I get a memory error, every other time I try to render this scene.  And this happens with many hair  figures.  Although  the scene is small, only a 38MB .PZ3;  Shadows, Dissplacement, Raytracing are all off, and the Max. Texture Size has already 1/4rd my maps.  So I think it is time to put a thumb Poser's memory management vocabulary; and then maximize Posers call for memory, with my specific XP system specifications in mind?  

My most effective solution, to memory mangement, has always been to install Service Releases;  which I have done 3 times, for this P6 installation.  This helped again; as it got the render to complete, but not readily.

The next most succesfull solution has always been for me to increase my Windows Virtual Memory alotment; at Control Panel > System > Advanced > Performance > Advanced Virtual Memory.  Currently I have 756MBs of Physical RAM; and I'm opening, and closing, my Virtual Memory at 8GBs. 

So now it is time for me to turn to Poser's built in Memory Managing features.  I see; Adaptive Bucket, Adaption Threshold, and Memory Limit Buffer, at Edit > Preferences > Misc > Render Memory.  And I see Maximum Bucket Size, at Render > Render Settings > Manual.

Page 38 of the P6 Manuals explains the Edit > Preferences > Misc. > Render Memory:

"Adaptive Bucket Size: Checking this box enables the automatic adjustment of bucket
size in the FireFly renderer. Memory limit defines the size of the safety buffer in
Megabytes. If less memory is available, the render terminates. Lowering this value can
avoid premature termination, but can also affect stability. Adaption Threshold defines
at what fraction of remaining memory a subdivision of the render bucket should occur.
The remaining memory is measured at starting a render and on each adaption of the
bucket size. Raising this value yields smaller bucket sizes, lowering it will use more
virtual memory."

And Pages 341-342 explains Render > Render Settings > Manual > Maximum Bucket Size:

"Maximum Bucket Size: The bucket is the area being rendered at any one time. Enter
your desired value in the Maximum Bucket Size field. For example, entering a value
of 10 creates a rendering bucket that is no greater than 10-pixels by 10-pixels in size.
At render time, the renderer will render one such bucket area at once. 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. Note that Poser will automatically detect when the specified
bucket size will consume excessive resources, and in such cases will override the
specified bucket size and subdivide the buckets into smaller sizes. Smaller sized
buckets require less RAM, but will take longer to render."*

Here is what I've gathered from here, and in frequenting this forum:

Adaptive Bucket - This is better left on, to give Poser a freedom to manage hard to render object, like hair; and then simple things like skin, on it's own terms.  But what kind of know how would actually prompt a person to uncheck this?

Memory Limits - I do'nt understand how a Safety Buffer operates at; and confuse this option, with the Render Settings > Manual > Maximum Bucket Size, always?

Adaption Threshold - What is the subdivision of a render?  Is it safe to say that if this percentage, of available RAM, is smaller than Memory Limit Buffer, there will be problems?   

Maximum Bucket Size - A big bucket will render faster, but cause stability issues; and that the inverse is true, in that a small bucket will render slower, but be more stabily.

My problems, now, are; that I do'nt know where to start, by what margins to make alterations, nor how one function should effect an other(s?)

Or if anyone would care to reiterate these vocabulary definitions, in Layman's terms, that would also be appreciated!

:thumbupboth:

One scene I was trying to render but couldn't, ended up being a problem with the size of the shadow maps for one of the lights. It was in the thousands. I reduced it to 256 and then was able to render fine.

It might not be your problem, but it's something worth looking at.

Acadia - Hi, thanks!  Nope, not, and for sure; I have Shadows Turned Off, from my render settings, per usual.

Thanks pjz99!  O.K. I'll be sure to Minimize it.  Can I just keep it Minimized?

This reminds me there is a Task Manger Function to give Poser a Higher Priority; but any time of tried this, in a similar situation, I've lost control of windows.  THe render may have gone far, but it was useles, becuase I could'nt save it, before Windows crashed.

Hi.. I have same problems with P6 and P7.. I read somewhere in a forum:
If you have bucket size high( I see you have 100) then it will use more memory.. It's 64 by default..I will suggest that you put it to 34 or maybe smaller.. I also have tried to unmark the adaptive bucket size on the preferences..and my render got more stabil...

