Hello everybody

My question has probably been addressed before but I can't find the answer. So please excuse me for asking again!

I run Poser 6 on a 3.6 GHz P4 with hyperthreading, 2 GB DRAM, and Windows XP Home with SP3.

I never had any problems until the day I wanted to render a scene with 2 Victoria 3 incl. cloths. The scene wouldn't render until I reduced max. texture size to 1536. I checked with the task manager and made a couple of puzzling observations (at least puzzling to me, I'm not a technical guy):

Memory usage for the Poser 6 process was approx. 900 MB. Total memory usage of all processes running was about 1.2 GB. Why Poser 6 complains about not having enough memeory when there are approx. 800 MB free RAM? I thought Win XP can assign max. 2 GB per task !

Processor usage during rendering (at low texture size) was 50% in average. Why the hell does't Poser use all processor capacity?

I'm curious if there is a solution to this which doesn't involve buying a new computer or upgrading the operating system to XP Professional or Vista. I would consider to upgrade DRAM to 3 GB if that helps but as long the 2 GB I have are not used that doesn't seem to make much sense.

Any advise highly appreciated!

Regards,
Christoph

I would check your settings for virtual memory and make sure thats big enough. You system should be able to render a picture with more figures than that.  I have done 6 figures in total and have only 512 mb of memory and lots of disk available to virtual memory .

You could check administration tools , event viewer and see if there are any errors logged . Its on the control panel from start menu.

Sounds like a virtual memory problem indeed.
I'd advise setting the virtual memory min and max at 2 times your physical RAM - WIndows XP Home probably won't let you set it at more than 4092 MB.

You can set your virtual memory by right-clicking the My Computer icon, choose Properties, the Advanced tab. Then click the Settings button under the Performance heading, choose the Advanced tab of the Performance Options dialog that pops up, and click the Change button under the Virtual Memory heading.
In a default Windows install, the virtual memory is probably set to "System managed size". Change that to "Custom size", select the C: drive in the drive list, and set both Initial Size and Maximum Size to 4092. Click the "Set" button to confirn Then "OK" your way out of the dialog boxes.

Chances are that you'll have to reboot your system - you can do so after closing any open programs.

What will this procedure do? You'll get a page file that's large enough to accomodate the memory requests of Poser during rendering.
The problem you experience is not due to a shortage of free memory, it's due to a shortage of contiguous free memory, both in RAM and in your pagefile. A full reboot will clean up both virtual memory and RAM, so memory requests for large blocks can be fulfilled again.
That is why a scene that refused to render before sometimes renders well directly after a reboot.

Bingo! Thank you both very much and a special thank you to svdl for the clear description how to resolve the issue.

My page file was 2047 MB, obviously too small. Checked with Vue d'Esprit too and found that Vue uses 100% of the processor capacity while rendering. Poser 6 obviously doesn't support hyperthreading.

If you ever are in Basel, Swiitzerland send me an email, I owe you a beer or two ...

Regards,
Christoph

Windows used to set virtual memory to system managed as the default , then for some reason it changed to about 2 times real memory , and thats way to small for many systems.   I use system managed myself so it can grab whatever it wants , but I have a second drive thats simply backup files , so the page file sits there without interferance. 

good to hear its fixed.

That's right, Poser 6 is a purely single threaded application.
Still, your CPU is single core. Hyperthreading is not multicore, and Poser 6 should be able to utilize up to 80%-90% of your CPU capacity.