Up until recently poser had been pretty stable on my system, then as time went by it got more and more unstable, it began crashing on renders fairly often.  I tried a few of the obvious things, video drivers, deceasing the bucket size, etc.. all seemed to help somewhat but nothing really got poser back to what I considered "stable", I'd still crash occasionally especially on bigger or more complicated scenes.

Well, I did some digging around and some reading trying to discover a solution to the problem, when I ran across a little blurb on website talking about the firefly renderer, and how it caches files out to disk - and as such how it is important to keep your disk defragmented.

I have to admit I was skeptical, after all disk defragmentation with most apps will affect there speed to a slight degree, but usually not there stability.  But I thought why not, worth giving it a shot.  So I defragmented my main drive and sure enough, poser is up and running nice and stable again on my system - it hasn't crashed during a render since.  I've even put my bucket size back up to 64 with no problems whatsoever.

I thought I'd pass that along for other folks who were having stability problems in poser - it's not the first place I would have looked for a solution but for whatever reason it worked wonders for me.

Stepdad

Thanks for the excelent info.

This sure is something to keep in mind.
When troubles occure, first thing will be a defrag than.
Surely not something first where I would think off.

Thanks

Thanks for the heads up :thumbupboth: Great info!

Clean disk and Defrag are 2 important habits to get into. I find once a week is good, maybe twice a week if doing a lot of CG. If you go to bed at the same hours every night, set your computer to do the house keeping when your asleep.

Another reason why your pagefile should be on a seperate drive and kept defragmented..

And if you rely on the windows system defrag utility, don't necessarily believe it when it says the disk does not need to be defragmented - I do it every couple of weeks whether the utility says it requires it or not.

I've had cases on other people's machines where the utility said there was no need, the report showed a heavily fragmented disk, the OS was slow and guess what. Defragging set everything back to normal!

I've came to believe that the reason behind this is that Poser (much like Windows) "Shotguns" it's self all over the drive. Little bit here, little bit there. After a while it gets hard for a program of any sort to run hither and tither gathering up all the information it needs when it's splattered across a vast amount of space.

 Only thing is? I'm incredibly squeamish about leaving my computer on and unattended with a Windows program ravaging it. Let's just say I have a love/hate relationship with my OS.
If only I could find a good, reliable...Non-windows...Defragmentation program...

A good way to defrag the pagefile is this:

Defrag the hard drive then pop your Windows XP cd into the drive, reboot & when the cd starts up choose recovery console.Then (if your main drive is C) type copy C:Boot.ini Pagefile.sys (hit enter at this point) then type del Pagefile.sys (hit enter again). Now reboot  & remove the cd, Windows will take slightly longer than normal to load but the pagefile will now be fragment free.

Note that Poser's texture cache is not in the pagefile but in the temp location set in the Poser Prefs. So if you want to keep all your temp files on a separate scratch disk, don't forget to change Poser's temp location to that disk (otherwise it defaults to the OS' native temp folder).

Defrag? Who'd have thunk it. Thanks for the info! I was just wondering about buying a 3rd party utility for defraging my one Windows box about a week ago too. This also totally explains why it's not deteriorating on my other nonWindows computer. BO_ok Marking this thread for sure. XD Thank you. :biggrin:

Oh yes, defraging one's computer after cleaning out the metaphysical peanut butter on all drives is # 1 for me.  Like stated, just because MS states that your disks drives don't need defraging doesn't mean squat.  I clean out everything daily and once a week, defrag all my hard drives and it only takes me a few minutes to do it.  --had my computer since 2002 and it's just as fast as it was new. 

Additionally, before you load any software application (like "Poser 8 or VUE 7"), clean it and defrag-defrag it a couple of times THEN load that brand new "Alpha" Poser 8 and VUE7- the software that never has to be updated, no bugs. 

Plutom

Note:  Poser 8 or VUE 7--the products will be out before the end of 2008-me predictions

Quote - Defrag? Who'd have thunk it. Thanks for the info! I was just wondering about buying a 3rd party utility for defraging my one Windows box about a week ago too. This also totally explains why it's not deteriorating on my other nonWindows computer. BO_ok Marking this thread for sure. XD Thank you. :biggrin:

Glad to be of assistance.  Under normal circumstances I'd defrag the home machine about once a month, but it had been quite a while since I'd done it and just a few weeks ago I moved a lot of stuff offline onto DVD's for permanent storage to free up some drive space.

When I was poking around on the web trying to come up with a solution for why poser had become so unstable, I read a blurb on a website talking about how the firefly renderer cache's to disk and how as a result you wanted to keep your disk defragged.

I thought about it for a bit, and thought well, it's a longshot but I wonder if maybe the fragmentation of the drive might have something to do with firefly being so unstable.  Never seen an app that would get hinky if your drive was a bit fragmented before - granted many of them will run slower but hadn't had one crash before.  But when you consider the disk caching and all the other stuff going on, I thought it just might be possible.

So I tried defragging the drive and sure enough, poser has been rendering even at it's highest settings with no problems ever since.  It was such a weird solution and one I never would have thought to try myself I'd thought I'd pass it along, just in case someone else might run into the same problem i had.

I have been getting crashes occasionally in the hair room and cloth room, so when I read this thread I thought "I wonder if". Ive now cleaned and defragged my systems disk and my Poser disk and things seem to be more stable now and things load faster but there is one very unexpected result,
  I went back to the scene I had been working on previously and when I render, the page file size has gone down from 1.5Gb to 1,0Gb,

Quote - I have been getting crashes occasionally in the hair room and cloth room, so when I read this thread I thought "I wonder if". Ive now cleaned and defragged my systems disk and my Poser disk and things seem to be more stable now and things load faster but there is one very unexpected result,
  I went back to the scene I had been working on previously and when I render, the page file size has gone down from 1.5Gb to 1,0Gb,

Interesting... so less is being sent out to disk once the volume is defragged.  I wonder if perhaps this is entirely a poser issue or if it might have something to do with how windows itself handles it's virtual memory.  I'll have to do some reading and see what I can uncover.  Glad to hear this apparenlty fixed your problem though.  At least now I'll have at least one suggestion for other folks to try the next time they say "I'm having problems with Poser.."

Stepdad

Quote - Defrag? Who'd have thunk it. Thanks for the info! I was just wondering about buying a 3rd party utility for defraging my one Windows box about a week ago too. This also totally explains why it's not deteriorating on my other nonWindows computer. BO_ok Marking this thread for sure. XD Thank you. :biggrin:

I've used Diskeeper for a few years now.  Works for me (and worth the money).

Quote - > Quote - Defrag? Who'd have thunk it. Thanks for the info! I was just wondering about buying a 3rd party utility for defraging my one Windows box about a week ago too. This also totally explains why it's not deteriorating on my other nonWindows computer. BO_ok Marking this thread for sure. XD Thank you. :biggrin:

I've used Diskeeper for a few years now.  Works for me (and worth the money).

That is the good one I came accross some time ago but I couldn't remember the name of it. Thank you! :biggrin: