For my day job, i've been asked to get familiar with Amazon's EC2.  "Cloud
computing" - this is a strange new thing. To get familiar with it, i thought
i'd try running my favorite software on it.   Has anyone tried running POV-Ray
on EC2? Is is faster than on a regular or fancy desktop?

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"darenw" <Gre### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
> For my day job, i've been asked to get familiar with Amazon's EC2.  "Cloud
> computing" - this is a strange new thing. To get familiar with it, i thought
> i'd try running my favorite software on it.   Has anyone tried running POV-Ray
> on EC2? Is is faster than on a regular or fancy desktop?

I just tried it out on a "Free Tier" micro instance (they have a one-year free
trial offer running).

It started off quite well, but after about 5 seconds a mystery service kicked
in, consuming about 95% of the CPU (at least that's what it looks like in
Process Explorer, it's the svchost service, and the thread that kicks in is from
the service "schedule"). There were a few subsequent intervals where I got 100%
CPU for a few seconds again.

I tried it a few times with the same result. I never see this schedule process
do anything when the instance is running idle, so it is surely responding to the
high CPU usage. So it looks like they have automated governance in place to
prevent applications such as Povray to "misuse" their services.

It might not be fit for Povray, but it can run a website or two without problems
:-)

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> "darenw" <Gre### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
>> For my day job, i've been asked to get familiar with Amazon's EC2.  "Cloud
>> computing" - this is a strange new thing. To get familiar with it, i thought
>> i'd try running my favorite software on it.   Has anyone tried running POV-Ray
>> on EC2? Is is faster than on a regular or fancy desktop?
>
> I just tried it out on a "Free Tier" micro instance (they have a one-year free
> trial offer running).
>
> It started off quite well, but after about 5 seconds a mystery service kicked
> in, consuming about 95% of the CPU (at least that's what it looks like in
> Process Explorer, it's the svchost service, and the thread that kicks in is from
> the service "schedule"). There were a few subsequent intervals where I got 100%
> CPU for a few seconds again.
>
> I tried it a few times with the same result. I never see this schedule process
> do anything when the instance is running idle, so it is surely responding to the
> high CPU usage. So it looks like they have automated governance in place to
> prevent applications such as Povray to "misuse" their services.
>
> It might not be fit for Povray, but it can run a website or two without problems
> :-)
>
>
>
>

svchost.exe is a hosting process for various services. It's not related 
to POV-Ray in any maner, it's part of Windows. It make it possible for a 
service to crash without bringing the whole operating system down with it.

The schedule service is responsible for starting any scheduled task. It 
can be anything, like your anti-virus, a disk defragmentation, creating 
a routine restore point, indexing files, or...



Alain

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"darenw" <Gre### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
> For my day job, i've been asked to get familiar with Amazon's EC2.  "Cloud
> computing" - this is a strange new thing. To get familiar with it, i thought
> i'd try running my favorite software on it.   Has anyone tried running POV-Ray
> on EC2? Is is faster than on a regular or fancy desktop?

Well, it has take me nine years to discover this service and one year since the
publication of this video.

anything new?
Regards.
B. Gimeno

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"B. Gimeno" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> "darenw" <Gre### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
> > For my day job, i've been asked to get familiar with Amazon's EC2.  "Cloud
> > computing" - this is a strange new thing. To get familiar with it, i thought
> > i'd try running my favorite software on it.   Has anyone tried running POV-Ray
> > on EC2? Is is faster than on a regular or fancy desktop?
>
> Well, it has take me nine years to discover this service and one year since the
> publication of this video.
>
> anything new?
> Regards.
> B. Gimeno

 Oops, https://youtu.be/gE8a588YhQk

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On 9/26/2017 4:36 PM, B. Gimeno wrote:
> "darenw" <Gre### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
>> For my day job, i've been asked to get familiar with Amazon's EC2.  "Cloud
>> computing" - this is a strange new thing. To get familiar with it, i thought
>> i'd try running my favorite software on it.   Has anyone tried running POV-Ray
>> on EC2? Is is faster than on a regular or fancy desktop?
> 
> Well, it has take me nine years to discover this service and one year since the
> publication of this video.
> 
> anything new?
> Regards.
> B. Gimeno
> 
> 

I used the free trial period of Google Cloud this past Spring, and found 
it was pretty easy to set up. I only used 1 instance however, and did 
not try to network several instances together.

Mike

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