swap file limit increased to an astonomical size and a LONG
> > > render time!
> > >
> > >
> >
> > What's a swap file?
> >
> > I'm on a Mac.  maybe it's called something else.
> >
> > A.D.B.
> 
> A "swap file" or more correctly a page file, is what a Windows computer uses
> when it runs out of RAM.  Data is "swapped" in and out of memory to the
> hard disk as needed.  While it works OK for background tasks that only need
> to access their data occasionally, things like a big photon map will slow a
> system to a crawl.  The CPU is spending far more time waiting on the hard
> disk than it is crunching numbers.  I'm not sure how a Mac does this, but
> it has to be something similiar.
> 
Probably more efficiently though. Unless they fixed it in XP, the problem 
was that it started paging once a certain percentage of memory was used 
at one shot, even if you still had a significant amount left. Something 
stupid like 1MB or something on the older versions of Windows. This is 
what made games lag. If you moved around more than X megs in one shot, 
the memory manager would start paging out, even if you still had 90% of 
your physical RAM available. Or at least that is what I read anyway, when 
someone described the problem.

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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