I just rebuilt my machine and reinstalled p5 and sr3 i am noticing that the interface is slow..... very very slow over 10min to start. also when i use v3 with the update from daz3d takes forever to inject controls.... is there anything that can be done to increase the speed of the interface? i am not talking about render time that is a different issue i am talking about just the interface tool its self i have a p4 1.8gig with 1gig ram and 240 raid striped and mirrored i have set the vram up to 2 gig on the cdrive raid and 1 gig on the other drive.... so....what do you think???? thanks for your help in advance

more info.... i just tried to do an inject on v3 for expessions and it has been cooking for over 10min. I have tried to look for some pointers and tips from faqs and forums but i did not see anything with the searches i have been doing...

cpu usage 100 percent memory 404 mb and holding steady

over 30min and still nothing argh

You might try ... ... reducing vram. It has been observed that ... Sometimes, when you give Poser too much room to "play," it runs slower. cheers, dr geep ;=] Sometimes, less is more. ;=]

When using V3 (and M3), P5 has an issue if the !DAZ folder is not under the main P5 runtime/libraries. EG the path to !DAZ should look like this: Poser 5/Runtime/Libraries/!DAZ and not My old P4 stuff/Runtime/Libraries/!DAZ as when injecting morphs, it seems to search it's own folder for everything first before looking elsewhere on your drive for the deltas. When I moved my !DAZ folder into my primary P5 runtime I found a massive performance increase - selecting "Inject all head morphs" for example, went from about 30 minutes (with frequent crashing) to about 1 minute, if that. Hope that helps.

wow i will try both of these and let you know thx

Yes, definitely don't move the main install files for V3 / M3 out of the P5 runtime directory. I found M3 doesn't work at all, and V3 takes forever to load. Move em back and hey presto... As for the startup.... Ok. Here goes a little (a lot) "What do I do with my swapfile" :) Virtual Memory Set min/max figures to 2 times your ram. Both should be the same to avoid resizing. The fixed size swap file has two benefits: - the cpu does not have to constantly recalculate the size of the swap file from the free space on your harddisk. - if min=max then the swap file will not get fragmented(it takes much more time to access a diferent location on the harddrive than just continue reading/writing to the same location) Sometimes - not always - after you set the min/max for your pagefile, and you run a defrag straight after, it will put the swapfile at the front of the drive. (Faster) So after you set it, defrag. See if it moves the swapfile. Don't worry if it doesn't, it doesn't make that much difference, but obviously if the swapfile is at the front of the drive, then it's the first area that is read / written to - hence access to the swapfile is faster. I'm really not sure how much of a difference it actually makes though. (btw - pagefile / swapfile = same thing.) On Windows it's called "pagefile.sys" just in case you didn't know. Swapfile is a Unix term. (I usually call them swapfiles. It's a leftover from Win 95 etc which had swapfiles) Don't place multiple pagefiles on different partitions on the same physical disk drive. Try to avoid having the pagefile on the same drive as the system files. (i.e. if you have 2 harddisks - put the pagefile on your OTHER disk.) If you want to move the pagefile, just add another on the other drive, reboot, then reduce the c: drive one to 0. Reboot. It should be gone afterwards. Other things you can do - which I tend to do every now and then - is set Window to clear the swapfile on shutdown. To do that you actually have to edit the registry though. WARNING! I only recommend this if you know what you are doing! This is the key where it is set: Reg Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory ManagementClearPageFileAtShutdown Procedure: Set to 1 to clear at shutdown. Anyway.... 'nuff of my blathering about swapfiles lol. Silke

Set min/max figures to 2 times your ram. That's an old rule of thumb that never made sense to me. Wouldn't a computer with few RAM need more swap space than a computer with lots of RAM? Anyhow, here's some more ideas: Don't set your pagefile on a RAID - those are slower at writing, at least that's what Microsoft says. Here's also a helpful article from Microsoft on pagefile sizes.

My personal opinion is that you either have a very sick PC or a very sick poser installation. My 1Ghz athlon loads poser 5 in about 30secs (I have set prefered state to not load any initial figure to speed up the startup somewhat) personally I dont think its anything like pagefiles etc unless youve tampered with them , in which case Id suggest you select for windows to set the size automatically (if you are using xp or 2k). Poser has a horrible horrible horrible habit, from what I can make out of doing an extensive search of your Hard disk if it cant find the files it wants the more files you have the longer it takes to acertain they arent there (great). Theres a program in the freebies called "correct reference" that can help wiht a lot of these long search problems... roll on Daz studio .. (noone could make a worse job of finding files IMO).. Best wishes.

If you're on XP turn off the fancy rounded corner dialogs and other UI enhancements. In fact just set your machine to performance instead of appearance. Right click on My Computer -> properties -> advanced ->Performance settings->best performance.

