Ken wrote:
> There was a rather lenghty conversation on the pitiful waste of
> system memory when having to go to the swap file and the reasons behind
> it. If I can find the thread I will give you a direct pointer to it.

See the thread "Memory reporting" in povray.windows posted on 07-26-1999.

-- 
Ken Tyler

See my 700+ Povray and 3D Rendering and Raytracing Links at:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html

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Ken wrote:
> 
> Ken wrote:
> > There was a rather lenghty conversation on the pitiful waste of
> > system memory when having to go to the swap file and the reasons behind
> > it. If I can find the thread I will give you a direct pointer to it.
> 
> See the thread "Memory reporting" in povray.windows posted on 07-26-1999.
> 

Ah, yes. Thank you very muchly. This thread did indeed go a long 
way toward answering some of my questions about this --- weird --- 
phenomenon. Looks like it it a windows thing, afterall (big 
surprise). Eventually, in the far flung reaches of what we currently 
know as the future, I'll be upgrading the whole kit and kaboodle 
(what IS a kaboodle, anyway?) and my current machine will become an 
exploration box so I have something to experiment on (hardware and 
softwarewise) without risking my prime machine. I think I just 
added "check out Linux" to my computer's list of things to do when 
it's retired<g>. In the  meantime, guess I'll just have to max out 
my memory & learn to stop gritting my teeth to the sound of hard
drive thrashing... :\


Charles
-- 
http://www.enter.net/~cfusner
"...Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time,
 and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell..." 
                              -The Two Towers, JRR Tolkien

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> I haven't gotten the message you describe. I do however get "File changed
> outside POV, reload?" quite often, although I've done nothing with the file in
> question.

Ditto aplenty...

--
Anthony L. Bennett
http://welcome.to/TonyB

Non nova, sed nove.

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I've seen a one-month old HDD of an NT workstation. Since formatting,
NT was installed, PhotoShop, Corel Draw, Illustrator, Painter, 3DMAX,
Adobe Premierre, Cool Edit Pro (Taiti OEM), some PerceptionVR
software, and various smaller packages including POV-Ray (my doing :)
no one actually used it though :( ) This was the main workstation in a
local multimedia company. It had two HDs, one for software and one for
data. Oddly, software was working almost twice as slow as compared to
the PhotoShop-only machine or CorelDraw only machine, which were
equivalent in MB and CPU but with less memory and HD space, and were
running Windows 95 OSR 2. When the sysop ordered a trird party plug-in
for the workstation and ran it on the software HD, he almost lost his
marbles (me too.) There were about 500 file fragments, 200 swap
fragments and several thousand (!) free space fragments.

Perhaps it would have behaved better if there was more free space on
the HD. There was about a gig free, but swap was only about 50 MB at
the time (and it often ran up to 300-400 MB), I don't know. But to
claim NT needs no defragmenting is a dam^Hrn lie from MicroSoft and
nothing else.

AFAIK Linux needs no defragmenting (at least I've never seen a
defragmenter), but still when booting my SlackWare 3.5 it says "0.2%
non-contiguous" -- anyone have an idea what this might mean? I know
this part should really go to povray.unix, but then again, the first
part is for p.w :)


Peter Popov
ICQ: 15002700

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Charles wrote in message <37BF57BC.624DDADD@enter.net>...
>...I'll be upgrading the whole kit and kaboodle (what IS a kaboodle,
anyway...

A kaboodle is what you get when you sell that which you acquired using your
kit.

Mark

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On Fri, 20 Aug 1999 11:42:57 +0200, Remco de Korte
<rem### [at] xs4allnl> wrote:

>Dennis Miller wrote:
>> 
>> Howdy. I often do long animations that have very complex scenes, to the
>> extent that when I try to quit, it takes a few minutes to reclaim the
>> memory. However, even after quitting and closing the interface, my
>> system will grind to an incredibly slow tempo until I reboot. In fact,
>> once when I had quit PV and was trying to shut down, pvengine was still
>> showing in my Task Window (Win 98). Anyone ever have a similar problem?
>
>Yep. I think it has to do with the amount of memory that has to be recovered.
>If the memory is in the swap file you'll hear your harddisk rattling for about
>half an hour and you know what's going on and that seems only half as startling
>as when your system tries to regain control over 256Mb of Ram.
>Most of the time my system freezes for about a minute, the only thing still
>working is the mouse but every now and then just moving the mouse will cause a
>rattle from the internal speaker. Is this to simulate the harddisk?

Ot's probably your PC "reporting" (albiet somewhat uninformatively)
uninterpreted interrupts. You can get similar clicks if you've a
faulty keyboard/mouse that's generating spurious IRQ's (not much help
I know but my best guess).

>> Also, when I am rendering, hit Pause, and run another app, such as
>> Netscape, I get a series of "Cannot save file, file in use by another
>> application (paraphrased)" messages from POV. It's as if POV doesn't
>> recognize it is the app using the file.
>> Any comments?
>> Thanks much.
>> d.
>
>I see this message annoyingly often, but not really with a paused render.
>> 
You can if you pause it before POV has finished parsing. Once it's
parsed, and is building bounding blocks, or light buffers, or vista
buffers, or actually rendering then AFAIK it doesn't happen... at
least, not here!


Cheers,

Cliff Bowman
Why not pay my 3D Dr Who site a visit at http://www.who3d.cwc.net/

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