I've come across a few more issues with Poser 8, which I haven't seen discussed on the forum.  If anyone knows how to deal with any of these, please help!

• P8 freezes when adjusting a camera.  Windows tries to close P8, but any Poser interface windows which aren't docked persist, floating over the desktop.  Poser will not close.  Upon logging off of Windows and back on, P8 will open, but the library won't load.  I had this problem once before, prior to the SR 2.1 update.  I can't tell whether this relates to cameras/scene preview, or to the library, which wouldn't load.

• Point lights don't always seem to be updated in a scene when they are dragged.

• The morph brush jumps erratically when used on some meshes, making the tool utterly useless in such cases.

• The preview window will only antialias when I force it using an external program.  I have to use settings not formally supported by nVidia in order to force the antialiasing.  Otherwise, the preview loses the antialiasing when the camera is switched or the room tab is changed.

• Periodically, Poser will act like it is rendering the scene, but will only produce a render of the preview.  This is usually corrected when the render is repeated.

If anyone has encountered these problems or has a suggested solution, please jump in!  Thank you!  :D

It looks like the morph brush problem may relate to body handles.  On a body part with a body handle deformer, the morph brush tries to select the handle geometries, even if they are turned off.

"Camera goes nuts" problems are something I have also had, and seem to go away after rebooting (I actually power down).  They don't seem to be strictly limited to Poser 8, a couple of people have reported the same problem with Poser 7.  Try a BRS reboot (big red switch) and see if it lets you get around that problem.  Not a good answer but at least it's an answer.

I had a lot of stability problems with rendering until I turned off "External Process" in Edit -> General Preferences -> Render.

I would keep a close eye on any updates getting pushed through by Microsoft.  There have been several recently and could potentially cause problems.  I'm experiencing some anitaliasing problems upon camera movement I never had before, but that immediately corrects itself.

pjz99 - The camera freeze problem did require a full reboot before Poser would return to normal.  I neglected to mention that.  Unfortunately, by the time the situation reaches the point where a reboot is needed, Poser has already crashed, with potential data loss.

I'll try turning off the external process rendering.  In an earlier thread, I was advised to turn it on, for the sake of less crash-friendly renders.  The most recent SR seems to have corrected the render-crash problems, so I'll see if external process rendering makes any difference.

hborre - My preview antialiasing is very odd.  When the mouse is over the window, the entire scene blurs slightly, like a Photoshop filter has been applied - which may involve more than antialiasing, as I thought that dealt only with the edges?  When the mouse leaves the preview, the blurring ceases.  It certainly looks like Poser is doing more upon mouseover than it really needs to.  I've never had any antialiasing oddities during camera movement.  But if you're using the parameter dials to move the camera, your mouse has left the preview.  Could your problem be some manifestation of what I'm seeing with the mouseover?

When the "camera goes nuts" error occurs, I prefer a fast and simple [SPACEBAR] press instead of a complete reboot.

Does that actually fix it?  I'd be happier to not have to reboot (duh).

Cage, could be the same manifestation.  As I mentioned, it corrects itself after settling in.  I usually keep track of any update that filters in from Microsoft, Java, etc.  Especially from Microsoft.  My automatic update is set only to notify me when an update is available.  If I think it's safe, then I will download it and install.

R_Hatch - The spacebar?  How odd.  I've just checked the Poser keyboard shortcut listings, and it looks like the spacebar pauses or resumes the flyaround feature, which I've never used.  But does the spacebar help because the problem involves flyaround somehow, or is it a Windows shortcut with which I'm unfamiliar?

hborre - I have my Windows updates set up the same way.  Unfrotunately, I'm rarely able to discern whether an update might be unsafe, so I just end up letting them all through, most of the time. 

me too, me too, me too...

• anyone above using Wacom Intuos?(so have set the 'tablet mode' in preferences)
• anyone using Win 7 - 64 bits?
• anyone had  in Render Process set  17 or more 'number of threads' in separate process?

