clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Again on Windows systems, there's also a known problem when the image is
> too simple: The thread responsible for assembling the image from the
> rendered chunks may become swamped with finished chunks, and may still
> be busy processing them all long after the render threads have already
> done their job. With large images, this can even lead to the paradox
> situation that the simpler the scene gets the more physical memory is
> eaten up during the render. (Fortunately, if this maxes out physical
> memory it only bogs down the POV-Ray thread, and doesn't throw the
> entire system into swap hell like it would happen in other situations.)

On my last system (1GB RAM, 1 core, 4 threads), I ended up in swap hell quite a
lot in Linux, but not in Windows.  The entire system was near frozen, not just
POV-Ray.  The scenes were conceptually simple, but had lots of media containers
overlapping in line-of-sight, so I don't think it was a case of blocks rendering
too fast.  Typically, the render would proceed nicely, with RAM usage in linear
proportion to the progress of the render.  (I eventually learned to shut down my
Web browser before rendering large images.)

Post a reply to this message