Hi all,

Is there any way to run mantra in a low priority mode?

thanks
kuba

On what operating system? On Linux, I *think* you can just change the Command on the ROP from “mantra” to something like “nice -20 mantra”. On Windows, changing it to “cmd /c start /b /low mantra” seems to work.

I'm doing a little bit of internal translation here – I assume what you mean is “omg, when I render using mantra my computer slows to a crawl, and nothing else works”…

This is often caused by the fact that mantra is awesome. It will use all resources at it's disposal by default, meaning all cores.

The flag to control the number of cores used is “-j” which defaults to “-j 0” (all cores). If you wish to use less cores, simply specify the number of cores you wish to allocate in the command options in your ROP. For instance “-j 2” will use two cores.

I could of course be completely misinterpreting your question, but I figured I'd fire it out there anyway.

G

Well, I don't see any reason why not to just let mantra use all cores but run at a low priority. Say you have a long test render that you run on your own workstation that you don't particularly care about. Then while you're working on your computer, everything that you're currently doing has higher priority. When you're away from the computer (or just thinking), the render naturally gets more cycles to render. If you just set it to use only 1 core, then it will never use more than 1 core.

Say you have a long test render that you run on your own workstation that you don't particularly care about.

Then why are you rendering it? :wink:

All kidding aside, that's a fine idea – would be great to have a preset for that in the GUI

G

Well, less important than what I'm currently doing.

edward
Well, less important than what I'm currently doing.

SHARE SHARE SHARE !!!!!!

SCNR !! But you started it ! Never ever let a cat become courious if you don't really want her to be killed !!

BTW. You know Schroedinger ?? :twisted:

Er, that's *if* I was trying to render something, which I'm currently not.

I'm just resurrecting this ancient thread since I was just pondering the same issue and found a nice solution, at least for Windows. Get Process Hacker (which is a free Task Manager replacement, http://processhacker.sourceforge.net [processhacker.sourceforge.net]) and then you can adjust the Priority of mantra.exe to “Below Normal” and save that priority, so Process Hacker will set it to below normal every time it launches. Et voila, suddenly you can work as normal in the GUI and get your preview renders in the background. It's almost like working in Modo

This is often caused by the fact that mantra is awesome.

word.

For a while I've wanted some easy way to specify #cores-1 easily, so that 1 core is available for the general OS and stuff. For windows in particular, Linux doesn't suffer this issue.

In Windows you can do it in:
taskmanager -> Processes -> right click on mantra.exe -> Set affinity or Set Priority…

maybe that helps.. ?