"Mic Hazelgrove" <mic### [at] mhazelgrovefsnetcouk> wrote in message
news:395a18da@news.povray.org...
| Here, here! Povray is fine up to about 50,000 object after that, when it has
| to use the hard disk things really slow down. Some sort of buffering?

Disks are just plain slow for using as "virtual" memory anyway.
From what I've seen personally, the declaration of a set of objects and
reusing them simply eats up the memory far more than seems necessary.  That's
from my outside looking in viewpoint about it.
It might be because of the final placements of the previously defined things
that makes memory increase so drastically.  It would seem to reason that if
you have one complete object made and then use it twice or two thousand times
that it would remain nearly the same consumption of memory as a single
instance of that object, plus some transformation info is all.  So I think
POV-Ray must be using almost the same amount of memory to recreate each new
"clone" as it would were there as many written out in the scene file
individually.
In other words, maybe it's not the object itself but the transformations on
each use of it that causes the growth of a memory file.  Since it all needs to
be set up into a ray traced scene there might be a analogy to a unity object
which is then many times larger than the separate parts it's made up of.
But I think I'm just repeating what has been thought of before.  Layman's
method of thinking  :-)

Bob

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