[Chimera-users] Percent done

[Greg Couch]

On February 7, 2005, David Belnap wrote:

> It would be useful to have a percent done displayed when the image is being 
> rendered.  I have a very large job that has been running for two days.  I 
> think it is still progressing so I have not stopped it.  For slower 
> machines or large jobs, it would be nice to know how far along jobs are.
> 
> Thanks.  I'm enjoying Chimera.

I'm going to assume that you're having problems when you save images and
you'd like an indication of how far along it is.  That will slow down
the image saving, but probably not very much.  I'll look into it.

I am really curious about how large a job you're running.  The only way
it could take two days is if you don't have enough physical memory and
the system is paging memory to and from the disk.  Some operating systems
are better at handling programs that need more memory than is physically
available than others (ie., BSD Unix and Linux), but all do poorly.  Any
system that doesn't exhaust memory, should be saveable in minutes.

So, you should get some more physical memory for your computer if at all
possible.  We are working on making chimera more memory efficient, but
that work won't be done until May or so.

 	Thank you for using chimera,

 	Greg Couch
 	UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
 	gregc at cgl.ucsf.edu