In article <395a220b@news.povray.org>, "Bob Hughes" 
<per### [at] aolcom?subject=PoV-News:> wrote:

> 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. 

Actually, if the objects are meshes, declaring and reusing them is much 
more efficient, since each "clone" shares the same mesh data. The larger 
the mesh and the more clones, the more efficient the memory usage.


> 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.

It is this way for most objects, only a few objects(meshes, and maybe 
height fields) share data. Also, I think image_maps are shared, as well 
as other uses of images, though I could be wrong.

-- 
Christopher James Huff - Personal e-mail: chr### [at] maccom
TAG(Technical Assistance Group) e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
Personal Web page: http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG Web page: http://tag.povray.org/

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