"Gilles Tran" <gitran_nospam_@wanadoo.fr> wrote in message
news:4069f124@news.povray.org...
> Using the beta 2, I experienced 3 consecutives computer crashes aka Blue
> Screen of Death under Windows XP HE. One occured when working with the beta
> (I don't remember if it was rendering or not, but I was writing script), the
> second occured after 8 hours of rendering and the third occured a few hours
> after resuming the previous scene. BSOD are extremely rare on this machine
> (the few previous ones could be traced to driver problems and contained
> messages that pointed to particular drivers) and these last 3 happened using
> the beta in less than 24 hours. The message, that I didn't write down
> unfortunately, was something like KERNEL_ERROR (the fact is that BSOD are so
> uncommon now that my first move was to try to restart the machine to see if
> it was still working, even after the 3rd crash...).
> The scene is very large (a couple of hundred Mb of meshes and maps), uses
> radiosity and isosurfaces, and takes 800 Mb of RAM. I re-rendered the scene
> without problem using 3.5.

In general, for a BSOD to occur on NT/2K/XP, you either have a driver
error or a hardware error.

Sometimes, particular software can seem to trigger it because that software
is doing something that causes either (a) the driver to experience its bug,
or (b) the hardware to be manipulated in a way that causes it to function
incorrectly, often subsequently causing (a) or some other weirdness.

What is strange is that you don't get it with 3.5; 3.6 isn't *that* different
that this should happen to it alone.

It would be interesting to know if 3.6 uses more memory for the scene than
3.5 ... this is quite possibly one cause if so, because if you do have a RAM
fault in there somewhere, it could be triggered by 3.6. (If that is the case
there is surely some free RAM testing software out there somewhere that you
could leave running on the PC overnight). Alternatively try reducing the RAM
usage by 100mb or so and see if it still happens.

There is a memory leak in the beta 2 internal message passing code that could
cause memory usage to increase over time, but IIRC that mainly applies to
animations rather than a single frame.

-- Chris

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