Thanks for the responses all!

Last night I tried sending the abort key once the pre-render had completed,
but depending on the timing of the abort, the file size of the radiosity
map would vary.  It appears as though it keeps adding to the radiosity file
throughout the render, even though I have always_sample set to 'off'.  I'm
not sure I am comfortable with the idea of varying sized radiosity files, I
feel as though it is half complete, even though the pre-render had
completed.

I also tried hacking the povray code as suggested by George.  As a
benchmark, before changing anything I compiled the source base and ran a
comparison of the render times from my binary (both static and dynamically
linked) and the distribution binary.  It seemed that my binaries were 30%
slower than the distribution binaries!  I suspect that this is because I am
using the standard (non optimised) libc libraries, but I am still impressed
at how much better optimised the povray distribution is.  Kudos to the
povray developers!  As I'm only interested in the radiosity pre-render, I'm
not too concerned about the 30% overhead, so I ripped out the calls to the
main tracing, and named the binary povray_prerender.  It seems to work
great for my purposes, but I still need to do some more testing to be
completely sure.

I haven't yet tried Peter Popov's suggestion, I'll give that a try tonight.

Thanks for the help!

-peter

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