"Increasing the bucket size increases the area being rendered at once but requires greater system resources. Use caution when enlarging the bucket beyond its default size, and monitor your system resources." i thought it was pretty plain in the manual about how the bucket size can influence your system at render time. maybe they should mention that even the default bucket size can have advers reactions when rendering at high resolution and/or are rendering particularily dense scenes with lots a polys/transmaps/gels(light) and the like. now the manual. now theres a problem.