Because I have those and I wonder if I set it all right. Ati Radeon i able to do it all alone . I doubt that P8 is using it......the renders could be done way faster but it's not. Also the P8 is 'nagging' when I move things in the scene in 'texture shaded' ..bul will do it in wasp if I change to cartoon or other less 'heavy'. Point is: with 2GB  Ati I suppose it will make the render faster..Am I wrong?
I'm back using PoserPro 7.3 because it's even faster....;(

@ softcris:

How many threads do you actually have available on your CPU? It's either 1, 2, 4 or 8 - possibly 16 if you're very rich - but not 17. (I'm running an Intel i7 940 which has 4 cores / 8 threads). Set your preferences to the number of threads your system has.

Your graphics card plays no part in rendering, but a bigger, better card will improve things in the 'Pose Room' - moving cameras, props and figures around. The more polygons in your scene, the more jittery the movement.

well thanks!
That makes things clear for me! Yes I set to 17..but bcause I had no idea was realted to cpu!
I have a quad core ( not yet 7i!) so I will set to 4 from now on!
Thanks for clearing it up!

"Camera goes nuts" -> hitting Space bar does seem to fix this for me, cool.  Thanks R_Hatch.

This jumping morph brush is really going to be a problem.  It doesn't just happen with body handles, but with internal body parts, too.  When trying to morph the head, the brush keeps trying to select the eyes.  Result, a jumping morph brush which is useless for face morphs.

Has anyone tried to use the tool on faces?  Is this affecting only me?

I had another one of the freeze-crash situations just now.  I had stepped away from the computer and left Poser open.  Vista began running something in the background while I was away, and Poser wasn't responding when I returned.

Hard to know whether this is a separate problem with similar symptoms, or whether it indicates that my freeze-crash was due to something other than the Poser camera.

I tried the spacebar trick with my recent crash, but no dice.  Perhaps it isn't the same problem as "camera goes nuts."

Another freeze-crash.  This one took place when manually entering values in a numeric field on the parameter dial tab.

Now that I'm actually trying to use Poser 8, I'm really finding it to be horrifically crash-prone, even after the SR 2.1 patch.  I'm losing work.  I'm not happy.  I think I may go back to P7 until there's a new patch for P8.

On the positive side, I did get to verify the spacebar solution for the "camera goes nuts" bug.  It worked nicely, when that was the problem.  Thanks, R_Hatch!

P8 camera and morph brush are quite normal here ,but joint editing and set-up room are nuts.By clicking a value ore a gizmo in the window my parameters use to jump soewhere into space.Tablet mode on or off doesn'z matter ... and yes i have the latest SR installed.

Quote - P8 camera and morph brush are quite normal here ,but joint editing and set-up room are nuts.By clicking a value ore a gizmo in the window my parameters use to jump soewhere into space.Tablet mode on or off doesn'z matter ... and yes i have the latest SR installed.

If you are using a Tablet, try uninstalling and reinstalling the Drivers. If that does not work, contact Tech Support (put Attn John in the Subject)

I think my freeze-crashes come about when something begins running in the background while I work with P8.  The hard drive begins to grind, the interface begins to lag significantly, and Poser apparently becomes confused.  The drive stops grinding after a few minutes if I close Poser.  The Windows Task Manager doesn't report any unusual activity, as far as I can tell, and I've tweaked Vista to try to turn off anything I know about which will grind the drive this way.  I assume Poser is the cause, somehow.  I've turned off the 'searchIndexed' listings in the LibraryPrefs.xml, although I don't know if that relates to this at all.

Does anyone get hard drive grinding while running Poser?  Not rendering, just working with the scene.  Could it be something relating to the new library system?  Do I need to increase the amount of drive space available to Poser for memory in some way?

Attached Link: Hard drives Issues.

Well I'm not expert..but usually that sounds is something wrong with your HD.
Try to listen to these sounds here;     
http://blog.enrii.com/2006/01/25/diagnose-yourself-when-you-hard-disk-makes-noise/

identify an d look for solution.
Ah! When we have MANY adds-on ( all the freebies etc..for Poser)  in one o maybe several 'runtime'.. can cause the program to go nuts../ simple my dear Watson; 'stuff from many different desktops in one place together, can generate different behaviors from the host' )

Hi, softcris.  I visited the site you've linked, and it leads to the Hitachi website, where there are no .wav files readily evident.  I think they must have been taken down?  But I'll see if I can find anything which will assess the health of my hard drive.  I hadn't considered the possibility that I might be having hardware problems.  All of my other software runs fine.  Only Poser 8 has problems.  Posers 5 and 7 are quite cooperative.

