[REQ] duty cycle for laptop users

[enkidu]

I've seen lots of requests for the ability to change the Indigo process priority, but I haven't seen anyone ask for a duty cycle setting. This would be extremely useful for us laptop users who can't leave the CPU churning away all day at 100% CPU without it bursting into flames...

Reducing the process priority won't help in this situation, because if nothing else is going on then the low priority Indigo process will still run at close to 100%.

The windows Povray GUI handles this very nicely - allowing both process priority and duty cycle to be changed during a render. And I can quite happily leave my laptop running all day on a 50% duty cycle without the fan going mental. The way it works is that it renders a line, then depending on how long that line took it will sleep for a certain number of seconds based on the duty cycle setting. A similar thing could be done with Indigo after a set number of mutations, say.

Unlike the setting of process priority, which can easily be done through the task manager or in a batch file, I think the duty cycle really needs to be controlled by Indigo itself - maybe in the server component. If an external program was used to impose a duty cycle on the Indigo process then it might suspend it halfway into writing an image file, for example, which wouldn't be good...

Would anyone else find this feature useful?

[zsouthboy]

I'd be concerned about your laptop if running all day at 100% load caused problems. (right now, at home, my M170 is still rendering, and has been, for a WEEK straight, literally)

I think the duty cycle setting, though, could be added into indigo pretty easy.

do until EndOfTime=true {
Sleep(3000);
Render(3000);
loop;
}

[eman7613]

i can understand that, some of the laptops i've used before, when under a full load, roar like hell. I would much rather wait longer for a render then listen to some of those things howl for 24hrs+