Steve Martin wrote:

> You might build a script that invokes the renderer with appropriate
> arguments and make that script setuid root. As pointed out above,
> though, this would be dangerous if there are other users on the box.
> Is this a single-user computer?

Some systems don't allow scripts to be run SUID root.  It wouldn't be
too big a deal to rewrite it in C, but I wouldn't recommend it.

> Setting the nice value might not be necessary, though. If you're the
> only user and nothing else is going on in the background, it just
> might be that POV will get the lion's share of cycles anyway. Try
> running "top" to see what is running on the box. Anything that's
> in a sleeping state won't be taking cycles, as they're waiting on
> an external event before being scheduled to run again, so no CPU
> time is going to those processes anyway. I just opened up a shell
> on my machine at home with X and Netscape running (plus loads of
> support stuff), and everything except "top" was sleeping, waiting
> for input.
> 
> If you're not running anything computationally intensive (number-
> crunching, downloading a file, whatever) at the same time you're
> running POV, I doubt you'll see any significant speedup from the
> negative "nice" setting.

I see my share of CPU drop when my nightly cron jobs start chugging
away, but outside of that, I pretty much agree.

-Mark Gordon

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