I suppose it could be Runtime bloat, if that's actually something which can create problems in P8.  I really don't have very large libraries, but I do have several Runtimes linked up.  And, again, Poser 7 has all of those Runtimes, minus the new one for P8 (to which I haven't added any new content), and it runs without any trouble at all.

The grinding noise isn't anything unusual.  Apparently Vista grinds the drive this way a lot.  I hate it, I can't make it stop, and now Poser 8 seems to have run afoul of this wretched trait of MS Vista.  Hmm.

Thank you.  :D

you're welcome..I guess was 6aken away the 'wav' sounds...;( but still you got lots of information about the health of your HD.

I by myself have this problem, a unusual noise in the HD - but I know it's corrupted files I got there...I'm to change asap  but haven't done it yet...sometimes happens and sometimes it does disapears...I tested the same drive in extrnal box and it's same noise...;(
Now, Poser has it's way with all of us....I don't let it take to me anymore..:))   I go back to older versions and back again to the new one...still I have not yet like so much P8 - I'm using both Pro 7.3 and P8 - but after so many years using Poser I know the culprit MUST BE the hundreds of 'runtime' we tend to use with the software...
Look, one make a freebie or pay stuff that 'he' or 'she' places the folders in diferent plces that is supposed to be..even if you buy TODAY a Daz3D stuff for it - it will run to your 'runtime' and set it all there the way the maker did...what in many cases is NOT the ORIGINAL place for Poser runtime to ahve its things....
As said before, I'm not expert, just observing things with Poser alogn these years.
..Actuall I don't believe in Poser anymore and that measn will not be better in newer versions...I have wait for that since P4.

Problem is get rid of Poser! That's a addiction you know...
I'm trying hard to get use to Daz Studio..but I can't see any fun in it...even Cinema 4D I'm willing to..but as said...Poser is more addiction than than anything...sorry if I went far beyound the issue here..just giving a peice of my mind.

Quote - Hi, softcris.  I visited the site you've linked, and it leads to the Hitachi website, where there are no .wav files readily evident.  I think they must have been taken down?  But I'll see if I can find anything which will assess the health of my hard drive.  I hadn't considered the possibility that I might be having hardware problems.  All of my other software runs fine.  Only Poser 8 has problems.  Posers 5 and 7 are quite cooperative.

I suppose it could be Runtime bloat, if that's actually something which can create problems in P8.  I really don't have very large libraries, but I do have several Runtimes linked up.  And, again, Poser 7 has all of those Runtimes, minus the new one for P8 (to which I haven't added any new content), and it runs without any trouble at all.

The grinding noise isn't anything unusual.  Apparently Vista grinds the drive this way a lot.  I hate it, I can't make it stop, and now Poser 8 seems to have run afoul of this wretched trait of MS Vista.  Hmm.

Thank you.  :D

It sounds to me like you have nowhere near enough system RAM and both Poser and Windows Vista are forced to use the virtual memory cache on your hard drive. The drive gets thrashed as it swaps files constantly. You should have at least 2GB of RAM just to run Vista well and if you're going to render scenes with a lot of objects and textures, you should strongly consider upgrading to 3GB or 4GB.

My system has 3GB of RAM, of which my RAM monitor reveals 2GB to be available to Poser and other programs.  I guess I generally overlook that extra 1GB which the OS just sits on.  Possibly I should consider a RAM upgrade, though.  Absolutely no problems with Poser 7, however.  Does Poser 8 use that much more RAM than P7?

