hi there,
i’m wondering if anyone could tell me how shake takes advantage of multiple cpu’s.
in the manual it’s stated that it can utilize smp for running interactively.
i’m wondering now if that means that dual cpu’s can kick in every time a node is evaluated in the ui and the little clock icon appears next to the cursor - or if that means that only things like rendering fileout’s / flipbooks or proxies benefit from having more than one cpu.
It does use both processors all the time. You can use the cpu monitor in the utilities folder on the Mac (or simular linux util) to watch this.
ah, but you have to enable it in the settings.
go to Gui Settings; go to sys.maxThread and enable the max number of processors. if it stays at default (1) , the other processors will only kick in during rendering, as will additional RAM over 2megs.
great news, thanks people. will order dual cpu setup asap 
and buttachunk: muchos gracias for this tip!
GiJoe,
make a text file that says
“sys.maxThread = 2;”
without the " " marks (make sure it ends with a semicolon ; )
and save the file as Shake thread
now put the file in your shake/include/startup/ui folder
start up shake and your settings should be right on.
there is a command deep within Shake somewhere that says “sys.maxThread = get available processors” (or similar), but this text file is a way of making sure that shake will be set for 2 cpu’s.
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