I'm running Povray 3.6.1 in Linux 2.6.7-mm6 on an Athlon XP.

While studying very slow performance on an sshfs disk (encrypted network
filesystem), I discovered via strace that Povray is re-opening the main
..pov file about 120,000 times.

This seems to be related to the part of my code that reads in data for
sphere locations. Varying the size of the data file changes the number of
opens (of the main .pov file)

Throughout this, the data file is opened twice, and the .inc file that reads
the data file is opened once. It's only the main .pov file that gets
reopened obsessively.

524641 opens with full file (87475 lines, 437375 numbers)
118234 opens with small file (19714 lines, 98570 numbers)
5997 opens with tiny file (1000 lines, 5000 numbers)

So in short, the source file is opened about 5.997 times for each data line
read. Poking through the POV source hasn't enlightened me yet. Can anyone
explain this (the behaviour, not my failure to understand the source)?

-Eric

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