I've contacted Smith Micro about my problems, and they seem to be trying to zero in on some display driver problems which may specifically beset some nVidia cards.  So far, they've had me uninstall my nVidia drivers (Microsoft issued a Windows update which screwed up most display drivers, apparently?), then install the latest drivers from nVidia.  I've done this, and nothing has changed, as far as I can tell.  So far P8 hasn't crashed, but absence or evidence isn't evidence of absence.  That, and I've been using P7 for most things, because I got sick of losing work.

Fingers crossed that solutions to these and other problems will come about.

Quote - > Quote - Hi, softcris.  I visited the site you've linked, and it leads to the Hitachi website, where there are no .wav files readily evident.  I think they must have been taken down?  But I'll see if I can find anything which will assess the health of my hard drive.  I hadn't considered the possibility that I might be having hardware problems.  All of my other software runs fine.  Only Poser 8 has problems.  Posers 5 and 7 are quite cooperative.

I suppose it could be Runtime bloat, if that's actually something which can create problems in P8.  I really don't have very large libraries, but I do have several Runtimes linked up.  And, again, Poser 7 has all of those Runtimes, minus the new one for P8 (to which I haven't added any new content), and it runs without any trouble at all.

The grinding noise isn't anything unusual.  Apparently Vista grinds the drive this way a lot.  I hate it, I can't make it stop, and now Poser 8 seems to have run afoul of this wretched trait of MS Vista.  Hmm.

Thank you.  :D

It sounds to me like you have nowhere near enough system RAM and both Poser and Windows Vista are forced to use the virtual memory cache on your hard drive. The drive gets thrashed as it swaps files constantly. You should have at least 2GB of RAM just to run Vista well and if you're going to render scenes with a lot of objects and textures, you should strongly consider upgrading to 3GB or 4GB.

Well from my side I think the ram is not issue. I run with 8 GB ram and have avaiable 7GB for for all my programs and P8 crashes! Pacth ..no patch..it happens.
As well I make it all in PPro and render the 'pz3' file in P8 so that makes it less frustatting.
As said before; I don't think Smith Micro will fix these issues in the next version..unfortunely I'm fed up with then too.

I've yet to experience a single crash with Poser 8 (or Poser Pro - no crashes since P7 actually), so I wouldn't go laying the blame on Poser or Vista just yet. There are all kinds of software and hardware configurations that can cause problems. The hard drive thrashing doesn't sound like it's a problem with Poser, but a systemic issue instead. I'd be interested to see how much of your system resources are being used by Poser while rendering a scene that gives you trouble. If you're using a bunch of figures and props with high resolution textures, 2GB is not hard to fill. Keep in mind that textures are uncompressed when being rendered, so a 4000x4000 texture that only takes up ~1.2MB on your hard drive requires 45.8MB of memory uncompressed.

That said, I doubt it's your display drivers either, especially when it's the rendering engine causing problems and not the Preview window. Assuming you're using the Firefly engine to render scenes and not OpenGL, your GPU is not utilized while rendering at all.

softcris -

I wouldn't say I'm fed up with SM, but I am tired of Poser 8 being a drag.  I think they'll fix it, eventually.  I hope....

I bought P8 for the cross-body part morph brush (which I can't use, as it jumps) and for the new joint options (which I haven't tried yet and which don't look as exciting as I'd hoped, now that I see the implementation).  So going back to P7 makes sense, for now, at least.

JWFokker -

Actually, the rendering crashes have stopped.  I had an earlier thread about them, but they were resolved by SR 2.1.

I rarely use many figures or construct complex scenes, and I tend toward small textures (rarely over 1500 square).  I still construct scenes which are about as complex as those I made in Poser 5 on a Windows ME Compaq with 512 MB RAM.  Poser 7 has no trouble with what I do.  And, for that matter, most of what I do is build figures and objects, because once they're built, posing them usually frustrates me due to bad joints.  (Antonia and Brad may change that....)

When Poser 8 is rendering, I show 90% to 100% CPU usage, even with one figure without props or environment.  Poser tends to use about 30% to 40% of my available RAM, in scenes I've tested.  Poser 7 doesn't require as much for the same things, but I don't recall what P7 uses.

