I have beta 35a running on an i7 and an AMD Phenom system. I've been adopting
radiosity for my scenes, and using the beta to speed things up with the two quad
core machines. There haven't been any problems until recently but my latest
scene froze the computer. I rebooted and launched the task manager window to
analyze CPU and memory utilization. I began with the i7 system with 6GB. The
render began using about 4 GB. After the radiosity pre-trace (the funny square
phase? :)) the memory allocation began to slowly increase at the rate of about
1GB per 10 seconds. This continued until the memory was full, then Windows
(arghh!) attempted to run in virtual memory (I assume because console I/O was
slow and disk was constanly busy).

I ran to the store and purchased another 6GB of RAM, installed it and tried
again with a total of 12GB. The same thing happened (only I was able to halt the
process in time when 11.8GB was reached).

Another strange thing... I noticed that there are many times when CPU
utilization is alarmingly low. When I run version 3.6 I seen 100% utilization of
one core. With 3.7b-35a it is bursty, and spends a lot of time running at 20%
utilization. During those times, the load seems to be fairly evenly divided
between the 4 cores.

The scene in question isn't anything special, just a landscape with a few
isosurfaces and planes. The isosurfaces do contain a lot of functions, which
create a lot of divergent surface details. To be perfectly clear, when I run the
same code without radiosity everything is fine. Also I ran the same code on
version 3.6 with radiosity turned on and everything is fine.

Ideas?

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