clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> That total unresponsiveness is perfectly normal when starting a render
> of an extremely large output image; POV-Ray needs to create a multi-GB
> temporary file, and Windows insists on initializing this file right from
> the start (rather than initializing only the blocks actually written to,
> as Linux does), which may take several minutes.

Ah thanks for the heads-up! So that's the problem... Yes I'm on Windows, and
I've been waiting for minutes and minutes... guess I haven't waited long enough.

I'm just wondering... what is large and how can I influence where that file is
saved? Say, if it's only a few GB, I can just as easily create a ramdisk (on the
same or another server) and store it there to speed things up? Or should I think
more in the line of half a TB?

> Rendering (including creation of the file) is probably still faster if
> you do it in one large render.

OK, it does make everything much easier, so if that's possible that would
definitely be my preferred approach...

> There's one other noteworthy caveat with big files: If the scene is
> extremely simple, memory consumption may rise during render as the
> render threads create image data faster than it can be stored in the
> temp file; this can ultimately lead to swapping. (Nothing too serious,
> fortunately; the system will remain responsive enough to handle the
> situation by pausing the render for a while; this will allow image data
> to be tucked away and memory be freed again).

Well, it started off simple... now there's 50k trees, about 200k grass objects,
water, rivers, clouds... so no, I guess it's not an extremely simple scene
anymore :-)

Thanks,
Stefan.

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