The hard drive grinding/thrashing is apparently, from what Google brings up, a commonplace complaint with Vista(?).  I've had the grinding since I started using this Vista system, whenever Windows begins running some (generally unwanted) process in the background.  What's unusual here is that using Poser 8 seems to result in unidentified grinding.  How do I learn about my swap space usage?

Well that's a new look at it, at least for me.
I use Win 7 (very similar to Vista!) and as said here before, I had the noise coming from my HDD. Today I don't bother anymore! I know it's not damaging anything.
About P8 or PPro I rest my case!
Have a nice day.
See you around here.
Cris  :)

I suspect the unwanted process is Indexing.. that will run big drives for days... seems the OS does not look at Processor usage, but Mouse or keyboard Usage for whether there is activity. Not sure if that is what is causing all your HD access, but you can check by turning off Indexing. Oddly, if you let it finish and the Drives are local, not external, it seems to clear up. I have noticed on Vista that it attempts to reindex my Network and External Drives each time I access them, so I turned it off on them.

Quote - I suspect the unwanted process is Indexing.. that will run big drives for days... seems the OS does not look at Processor usage, but Mouse or keyboard Usage for whether there is activity. Not sure if that is what is causing all your HD access, but you can check by turning off Indexing. Oddly, if you let it finish and the Drives are local, not external, it seems to clear up. I have noticed on Vista that it attempts to reindex my Network and External Drives each time I access them, so I turned it off on them.

I thought indexing might be the problem, too, a few days ago.  I turned off indexing for Windows and I set searchIndexed="0" in the LibraryPrefs.xml.  But I did that before I reported the drive grind-related lagging, within this thread.  It seems that Poser or Windows is doing something it won't divulge, which I can't stop.

For some reason, Dr. Hibbard is in my head.  He says, "My diagnosis?  Bad babysitting!"

But I'm not sure what he means.  Hmm.  My subconscious is strangely hyperactive today.    :unsure:

Unless you actually use Windows Search to find files, I recommend running services.msc and setting Windows Search to Manual or Disabled to ensure that Windows hasn't decided that it wants to index your file system anyway.

Though the easier way to diagnose this would be to watch the services running with Windows Task Manager and see what it's doing when the drive starts thrashing.

If you want to check the size of your virtual memory cache, go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings (on the sidebar) -> Performance -> Settings -> Advanced tab. Under the Virtual Memory subsection the "Total paging file size for all drives" is how much virtual memory is currently allocated for use. By default Windows controls this and will adjust it accordingly. You may want to hit Change and tweak a few things. First of all, if you have multiple physical hard drives in your system, change the page file location to a drive that does not have Windows or Poser installed on it. And given free reign, Windows used to allocate more virtual memory than it actually needed, so you may want to put a set value or range of how much you want it to use. Since you've got 3GB already, another 3-4GB of virtual memory should be more than enough.

I use a separate program for searches.  Windows search is very slow, by comparison.  I'd like to turn of anything relating to indexing which I possibly can, based on things I've read on this forum since the P8 library was introduced.  I believe I've set it to Manual, but the P8 grinding seems like it could be indexing?

Windows Task Manager doesn't show me anything that I can identify as unusual when I check it, upon the start of the grinding.  What processes should I be looking out for?

Ah!  Thanks for the instructions.  "Total paging file size for all drives:   3369 MB" is what I find.  Which is 'round-about 3 GB, if I understand MB to GB conversion.  Slightly over 3 GB.

Look for something using Processor when it starts... If it is only System Idle, you may want to do some Diagnostics on your Drive.

 "Camera goes nuts"  happens to me on my mac os 10, space bar not work for me, did the "restart" worked for a min.

I am using the trial and if they dont figure this stuff out i wont upgrade.

I will check back here to see if any new ideas or info.

thanks, kim

You can also switch off "Superfetch" which is caching programs. It will give more memory to use for Poser - or any other program.

I thought I'd never heard of Superfetch, but apparently I had, as I've already disabled it at some point.  Hmm.  I'm looking over howtogeek.com to see if there are any other Vista tweaks I could try.

