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?

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.


--
dhm### [at] mediaonenet
http://www.casdn.neu.edu/~dmiller

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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?
> 
> 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.
> 
> --
> dhm### [at] mediaonenet
> http://www.casdn.neu.edu/~dmiller

Remco
http://www.xs4all.nl/~remcodek/

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Yep, the slowdown happens to me, too. No swapping, but the system looks as if
POV were still rendering at full priority.
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.

Margus

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?
> 
> 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.
> 
> --
> dhm### [at] mediaonenet
> http://www.casdn.neu.edu/~dmiller

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This doesn't help, or answer your problem Dennis, but I'd like to
see a feature that uses the swap file and memory differently,
I'll explain:

When parsing a scene that needs to swap for a few days it sounds
asthough the machine is working something out, placing an answer
to that in the swap file, reading that answer in order to find
out where an object goes or something, deleting that answer, and
putting the object place info inot the swap file and then
starting over again for the next object.

Would it be possible to have POV use memory until it's full and
then instead of starting to swap, putting say the last ten
percent of memory into the swap file and there fore having ten
percent of memory to play with unitl it's full and doing the same
again over and over rather than constantly reading and writing to
the swap file.

I don't know if this would be possible or not, but it would speed
those types of render up considerably.


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?
> 
> 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.
> 
> --
> dhm### [at] mediaonenet
> http://www.casdn.neu.edu/~dmiller

-- 
Cheers
Steve

email - mailto:sjl### [at] ndirectcouk

%HAV-A-NICEDAY Error not enough coffee. 

web:  http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~sjlen/

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Margus Ramst wrote:
>I do however get "File changed
>outside POV, reload?" quite often, although I've done nothing with the file in
>question.

I get this a lot too. I've had an animation rendering that wouldn't
let me Stop, I could Pause but not stop, I ended up having to use
ctr-alt-delete and End Task. POV just wouldn't let up.

-- 
...coffee?...yes please! extra sugar,extra cream...Thank you.

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In article <37BDD20B.AAF0364A@ndirect.co.uk> , Steve <sjl### [at] ndirectcouk>
wrote:
> When parsing a scene that needs to swap for a few days it sounds
> asthough the machine is working something out, placing an answer
> to that in the swap file, reading that answer in order to find
> out where an object goes or something, deleting that answer, and
> putting the object place info inot the swap file and then
> starting over again for the next object.

I think you misunderstand what a swap file does: When physical memory gets
low the operating system (not POV-Ray!) will store some blocks of memory on
a mass storage device (usually harddisk) and adjust the memory map of the
CPU so the larger memory still appears to be there even for the processor.
When it tries to access memory that is on disk, an exception handler (= a
function) of the OS will be called and it will move some other blocks of
memory to disk and move those needed from disk to memory. This processes is
completely transparent to POV-Ray as it is to any other application.

> Would it be possible to have POV use memory until it's full and
> then instead of starting to swap, putting say the last ten
> percent of memory into the swap file and there fore having ten
> percent of memory to play with unitl it's full and doing the same
> again over and over rather than constantly reading and writing to
> the swap file.

As said before, the swap file is managed by the operating system. Most
operating system memory managers can determine efficiently which blocks of
memory to move to disk and which are needed often and therefore should stay
in memory.

> I don't know if this would be possible or not, but it would speed
> those types of render up considerably.

While a specialized memory manager could surely squeeze out a few percent,
it would basically require to write a whole operating system as memory
management is obviously one of the core functions of any OS!


    Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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So basicly I've got to get a hell of a lot more memory before
rendering that scene which takes 8 days to parse, the annoying
thing is that it only takes two and a half hours to parse the
first half, I know this because of putting #dbugs in to monitor
the parsing.  


Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> 
> In article <37BDD20B.AAF0364A@ndirect.co.uk> , Steve <sjl### [at] ndirectcouk>
> wrote:
> > When parsing a scene that needs to swap for a few days it sounds
> > asthough the machine is working something out, placing an answer
> > to that in the swap file, reading that answer in order to find
> > out where an object goes or something, deleting that answer, and
> > putting the object place info inot the swap file and then
> > starting over again for the next object.
> 
> I think you misunderstand what a swap file does: When physical memory gets
> low the operating system (not POV-Ray!) will store some blocks of memory on
> a mass storage device (usually harddisk) and adjust the memory map of the
> CPU so the larger memory still appears to be there even for the processor.
> When it tries to access memory that is on disk, an exception handler (= a
> function) of the OS will be called and it will move some other blocks of
> memory to disk and move those needed from disk to memory. This processes is
> completely transparent to POV-Ray as it is to any other application.
> 
> > Would it be possible to have POV use memory until it's full and
> > then instead of starting to swap, putting say the last ten
> > percent of memory into the swap file and there fore having ten
> > percent of memory to play with unitl it's full and doing the same
> > again over and over rather than constantly reading and writing to
> > the swap file.
> 
> As said before, the swap file is managed by the operating system. Most
> operating system memory managers can determine efficiently which blocks of
> memory to move to disk and which are needed often and therefore should stay
> in memory.
> 
> > I don't know if this would be possible or not, but it would speed
> > those types of render up considerably.
> 
> While a specialized memory manager could surely squeeze out a few percent,
> it would basically require to write a whole operating system as memory
> management is obviously one of the core functions of any OS!
> 
>     Thorsten
> 
> ____________________________________________________
> Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
> e-mail: tho### [at] trfde
> 
> Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

