Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> gregjohn wrote:
> > Could it be that povray is deciding how much memory to allocate
> > for an entire render session based solely on the complexity of
> > the very first frame?
>
> No, you are chasing ghosts here: You have insufficient memory, and with
> memory fragmentation after the first render, you just run a bit above the
> swapping threshold for the second one. Hence the big difference in speed.
>
>  Thorsten


If you are making an argument about straw that broke the camel's back, the
opposite is true-- adding more straw makes the camel run better.

I even added another two more complex include files to the first render:


TIME TO DO 10 FRAMES (5 SIMPLE then 5 COMPLEX)
PARSE RENDER TOTAL SCENE FILE

 1    87     88   original, first 5 frames very simple scene

 2    11     13   added one moderately complex and unseen scene to the first
5 frames.

51    10     61   added two more unseen includes to the first 5 frames, with
multiple blob characters + complex CSG in them.


Even when I make it parse much more, it still renders much more quickly.
Straw makes the camel faster!


So it is an unfortunate way in which povray handles memory or some other
resource. Now I could imagine it is impractical or impossible to have it go
back and get more "stuff" once it's started down the road. But it's not a
ghost. It's a serious problem that requires design-around in order for
povray to be practical for serious projects.

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