On Mon, 14 Aug 2006 01:26:29 -0400, Meothuru wrote:

> Go to the "root-mode" and start
> provray with the highest possible "nice value" of the privileged mode.
> In this mode povray gets *much more* CPU-power than a normal user can
> ever get

Actually, you can renice user processes so they run at the highest
possible level; the behaviour in Linux is that a non-root user can set the
niceness level to a higher value than it's currently set.

There also can be a tradeoff if the processes impacted by running a
program at the highest priority affect processes that control disk i/o and
such - you can actually lose performance, depending on the process
(probably not so much the case with POV-Ray, but with things like bulkload
of a local LDAP server, the bottleneck tends to be the I/O channels rather
than processing, so pushing the niceness level to an 'unfriendly' level
can actually degrade overall performance of the bulkload).

Jim

Post a reply to this message