Attached Link: 78% sized screen capture

This is a quirk which I hope can be diagnosed and fixed for P9 and the next Poser Pro version.  Rendering in Poser Pro 2010, the progress bar for the IDL precalculation pass will reach the end.  The processor cores go idle, except for an occasional pulse.  The displayed buckets are usually only about halfway down the window.  The computer remains like this for hours, then the buckets suddenly cascade down filling the window.  I see a similar phenomenon at the end of the main render pass.

To see the screen capture, click the link above, and when the Photobucket page opens, hover on the picture;  when the popup menu appears, select zoom/high res image.

Whatever housekeeping/preparatory work Poser is doing during all that time is obviously not making good use of processor capacity, and thus wasting a lot of time.

It isn't an issue with page filing to virtual memory in compensation of insufficient RAM;  the HD activity is also only an occasional flicker, and as you can see from the screen capture (slightly hard to read because Photobucket reduced the size), there is plenty of memory capacity remaining.

The IDL progress bar finished in about four hours;  the idle time is fourteen hours so far.  That is a significant waste.

Cameron has dual hex processors (Hyperthreaded), rendering in 24 threads.  I see the same phenomenon on Galadriel, which has a core i7 Hyperthreaded quad rendering in 8 threads.

Attached Link: all cores active

Yay!   The IDL precalc buckets have dumped to the screen, and now the main render pass has begun.  all 24 processor threads are maxed out, and we're making progress again.  ^^

However, when the render progress bar finishes, another long "idle time" will begin.  :(

I had such an issue in Poser 7, but it was fixed in P8.

The CPU's would suddenly just go idle.