3delight throttles itself down?

alan bard newcomer

the problem with 3dl is it wants to take your entire cpu 
so I got a little program to hold it at a max of 85%  of cpu 
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dual xeons ... 16 cores...
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started a render then about halfway through it slowed way down... 
after a while I noticed it's now only has the cpus running at 15% .... 
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does it do something dumb like divide the scene up into a bunch of parts and then not reallocate when a part that renders quickly finishes?
It's at 98% done and the computer is down to 7% cpu usage... and yes, it's been sitting for an hour at this place...

 

Richard Haseltine

Trying to manage the CPU load conmstantly would probably result in a slower overall render, so yes when you get to the last few buckets you can find that two or more are in a single thread and are waiting for one core while the others are idle. That should not, however, kick in half way through - unless you havea  very large bucket size - though having a lot of cores available may tend to exacerbate the issue.

alan bard newcomer

problem solved... Uberenviornent2 1... don't know if it was installed with the scene preset but it does not like my characters.
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took 5 hours to render the image with those lights...
switched over to other lights ... renders in 2 minutes 
iray was 7 minutes...
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tried just the characters with the same light set and it flew for 1 min 46 seconds ... then starting ticking seconds without doing anything... but I could look at the render and see it was the same areas that took forever to render. 
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trying to figure out where the light set came from ... figure it was from the set but I'm redoing to check