"Thorsten Froehlich" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> "Anthony D. Baye" <Sha### [at] spamnomorehotmailcom> wrote:
> > scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> > > > now, from what I've read, it takes more than a thousand iterations to get good
> > > > results, but trying to do just fifty iterations makes POV do an imitation of
> > > > PAC-Man with my memory and swap space.  All 16GB of it.
> > > >
> > > > I don't know if this is a bug or a natural limitation of the geometry parsing
> > > > engine.
> > >
> > > It looks to me like at each iteration you are doubling the number of
> > > objects POV has in memory (by creating an intersection of two versions
> > > of the previous object). That means after 50 iterations you will have
> > > about 2^50 objects - I'm surprised you got that far!
> >
> > That's about what I figured was happening.  And I didn't get that far because
> > I had to shut it down.
>
> And no matter what you do, you won't be able to get that many with POV on any
> system available on this planet today. Even with references, and no
> transformations, it would take 8 petabytes (8192 terabytes) just to store the
> references. Realistically you might get 2^30 spheres on a PC, but not with a
> regular Windows (you need the a server variant, desktop variants only support 64
> GB of RAM) as you will probably need 256 to 512 GB of RAM for it. Or you need a
> lot of fast swap space.
>
> Thorsten

If I am not wrong, Windows7-32 bits can only have 4GB of memory, while Win7-64
bits can have 192 GB with pro edition.

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