Memory management in any version of Poser has always been a problem. When a scene gives a problem, save it before rendering, stop Poser, start Poser again, load your scene and render (this way all memory will be available for the render and nothing will be lost for any reason). Always reduce the bucket size to force through a render (you can go down to 2 for a very slow but stable render), smaller means slower but a better chance of getting it finished.
Minimizing a program doesn't release memory, it just means memory not currently accessed is no longer in active memory, so it may give the impression of reducing memory demands but it won't actually make much difference (although several programs benefit from the small interruptions when they have some kind of garbage cleaning capabilities).
Tricky scenes will always require a trial and error method. There is no way of predicting whether a scene will be tricky, I 've had simple scenes been tricky on rendering and complex scenes (like the italian bar with 8 spotlights and 12 point lights) render without a problem, so always assume a scene will be tricky and save before rendering.

Quote - Minimizing a program doesn't release memory, it just means memory not currently accessed is no longer in active memory, so it may give the impression of reducing memory demands but it won't actually make much difference (although several programs benefit from the small interruptions when they have some kind of garbage cleaning capabilities).

Yes it does.  Process memory immediately drops from hundreds of MB down to a small amount (around 50mb in my experience) and commit charge changes.  This behavior has been very consistent in Poser 6 for me and in other apps e.g. certain games that had memory leak problems.

I thought I was the only one with this problem.   I just added a Gig of Memory and still having the same problem    
Thanks much for this info 
Im not sure I understand it all but are you saying that some place in systems setting you can tell your computer to give a program, lets say Poser priority as far as use of system resources?

You can adjust the priority of a program but there is typically no purpose for single-user computers; what priority does is control what order a given process (or program) is allowed a turn on the processor, as the processor gives a portion of its "attention" to each process that has sent it an interrupt (a "pay attention to me please" signal).  Since pretty much all single-user computers, when you hit your Render button, aren't likely to be doing too much else that requires a lot of CPU time, adjusting priority rarely has any useful effect and can often cause you problems like Angelouscuitry describes.

While it would be nice if you could set a quota on a program to prevent it from consuming more memory than you have, unfortunately this is not a feature of Windows (or MacOS I'm fairly sure).

Hi.. I want to ask in this forum what computer shall I have to render fast?? I hate to sit and wait and wait for a render..

I have an AMD Athlon dual core 3800 + processor and 2 GB RAM, and still it get me crazy .. It close down, and some days it renders fast and yesterday   couldn't render anything..

Ok one more thing if you dont mind....
I was under the impression that more memory would solve my rendering problems.   I had 512 and removed half of that and replaced with a 1gb stick of mem which gave me 1.256 of ram and am planing to add another GB this weekend.
My question is this;  simply put is ram the problem or not?   
Dose more ram me less problems when rendering, or is the problem due to some sort of generic problem with Poser or my Operating system itself that can never really be fixed?
Hope my question makes sense. 
Im from the school of thought that 90% of the solution to any problem is first knowing what the problem is or how to ask the question which in this case Im afraid Im not sure I am doing.  :)
Thanks again 
Steel

If you have the money, SoCalRoberta recently spec'd out and bought pretty much the ultimate machine you could run Poser 7 on:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2717051

The big thing was the intel qx6850 quad core processor that she chose, which is the most powerful desktop processor in the world (no exaggeration), as long as your applications can make use of all 4 processor cores.  I have a similar box built around the qx6700, not as powerful but still pretty nice.  A cheaper alternative to the qx6850 would be something like the q6600, for about a quarter of the price.

Note that previous to Poser 7 though, all the other versions of Poser do not make use of more than one processor core; so depending on what version of Poser you prefer to work with it may not be as much benefit.

Quote - Ok one more thing if you dont mind....
I was under the impression that more memory would solve my rendering problems.   I had 512 and removed half of that and replaced with a 1gb stick of mem which gave me 1.256 of ram and am planing to add another GB this weekend.
My question is this;  simply put is ram the problem or not? 

It can help, sure.  However, no matter how much memory you stick on the machine (e.g. I have 8GB) all versions of Poser currently available are limited to 2 or 3 GB of memory under any circumstances, because they are written for 32-bit operating systems.  Even if you run them under a 64-bit operating systems, they still have this 2 or 3GB limit (Poser 6 and 7 are 3GB, previous versions are 2GB).  In fact just now I had a render crash because it overflowed 3GB of claimed RAM and crapped out (and incidentally I got around it by minimizing while running a second time).  This 3GB limit is fundamental to pretty much all 32-bit applications, and can't really be gotten around.  There are other things that can help, as jfbeute pointed out you can adjust bucket size down, or you can render a complex scene in smaller chunks and composite them together.