It doesnt sound like a tweaking issue to me .. 10mins to start up ? on a 1.8Ghz RAID system ? .. theres got to be somethign else...

Wow.... Thanks for the input... I will try some of the stuff tonight. but here is an update so far... -I moved v3 back into the poser p5 runtime (I had her in the download runtime)that had a big impact on the interface response time when doing injections poses. -I changed the bucket size to 128 and the render time improved. Here is what i plan to do next -move my pagefile swapfile to my non raid drive -switch on the performance instead of appearance. Additional thoughts and musings Silke, All the conversation around the page file makes me think about how raid works (as i understand it) the whole point of raid is data recovery. I dont think I need that for the page file but I do need that for the data files. the overhead of raid writing in 4 - 120 drives and keeping everything in sync must be playing havoc with the swap file. Thus it makes sense to move it to my non raid drive. Does this make sense to you?

there are different levels of raid, yes it provides data recovery .. on for instance (RAID 1) .. i think this is a one-one mirroring of one HD to another. if you have a hardware raid then there should be no decrease in access times and no overhead if its software raid .. through windows then you will encounter at least some cpu overhead... however if you have some sort of STRIPING in your RAID, for instance RAID 5 ?.. you would need a min 3 HD's for this . then you should get an INCREASE in HD performance (if its hardware type raid) and also one disk is used for redundancy (error correction). So :) in conclusion IMHO if you have hardware RAID 5, or RAID 0 (striping no parity I think), then you should keep your Paging file on the RAID disk.

Since you have 4 disks, I am assuming you are mirroring, not striping. Striping with parity will take 3 disks. Yes, you don't need the swapfile on the raid drive. I fact, like Stewer says, having it on a RAID drive is a bad thing, because it would constantly be keeping your RAID drives hard at work, since it constantly changes. As barriephillips says - it depends on the kind of RAID you use. Heheeh barriephillips... For a moment there I thought you were wrong on the stripe set when I saw redundancy, but you're right. :) Basically, all the third disk does is keep track of where all the bits of data are on the other two disks, and how those bits relate to each other. No actual data on that disk. So if one disk can't find something, it asks the parity disk where it is, and that will tell it where to go look and how to fix itself. (It's the HDD Tourist Information Desk!) "Wouldn't a computer with few RAM need more swap space than a computer with lots of RAM?" No, because the RAM swaps out to the swapfile. What's not there, can't be swapped. So if you have 512mb RAM but a 4gb pagefile setting... you will probably never actually get it above 1gb of actual used pagefile even if you set it at 10gb. Actually the rule of thumb is 2.5x your RAM. 2x is better IMO because that's usually the actual pagefile your system uses. (And I've balanced plenty of servers that bore me out on that one. None use more than 2x their ram.) Here is what you actually should do - but it will take a few days. First of all, dump your swapfile. Then set it to 1.5x min capacity of the amount of RAM you have. Set max the same. Now watch the swapfile size to see what it really goes up to over a couple days while you do things you normally do. Keep an eye on it. Increase it to 2x RAM if it reaches full min. Watch it again. Set it to 3x RAM if it increases again. Watch what it goes up to. (Don't change the minimum in this period, only the maximum) It will probably go to around 2x your RAM and stop there, maybe go a bit over, or a bit under. Once it's been stable for a couple days, set the min/max to about .5 more than you have your actual pagefile at that time. Bingo. You're done. That's how I set the swapfile on our servers. However, after a couple months, be sure to check that the settings are still ok. Sometimes freaky stuff happens. Oh yeah, one word of warning on stripe sets. Do not go near a stripe set with something like Partition Magic or another tool that repartitions HDD's unless you want to lose all your data. Stripe sets can't be repartitioned. I learned that the hard way lol.... Thank GOD I had a backup. I was kind of considering moving to the Amazon and become a crocodile farmer the moment I saw those 3 very BLANK disks... Are ya all bored yet? :P Silke

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1214308&Form.sess_id=1050209&

I solved my problem with V3 taking a long time loading INJ poses, simply by making sure that all of the DAZ updates were correctly installed.

I have never seen P5 take that long to load, except for when my harddrive took a crapper. Putting the swap on mirrored drives, I would think may not be the best idea. 404MB mem usage seems a little high for P5, is anything else running besides the bare neccessities? No screen saver, right? Is this total usage or just what P5 is using? First time I start Poser, it is about 20 seconds. P5 runs pretty quick for me, the only time it is obviously slow is when something is confusing it, or the drive needs to be defragged. AthalonXP 2600 1.5GB PC3200

Are you starting P5 with a saved document preference which includes V3? That might explain the slow loading time too.

