Willem <Willem> wrote:
> My system is quite stable, I can leave a batches of video's
> te be transformed on friday evening and they very well
> transcode over the weekend.The only (!!) program
> in 2005 giving me trouble is MegaPov 1.2.1......so
> lets concentrate on megaPov, not my fairly standard
> Gentoo Linux Box.
>
> I am more thinking in the direction of memory corruption
> and/or pointer errors.

A user application like POV-Ray (or anyother application for that matter)
cannot cause a system crash unless there is either a kernel bug or a system
hardware failure. Either way, the problem is on your system, not in
POV-Ray.

Most likely you have some faulty memory (just one instable bit is enough!)
and as POV-Ray requires a lot of memory, it is more likely that the other
applications you run just don't use all your memory or you are mostly
lucky. It is also not impossible that you have a cooling problem and only
after running POV-Ray (which causes high CPU load) for an extended period
of time the heat inside your computer gets high enough to cause arbitrary
failures.

After running a memory test program (not the BIOS memory test!), try running
your system under maximum load for a day (or longer) and then you are more
likely see other failures. Then fix your cooling problems.

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