This is the advantage to using a 64-bit operating system and running an application that is written in 64-bit instructions, that "technically" you are not limited to 3GB any more, and upcoming "Poser 7 Pro" is advertised as coming with a renderer that runs in 64-bit mode, as long as you have a 64-bit operating system; probably that will be a great help, but I guess it comes down to how much money you want to pay for just that feature, because imo little else of great value is going to be included.

Just out of curiosity would you guys please point me to one of your postings that you had problems rendering with a breif description of where or what you think caused the problem?

The min shading rate you've set is too low. Try something between 0.1 and 0.5. That combined with a more reasonable bucket size (try 32 for a start) and it should render that scene just fine. The min shading rate tell the renderer how small it should make its micropolygons. 0.5 asks it to make micropolygons that are not bigger than half a pixel, 0.1 says not bigger than a tenth. Luckily there's an internal limit so that 0.0 does not result in an inifinitely small micropoly, but it still causes the render to generate a huge number of micropolygons that consume huge amounts of RAM. The large bucket size in addition asks it to render 10000 pixels (100 times 100) at once, and while trying to cover those 10000 pixels with micropolygons that are only a fraction of a pixel in size, it runs out of memory.

Great information in this thread. 

But in case it's not just a memory issue, I seem to recall people having renders stall with certain hair figures and the remedy was to run the hair through Stomp.

*Hi.. I want to ask in this forum what computer shall I have to render fast?? I hate to sit and wait and wait for a render..

I have an AMD Athlon dual core 3800 + processor and 2 GB RAM, and still it get me crazy .. It close down, and some days it renders fast and yesterday   couldn't render anything..

I've looked at your gallery and I don't see any image at all that should cause trouble with your machine. I've got an AMD 64 3500+ and 2Gb also and I render much more complex scenes in Poser 6 than what your galleries shows at a minimum of 1100x1029 without any problems and pretty fast. Last week I did render a scene with Stonemasons Urban Sprawl (at least 8 buildings in sight), 4 fully clothed & skin textured M3's with a number of props, 1 textured humvee, 2 textured bradly and 1 textured blackhawk and on top of that I added volumetric rain. Without the rain the scene rendered in less then 10mins with the volumetric rain it took over an hour. I'm doing a large number of such large scenes and they all render very fast, no strange things happening, Poser 6 performs rock solid.

Perhaps you (or someone you know) should give your pc a thorough check and see if all hardware is still functioning as it should? Also check for spyware taking away cpu power, I had that problem last year, nothing worked well, nothing ran well and I found out some kind of spyware was running in my pc, when removed everything worked well again.

Two things i did to prevent software crashes (On XP):

1- Start -> Run -> type "msconfig" -> go to "Startup" tab, and uncheck all things you absolutely know that you don't need to startup when your windows starts. In doubt, leave it there (although it can be re-checked if you lack a functionality in some other software). Then, restart and open your software directly (poser, daz, carrara, bryce...) and 50% of the crashes are resolved.

2- Get the DownRezer poser utility (small software available here at renderosity), and use it to be able to put more people and clothing in a scene without charging your RAM.

Since Poser 5 I have used a small app called FreeRAM XPPro and have had much less hassle with out of memory errors.

Have a great Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous 2008.

- And thank you for all your input!  Again, I remember when your:

character first came out; finally having the chance to render with her has been an aspiration of mine for a long time, I am so grateful for...everything!

:thumbupboth:

I just got a scene Ive been working on for months now to render.
I lowered the Max Bucket size down to 03,  lowered the Max Texture size down to 400 and also I went into Task Manager, Processes, Highlighted Poser, Right Clicked,  and then Set Prority to High.   
The Render time was 26 hours but the finished product was well worth all the time and trouble.
I too want to thank all for the help and support Ive received here
Steel 
Oh and a Very Happy New Years to one and all

I think I now need to just get at a new/better example to cause need for other expirimentats with these other Memory Oriented throttles/gears?

:rolleyes:

System Specifications

AMD 700Mhz
768MBs PC100
8GBS Virtual Memory