Just wanted to add, that theoretically a stripe set with 2 disks should double your hard disk speed, a stripe set with 3 disks should increase it by 3, n disks = nfold increase.. You wont get this sort of increase if you ujse the SOFTWARE RAID that win2k and XP have. RAID 5 (IIRC) is a Stripe Set with parity, parity is just one disk (so if one disk fails you should be able to continue) however if you have 4 disks, then thereteically you have 3 times increase in hard disk speed (raid is very cool, it can push your hard disk speed through the roof) you can have raid 5 with any amount of disks. If you have hardware RAID use it, theres absolutely no reason not to, its likely to be the fasteset volume on your system so thats where you should have your swap file.. if you doubt its speed get a program like sisoft sandra and benchmark each volume.. Also I think MS advise you to split your swapfile over all volumes, (personally i wouldnt if one volume was RAID) Im with most ppl that are saying that theres some poser configuration problem and unless you have other issues with other apps, dont mess with your system config.

ok here is what i did i set up the swap on the non raid drive i set xp to performance i set poser to factory default in both settings i moved v3 to poser5/runtime from poser5/downloads/runtime and the results.... -poser 5 start is now 4min which is way way better than >10min -individual v3 injection poses are now fast <1min -the "all" injections has not been tested yet and to continue the raid conversation... i talked to the guy who helped me set up my machine as to what raid level i am at... raid 0+1 using 4-120gig harddrives striped and mirrored i also have another 120 drive in the machine as well

oh i also updated v3 to sr1.1

a stripe set of 2 disks, mirrored on the other 2 .. still faster than any of your other volumes no doubt.

Still a little long. Does P5 start with default figure? Individual injections should be almost instantanious. Still thinkin...

yea p5 starts now with the default factory settings including don

If you set it to start with the Preferred state, get rid of Don from the screen and reset prefered state, it won't have to load him when Poser starts. If this really makes a difference, it may indicate that Poser is having an issue finding something on the disk. I don't think this is really gonna be the case, but if a texture can't be found, Poser seems to look for a while. When my drive crashed, that last couple of times I opened Poser took much longer than usual because data was corrupt. It just took longer and longer and the I got the warning that Poser.exe was corrupted.

Hiya, silkeJust to throw some sand in the mix ;-) RAID 1.5 is a MIRROR/STRIPE configuration that uses only two drives. DFI LANParty MB's have the controller onboard. Tom's Hardware reviewed it: http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20030620/index.html The benchmarks so a slight benefit with 64+block reads and easier on the CPU. It has a slight downside (negligible for home users), but working with large files on disk-I/O intensive app like Poser, it's great.

Since this seemed to have something similar to my problem ...

I'm running P4 on a 900Mhz box with 512Mb of RAM. Lately, I've noticed that if I have more than one Millennium figure and one is an M3, V3 or Freak, it simply won't render at all. I get the little status window, but nothing happens; hitting Ctrl-Alt-Delete to stop the process kills Poser without even a confirmation.

I cleared out the C: drive to provide up to 3 GIGS of swap space, but that has made no difference. Incidentally, my old Compaq, running a much slower processor and only 98Mb of RAM WILL render the same scenes, albeit quite slowly.

Has anyone else experienced this sort of non-performance, and hopefully has a remedy? I can use multiple M2 and V2, as well as MilKids, and even complex sets and props, but after spending the money on V3 and M3, I'd like ot be able to actually work with them.

Thanks!

Heheh this is interesting stuff ya know :) I only use hardware raid on the servers, so I have never really had to tweak it for max application performance - since ours tend to be fileservers. I'm about to add an SQL server though so I will be looking more into Raid 5 on that one. Silke

hey just an update... i am still having some instability with firefly once in a while. i tried to render freak with mike and firefly can't handle it. however freak alone is ok and mike alone is ok. also the same freak and mike pic can be rendered in p4 mode. I tried all the usual stuff of changeing the bucket but still strange things happen (ex.the firefly render just stops mid render or memory usage jumps to 1gig and 1.5gig vram with cpu at 100% and stays there.) but in general the interface responce is now fine and simple sets are rendering fine (1 char 1 or 2 props) ps thanks for all of your help....

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/firefaq.html

One ther comment I would add. although you have 1 gig RAM, I wonder whether a bucket size of 128 is maybe a bit too high? I have 768 Megs RAM, and (whils't I don't pretend to understand the intracacies of bucket size) I certainly can tell you that I started (for the first time) to experience render problems in P5 when I experimented with increeasing my bucket size to 64 (Poser didn't freeze but just stopped half-way as you describe) Maybe you already know, but there's a great FAQ on Firefly at the above link, and if you follow Stefan's "my guide through firefly" link you can read his comments on bucket size.