Ben Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> Are you *really* sure what the source of the slowdown is?  Have you
> tried putting the model in the current scene, with its native scaling?
> Or did you just render the model at its native scaling in another scene?
>

No, I'm not *really* sure of the source of the slowdown.  However, when I
render the scene with native scaling (simply comment out the "scale
...0000254") it renders, when I comment it back in, it crawls. I reduced the
scene to just one piece of the offensive geometry (which does not have
textures), and one light. It should have rendered in 5 minutes based on
previous performance, but still hung forever when scaled. Highly
suggestive, but not conclusive.

However, I launched a major render for over the holiday weekend on Friday,
with the native scaling presuming it was ok, but the performance I saw
before leaving suggested maybe the problem wasnt eliminated. I'll see
tuesday morning when I arrive at work.

On my last project, I experienced something similar. All of the sudden my
renders slowed to a crawl seemingly independent of any changes I made. So I
undid my changes that supposedly invoked the slowdown. It didnt fix it. So I
rolled back all changes to the point of the last known successful mass
render. It didnt fix it. I was looking at two identical files, stroke for
stroke. One rendered fine (the previous successful launch) and the other
one crawled, even tho they were syntactically identical, character for
character. Finally, I constructed a new file by copying and pasting the
code from the problem file, line for line, into a new file buffer.  That
fixed it. Even tho absolutely NO code changes were implemented. I then
proceeded to implement all my mods that seemed to invoke the problem in the
first place, and there was no appearance of the problem.

I hesitate to mention that, because it makes me look like an idiot. Any
reader is surely convinced that I missed something in the file, as I would
be if I were reading it from another poster. But thats not the case. I dont
even know what I COULD put in a file to slow a render by orders of magnitude
like that, let alone something that cant even be seen in a character by
charcter comparison between two source files.

I initially thought my current problem was the same situation, until I honed
in on the scale issue. So these situations may or may not be related.

I was hoping and praying this would sound familiar to someone. I still never
figured out what the issue was on the last project, that alone still gnaws
at me. If this current situation doesnt get resolved, I got some real
trouble.

Of course, I've looked at all command line options as well, and the problem
happens on two different architectures. Someone suggested perhaps one of my
files didnt have an 'end of line' character at the end and maybe thats
causing some problems. I investigated that, to no avail, however thats the
sort of thing that I'm hoping to hear, since its separate from the graphics
issues that I've explored to death.

On the first project, it actually looked like something was getting trapped
in recursion. As if something was calling itself, and it kept recursing
until some maximum recursion depth was hit.(but i had no macros or user
defined functions. and my file includes checked out ok) Thats the only sort
of thing
that could explain what I was seeing, because the code itself just didnt.

Other ideas is that maybe something is causing memory to flood and thrash,
and maybe very little cpu time is going to the actual raytracing.

Sure wish I could post the whole thing on here to prove I'm not insane or
stupid (at least not on these counts), but the geometry and texture files
are too large to distribute.

Sorry for the long windedness. This is really baffling.

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