Like Nieminen said, it's probably poor memory management on the part of
Windows.  Also, it takes memory to allocate memory... you have to say which
memory is being used by which programs and how big the various chunks are.
(similar to the file allocation table for allocating disk space)

Also don't forget that windows itself uses quite a bit of space.  Most of
it is swapped out most of the time, but it still takes many, many megs and
will give you a large swap file.

-Nathan

Ken wrote:
> 
> This question pertains to the way Pov-Ray for windows reports peak memory.
> 
>  A scene I rendered this evening had 120k objects. I have 128 megs of
> physical ram memory and about 250 megs of swap space available. The
> 128 megs of ram were consumed quickly and the swap file grew to nearly
> 220 megs before it finaly finished parsing the file. When I checked the
> peak memory use after the image finished rendering however it only
> reported using 128 megs of memory. Obviously the math does not work out
> and I am wondering why there is such a descrepency between what I know
> it to have used and what the program itself reports was used.
> 
> --
> Ken Tyler
> 
> mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net
> http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/links.htm

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