Just tried running Poser 8 instead of Poser 7, for a bit.  It promptly started the drive grinding - the quality of which sounds kind of like the noise the old Windows ME disk defragmenter  used to make.  Kind of choppy, not continuous, as with the drive noise made by some programs.  Not sure how else to describe it....

What I noticed this time, in addition to the grinding, is a massive, continuous RAM leak.  Over roughly ten minutes I watched P8 grab 100 MB more RAM than it was using upon loading my test scene (two Antonias with default texture maps, two simple garments with small textures) being opened.  It continued to leak RAM when I wasn't doing anything.  It released any RAM grabbed during a render, but continued to consume more just for the scene. 

I tried turning off separate process rendering, but it didn't seem to make any difference for anything.

Smith Micro seems to want to blame most problems on display drivers and have suggested the cure-all of switching to SREE3D preview.  I did so, and Poser 8 behaved the same way - grinding the drive, not antialiasing, leaking RAM, refusing to operate the morph brush.  SREE3D does not seem to help.  (Does this mean my problem is something other than the display drivers?)

I tested not using nHancer, or, indeed, a special profile for Poser in the nVidia control panel (I deleted the profile altogether).  This didn't seem to affect anything, except insofar as Poser 8 went back to the aliased preview.  ("Aliased" is correct, right?  Not the unwieldy "unantialiased"....)  The RAM leak and grinding continued.

All drive grinding, as before, ceased promptly upon closing Poser 8.  In checking the Windows Task Manager for active processes which might account for the grinding, I only noted drive activity with Poser 8 and Windows Explorer.  Explorer's RAM consumption fluctuated up and down around a consistent level.  Poser, as described, grabbed more and more RAM while it was open.

After all of this, I opened the same scene I'd used, now in Poser 7.  P7 used approximately the same amount of RAM as P8, upon opening the scene.  The drive didn't grind.  The RAM used by Poser stayed level.  The preview window antialiased - without using an external program!  The morph brush didn't jump.

Something funny is going on, and it looks like it can only be traced to Poser 8, so far.  Bummer.

Regarding the page file. The best advice is to set a page file on each physical drive and set each to Windows controlled. Advice on websites telling you to set the page file to a fixed size or even to turn it off should be ignored. The windows memory manager knows best how to manage its memory and can do so optimally if left to do its own thing.

With a page file on each physical drive it will use whichever has least I/O on it.

With regards superfetch, you'll gain nothing by turning it off. It runs low priority and will only make use of memory for caching whilst that memory is not needed for anything else. If it is then it simply drops memory pages without issue for use by the programs requiring it.

How large is your Runtime? It's beginning to sound like Poser 8 is just taking forever to load the library for some reason. If you have thousands and thousands of figures, props, poses, etc, it may take a LONG time, which would also explain the constantly increasing RAM usage.

I have Poser 8 linked to five Runtimes.  Poser 7 is linked to all of these except the new P8 Runtime.

(Sizes listed are libraries only.  I assume the library system doesn't consider Geometries or other Runtime folders.)

Poser 4 - 792 MB
Poser 5 - 682 MB
Poser 5 (backup Runtime, formerly on a separate drive, now on C:/) - 788 MB
Poser 7 - 1.47 GB
Poser 8 - 1.11 GB

I 've tended to assume my Runtimes are rather small, compared to many users.  I haven't loaded many freebies and I have very few items from the marketplaces loaded.  Are my Runtimes large?

I think there was some discussion in another thread (I'm not sure how to find it now), about the P8 library creating some kind of temp files or cache files, which had to be manually deleted.  I couldn't quite make sense of the discussion, and when I've asked about it since the response seemed to deal with deleting Undo function cache files, which I assume is a separate issue.  Does anyone know anything about the library creating temp files?  Could that be what I'm seeing?

It may be worth merging your Runtime folders into one location and then configuring each version of Poser to use the new location. It would not surprise me if Poser is trying to load the library from multiple locations on the drive at the same time.

If you can, try merging them on a different drive and then move the new Runtime folder back to the original drive wherever you want it, so that all of the files are contiguous on the drive.

