Okay, so how come it is that it only takes a couple minutes to make my first render, but then it takes like an hour to make a second one when there's only been a few changes? And by the third or forth one, windows stops to tell me it's increasing my virtual memory every five minutes.

Obviously, Poser is a huge memory hog, and I think I only have 128 to start off with, but has there been any known problems with Poser releasing memory? Would it help if I downloaded a Garbage collector and ran it between renders? (If so, could someone recommend a good one?)

Thanks, all

And now that I've posted this, I'll search the forum and see is someone's already asked this question :)

Ok for a start what OS are you running. Personally I didn't have it as bad as you but I started off with 250meg on W2k and recently bought another 500. But I am only a hobbyist as it were. Also a mamnagement program like Ram Booster helps, there is a thread posted in the last 3 months about that. Another thing is that it all depends on what those tweaks you mentioned were, did you play about with the render settings at all?

What OS are you running? 128 is low for Poser, but I've run it on that for years, back when P4 came out and my computer was a scrawny P2 450Mhz with 128 Mb Ram. Yes it was slow, but the point is that you don't notice it untill you've tried something faster.

Sorry, seemed to have cross-posted with Trekkie ;-) always a pleasure. The reason to question the OS is cos Win98 has bad memory managmenet with apps that use up a lot of memory. Again I'm only going by what I've read here at some stage.

128 Meg of memory is a little light to run Poser, especially P5. I have 768 Meg and run into some memory problems, so I can imagine what 128 would be like. There does seem to be a memory leak in P5, where memory is not released back to the system until P5 terminates. There's some controversy over this as some users don't have this problem. I can usually do a number of renders before the P5 freezes on me. But it will freeze, especially if I'm using all the Firefly options. THe P4 type render seems to use memory better (or maybe it just doesn't need so much). A lot depends on the operating system too. Most people have a lot better luck with an XP or Win2000 NT system than with Win 98, since both of those systems manage memory better. However, both of these are memory intensive themselves, and may even make your renders slower at 128 Meg. Some users have reported some success using a garbage cleaner, but not all. This problem does seem to be system specific. If you're running XP or Win2000 NT, the best thing you can do is get more memory. If you're running a Win98 system, make sure you're running with all the latest updates. One thing that may help is a good defrag of your hard drive. This helps with the memory swap file. Hope this helps.

I'm running XP on a 1.2 GHz, or at least I will be soon. I'm actually got a beta of the Win 2003 servers, which expires in November, it's basically on there just because I wanted to play around with it, but I have a felling I'll be switching back to XP here soon. Obviously tweaking something in ther render setting could have a big influence on my render time changing, but I'm talking about little changes, like moving a hand over a couple inches because I don't like the way it looks. Usually what I do is just use the draft mode until I get things where I like them, save it, restart my computer, and then do a full blown production style render.

Actually, now that you mention it, pdx, my computer could use a good defrag.

Oh, and thanks for all the help guys

I too had an awful time with Poser 4 Pro constantly locking up every time I tried to render. Got to the old "throw your PC out the window phase". However I upgrded to XP and it is now rock solid. I can throw whatever I like at it in the way of textures,morphs etc and still it comes back smiling.

Aside from surfing over to pricewatch.com to grab another 512Mb stick for like $25-40, I suggest you look into versions of WIndows that uilize VIrtual Memory. Operating Systems, like WindowsXP, allow you to designate a portion of a nice new FAT32 or NTSC Hard Drive to RAM Memory Functions. I have a coule HDs, allocating a Gigbyte or two from each, to Virtual Memory, usually keeps Poser from ever squacking over memory needs. It's not to hard to do, windows allows this easily. So, next time you run into a spare 1 or 2 GB HD, do'nt throw it away!

Thanks for all the help guys, I appreciate the advice. I like the idea of greating a spare harddrive into a virtual memory drive is a great idea. I actually found out that my memory isn't as horrable as I though, I actually have 250! (I know, not much better, but I remember when a 8 was the sweet zone!) I actually figured out what was slowing doing one of my renders, damn dynamic hair. Oh well, win some, lose some :)