My Autopano Pro forum

jonny5alive555 wrote:

When rendering a panorama, the CPU only seems to get to 100% for a few moments during rendering, and for the bulk it is around 80%. However, my hard disk shows it is getting used a lot.

This symptom might be caused by insufficient RAM, causing the operating system to page the application to the hard drive.  In extreme cases I have seen CPU as little as 2%.  Try putting more RAM on your computer.  Whenever I buy a new PC I always get it with the maximum RAM available, to make it last as long as possible.  My current (quite old) PC has 1.5 GiB of RAM, and that isn't enough for large panoramas.

APP needs surprisingly little RAM. It's much more important for Smartblend to have 100GB or so of free space on a scratch drive (not the system drive). But hooking a Raptor to a firewire cable is a total waste. The Raptor needs to be internal. If you can't put in another internal drive, use an eSATA connection to an external drive.

For things other than rendering, it's a big help to have multiple cores or processors.

You may increase your disk IO performance by
1.  Don't make your partitions too large (file system algorithms impacted)
2.  Don't allow your file system to become too large or have too many files (file system algorithms impacted)
3.  Use a disk drive technology that has higher performance (trade off with noise)
   a. Choose a drive with more cache such as 16MB versus 8MB for SATA drives
   b. Choose a drive with a higher rotational speed 7,200 RPM or 10,000 or 15,000
   c. You might choose a Ultra SCSI interface or Fibre Channel interface (much more expensive)
4. Use a RAID 0 configuration that stripes your drives to hide latency.
5.  If you do not start off with an empty file system, you might need to occasionley defragment you file system which takes time and should be scheduled (CRON job)  It would be more efficient to copy the files to another drive and delete the files on the production drive.
6. If you are using a unix, bsd, or linux OS you might tune your file system.  Ensure that you do some reading first

Bisonwerks: to save a panorama to tiff, jpg, png, hdr, etc you need to render it, using this dialog:
http://www.autopano.net/wiki/action/vie … r_Settings

Saving the .pano just saves the settings to create that pano. Its like .pano is .psd if you use Photoshop, except the psd would not have any images, just layers and settings and masks but it would link to external images. I dont know if by this comparison i made things clearer or more muddy