Runtimes by numbers of files and folders:

Poser 4 - 8,706 files in 453 folders
Poser 5 - 19,076 files in 831 folders
Poser 5 (backup) - 22,736 files in 1,109 folders
Poser 7 - 15,076 files in 1,038 folders
Poser 8 - 13,752 files in 908 folders

As mentioned earlier in the thread, my Poser 8 Runtime hasn't had much new content added.  I think I may have loaded one or two freebie figures into it.  By default, it's almost the size of my working library, Poser 7, which is full of extra WIP files.

Quote - It may be worth merging your Runtime folders into one location and then configuring each version of Poser to use the new location. It would not surprise me if Poser is trying to load the library from multiple locations on the drive at the same time.

If you can, try merging them on a different drive and then move the new Runtime folder back to the original drive wherever you want it, so that all of the files are contiguous on the drive.

Hoo boy.  That's a serious undertaking, which could break some files which may have embedded paths which aren't relative.  Older versions of Poser used to have a tendency to write absolute filepaths into the files.  :ohmy:  I suspect the process could take days.  Eek.

Is there any program available which can help merge Runtimes?

Not that I know of. I just moved my Runtime folder from one version of Poser to the next. If a file isn't where it's supposed to be I just point Poser to where is actually is.

Okay.  Hold on.  I may have something wrong, in my above posts.

My RAM monitor program actually shows my level of RAM holding stable, while Poser 8 is open.  The Windows Task Manager, however, shows a steadily rising value for P8 under "Memory (Private Working Set)".  Is that not the same thing as RAM?  The WTM also shows rising values for Firefox, while it's open, so perhaps what I have here isn't a RAM leak?

At any rate, the P8 grinding seems like it may be linked to the Memory (Private Working Set) numbers, whatever they mean.

I doubt it's a memory leak. Many programs are doing things in the background that require memory, even if you aren't doing anything with the application. Like loading the Library.

The private working set is the amount of memory in use by Poser that is not shared with other applications, so that's a more accurate measure than whatever RAM monitor you're using.

Surely it doesn't load all the library in anyway? It physically can't - mine's several GB's in size. The internal library browser only works as a file explorer and indexes files as appropriate depending on which directory/folder you are in?

Consolidating runtimes would only end up with a single runtime the sum size of the individual runtimes anyway (assuming no duplicates).

Interesting.  I unlinked my Poser 4 and Poser 5 backup Runtimes from Poser 8, and the grinding seems to have diminished (but not stopped, altogether).  What makes this interesting, perhaps, is that these two Runtimes were not located in Program Files, like the others.  I've no idea whether that could be significant somehow, or not.

If the available free RAM isn't actually leaking, I think I'll try working with P8 a bit, to see if I can replicate the lockup crashes I was having before SM had me uninstall-reinstall my display drivers.  Poser 8 may at least be stable now, possibly.

But the morph brush is really a problem.  Sigh.

Quote - Surely it doesn't load all the library in anyway? It physically can't - mine's several GB's in size. The internal library browser only works as a file explorer and indexes files as appropriate depending on which directory/folder you are in?

Consolidating runtimes would only end up with a single runtime the sum size of the individual runtimes anyway (assuming no duplicates).
 

It's not actually loading the files in the library into memory, but it is loading thumbnails and other info. Having all of the files in one location, especially if they are contiguous on the drive and not in multiple physical locations, should reduce the amount the drive has to seek back and forth as it loads the thumbnails and file info. If the drive head doesn't have to seek back and forth this will improve performance and reduce or eliminate the "grinding noise" that Cage is hearing.

It's also likely checking each Runtime folder for any changes, which could take a while if they are in multiple locations.

But why would it be loading thumbnails (and anything else) for anything but the branch of the library that is currently opened on screen...?

Quote - But why would it be loading thumbnails (and anything else) for anything but the branch of the library that is currently opened on screen...?

That's one of the many things I've been wondering.  I like to navigate the new library better than the old one.  I'd prefer the old one, though, if the new one is interfering with Poser functionality.  Pity there isn't an option to switch off one and use the other.  Or at least switch off the one and use some external utility, if needed.