I know I've been posting a lot of questions recently so I'm sorry if this
one is obvious but I thought it was interesting none-the-less.

In a scene I've been creating it is using many (millions) of cylinders to
create an effect for me.  Something interesting I discovered about the
memory usage of POV-Ray while rendering my project are as follows:

(All values are rough and from Task Manager in Win XP SP1 under similar
conditions)
Description of modification     Total Memory Usage by system
Original Scene  -  849MB
Grouping all cylinders in 1 union  -  807MB
Grouping cylinders into 100's of unions - 807MB
Rotating and Translating the cylinders using vector functions before
invidual declaration (1 union) - 680MB

I only got a clue about this having an effect after POV-Ray crashed during
parse with something like "could not allocate 256 bytes for translate".

The memory usage appears to have an inverse effect on parse time, but
considering that I am avoiding HD swapping, it is well worth it.

-Nathan

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In article <412279f7@news.povray.org> , "N Shomber" <nsh### [at] hotmailcom>
wrote:

> I only got a clue about this having an effect after POV-Ray crashed during
> parse with something like "could not allocate 256 bytes for translate".

That is not a crash but a simple error POV-Ray reports!  A crash is the
result of a program malfunction.  An error properly reported due to your
scene consuming all available memory is not a program malfunction.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> That is not a crash but a simple error POV-Ray reports!  A crash is the
> result of a program malfunction.  An error properly reported due to your
> scene consuming all available memory is not a program malfunction.

  I have a co-worker which has the really bad habit of using the word
"crash" (well, the Finnish equivalent) for both program malfunction (eg.
segmentation fault) and a properly ended program issuing a proper error
message.
  A typical conversation of ours goes like he explaining me a new feature
he has added to one part of our project, then I ask what happens if I
give it a certain patological input, he thinks a couple of seconds and
says that the program crashes.
  I have no way of knowing if he meant that I came up with a bug in
his code which causes the program to really crash, or if he meant that
the program correctly detects the invalid input and gives an appropriate
error message and stops. I have to ask him explicitly each time.
  For some reason he never learns the correct terminology, even though
this same thing has happened many times. He intuitively says "crashes"
when talking casually without thinking too much about the true meaning
of the word.

  So it's not an isolated case, but seems to be fairly common. I wonder
why this is so.

-- 
#macro N(D)#if(D>99)cylinder{M()#local D=div(D,104);M().5,2pigment{rgb M()}}
N(D)#end#end#macro M()<mod(D,13)-6mod(div(D,13)8)-3,10>#end blob{
N(11117333955)N(4254934330)N(3900569407)N(7382340)N(3358)N(970)}//  - Warp -

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news:41230e73@news.povray.org...

>   So it's not an isolated case, but seems to be fairly common. I wonder
> why this is so.

Because from a user's point of view, it's the same : the computer was
working fine, and suddenly it doesn't, and this is how it appears to the
user and this is what matters first to him/her. Use of proper descriptive
terminology is irrelevant at that stage. It is only useful afterwards, at
the time of determining what happened in order to fix it. But then it's the
job of the tech support to ask - politely - the proper questions...

G.

-- 
**********************
http://www.oyonale.com
**********************
- Graphic experiments
- POV-Ray and Poser computer images
- Posters

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Gilles Tran <gitran_nospam_@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> Because from a user's point of view, it's the same : the computer was
> working fine, and suddenly it doesn't, and this is how it appears to the
> user and this is what matters first to him/her.

  But there's an important difference from the point of view of the user:
If the program crashes it doesn't say the exact reason why it stopped and
thus there's no hint about what to do next. If it is giving an error
message, it is telling the exact reason why it stopped and thus the user
can get an idea of what to do to fix the problem.

  If you try to open the door of a car with the wrong key and the door
doesn't open, did the car crash? Of course not. However, that's exactly
what the users are saying about programs which are only showing normal
behaviour on invalid or incomplete input (or lack of resources).

-- 
#macro N(D)#if(D>99)cylinder{M()#local D=div(D,104);M().5,2pigment{rgb M()}}
N(D)#end#end#macro M()<mod(D,13)-6mod(div(D,13)8)-3,10>#end blob{
N(11117333955)N(4254934330)N(3900569407)N(7382340)N(3358)N(970)}//  - Warp -

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Warp wrote:

> Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
>> That is not a crash but a simple error POV-Ray reports!  A crash is the
>> result of a program malfunction.  An error properly reported due to your
>> scene consuming all available memory is not a program malfunction.
> 
>   I have a co-worker which has the really bad habit of using the word
> "crash" (well, the Finnish equivalent) for both program malfunction (eg.
> segmentation fault) and a properly ended program issuing a proper error

Just for interest sake - what IS the Finnish word for crash? I. e. software
lockup?

In my native Afrikaans we say something like "Die rekenaar het gaan staan"
of "My rekenaar het gaan staan" or also "Dit het gecrash!" :)

What do you say? In nearest English phonetic obviously. 

-- 
Stefan Viljoen
Software Support Technician
Polar Design Solutions

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Stefan Viljoen <rylan@ <deletehis>intekom.co.za> wrote:
> Just for interest sake - what IS the Finnish word for crash? I. e. software
> lockup?

  "Kaatua", which literally translated means "to fall" (meaning something
which is standing falls over, not something which has been dropped).

> What do you say? In nearest English phonetic obviously. 

  Well, Finnish verbs are inflected depending on their role in
a sentence and it's thus not possible to give one single word which
would work in every sentence. Finnish verbs have more than 130 inflections
(compare that to the at most 5 inflections of English verbs). Thus I gave
just the infinitive form of the verb above.

  If you want to know how "kaatua" is pronounced, "kaa" is pronounced
like "ca" in the word "car" but with a long 'a' sound, "tu" is pronounced
like the english word "to" and the last "a" is pronounced the same as
the "a" in the word "car".
  But as I said, that's just the infinitive form and thus has a quite
limited use in itself. :)

-- 
plane{-x+y,-1pigment{bozo color_map{[0rgb x][1rgb x+y]}turbulence 1}}
sphere{0,2pigment{rgbt 1}interior{media{emission 1density{spherical
density_map{[0rgb 0][.5rgb<1,.5>][1rgb 1]}turbulence.9}}}scale
<1,1,3>hollow}text{ttf"timrom""Warp".1,0translate<-1,-.1,2>}//  - Warp -

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