"darenw" <Gre### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
> For my day job, i've been asked to get familiar with Amazon's EC2.  "Cloud
> computing" - this is a strange new thing. To get familiar with it, i thought
> i'd try running my favorite software on it.   Has anyone tried running POV-Ray
> on EC2? Is is faster than on a regular or fancy desktop?

I just tried it out on a "Free Tier" micro instance (they have a one-year free
trial offer running).

It started off quite well, but after about 5 seconds a mystery service kicked
in, consuming about 95% of the CPU (at least that's what it looks like in
Process Explorer, it's the svchost service, and the thread that kicks in is from
the service "schedule"). There were a few subsequent intervals where I got 100%
CPU for a few seconds again.

I tried it a few times with the same result. I never see this schedule process
do anything when the instance is running idle, so it is surely responding to the
high CPU usage. So it looks like they have automated governance in place to
prevent applications such as Povray to "misuse" their services.

It might not be fit for Povray, but it can run a website or two without problems
:-)

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