-- 
Cheers
Steve

email - mailto:sjl### [at] ndirectcouk

%HAV-A-NICEDAY Error not enough coffee. 

web:  http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~sjlen/

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Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> As said before, the swap file is managed by the operating system. Most
> operating system memory managers can determine efficiently which blocks of
> memory to move to disk and which are needed often and therefore should stay
> in memory.

Aye, and a pity 'tis, too, considering a weird thing that just came
to light which I'm assuming (simply on general principals) is a
MS Windows thang...

I have a trace currently that exceeds my available memory considerably
during parse (from what I can see parsing seems to pull two to three
times the memory needed for the actual render itself, although it
releases the excess when finished). So anyway, it parses for a bit,
then starts to swap, then finally finishes parsing and returns a 
solid 30 megs of RAM, but get this... apparently the portion doled
to swapfile is still out there on the disk for some reason. This
conclusion I draw from the facts that A) The allocated plus free
mem exceeds what I have installed, and B) The harddrive thrashes
halfway to Montana and back when the trace finishes. 

You would think the OS is your friend. That it would say: Hey, I've
got 17 megs in swapfile, and 30 megs of physical RAM free; Wouldn't
my pal, the user, be pleased if I stuck this virtual mem back where
it belongs and boosted his performance? But alas, this doesn't
look like the case. 

What brings me to post this (unrelated to the original question)
side topic is: can those of you with experience on other platforms
tell me whether this is an inevitable consequence of virtual memory,
or just some idiotic thing that Microsoft, in their infinitessimal
wisdom didn't foresee?


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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Charles wrote:
> 
> Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> > As said before, the swap file is managed by the operating system. Most
> > operating system memory managers can determine efficiently which blocks of
> > memory to move to disk and which are needed often and therefore should stay
> > in memory.
> 
> Aye, and a pity 'tis, too, considering a weird thing that just came
> to light which I'm assuming (simply on general principals) is a
> MS Windows thang...
> 
> I have a trace currently that exceeds my available memory considerably
> during parse (from what I can see parsing seems to pull two to three
> times the memory needed for the actual render itself, although it
> releases the excess when finished). So anyway, it parses for a bit,
> then starts to swap, then finally finishes parsing and returns a
> solid 30 megs of RAM, but get this... apparently the portion doled
> to swapfile is still out there on the disk for some reason. This
> conclusion I draw from the facts that A) The allocated plus free
> mem exceeds what I have installed, and B) The harddrive thrashes
> halfway to Montana and back when the trace finishes.
> 
> You would think the OS is your friend. That it would say: Hey, I've
> got 17 megs in swapfile, and 30 megs of physical RAM free; Wouldn't
> my pal, the user, be pleased if I stuck this virtual mem back where
> it belongs and boosted his performance? But alas, this doesn't
> look like the case.
> 
> What brings me to post this (unrelated to the original question)
> side topic is: can those of you with experience on other platforms
> tell me whether this is an inevitable consequence of virtual memory,
> or just some idiotic thing that Microsoft, in their infinitessimal
> wisdom didn't foresee?
> 
> 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

  This is one of my pet peaves beleive me. Windows has some funny ways of
managing memory and none of it is related to human logic. Take a look I 
believe in the advanced users group for a thread I started not too long
ago. 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.

-- 
Ken Tyler

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

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Charles wrote:

> What brings me to post this (unrelated to the original question)
> side topic is: can those of you with experience on other platforms
> tell me whether this is an inevitable consequence of virtual memory,
> or just some idiotic thing that Microsoft, in their infinitessimal
> wisdom didn't foresee?

Some of it depends on which runtime libraries the application is using, which
compiler, etc.


But for Windows, consider this: They are the same people who originally hyped
NTFS as no ever needing a defragmenter.

They a few years later they hyped the fact that NT 5.0 was going to include the
NTFS defragmenting technology developed by an independent company.

--
"My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box" - W.A.Y.

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