I have been using Poser 13 for a few days now and generally I like it but I have a problem in that it seems to wander off on a regular basis.  It is generally fine when I start it but if I save a scene and then open another it seems to lock up whenever I make and change to the new scene.  All I have to do is move a camera or manipulate a figure and I get the spinning circle for a couple of minutes.  Task master shows a thread as not responding but it is in fact using the CPU and varying amount of memory.  If I wait for this to finish all I have to do is move the camera slightly and it goes into the same loop again and I cannot use Poser for another couple of minutes.

Is anyone else having this problem or is it my system?

I had this happen once! Was a CPU overload causing to overheat reaching the 100 c barrier. Made me change the Computer cooling system to make sure it does not happen again as it can sure cause damage and shorten the lifespan of the computer.

It might be caused through accessing to much the poser library, you should check what is using up that much resources. It also can be caused if your Hd drive is running at 100% when something is trying to access it .... Best is just to check where the peaks are from there you can block it or fix it.

Like in the other thread Hopefully it is not a sqlite issue accessing the database and using up all your resources. I had a link placed that explains Symptoms if infected and exactly one of these are mentioned.

• Installed software crashing
• Various stop errors
• Software errors
• Random system reboots
• Unknown processes running in the Task Manager
• General slowdown on the computer
• Increased CPU/GPU usage

Thanks for the pointers, my system is water cooled and only every reaches the very low seventies when I have a long render running.  In this case some of the processors are not in use as the CPU is only running at around 25%.  Poser itself is on an 500G SSD with 419g spare.  None of the other problems seem to have an issue only Poser. 

After my issue I ripped out the water cooling system and built in a conventional one with Fan also changed the Air Flow with the chassis Fan's with water I had about 70c and after the change it went down to 30c . Right now only the Cpu Fan's are running and once in a while it needs to boot up the Chassis Fan's, but also these are set up to work in a intelligent mode not to run all at once if not needed.

Peaks on Cpu can be very short you will not even note them but heating up the system big time, in no time you are on 100c and as fast it can go down but sure can cause to freeze up your system. At the time I also thought the CPU is running low but it already was enough causing system issues.

Even a issue with a Internet browser or a site can cause a freeze and short peaks changing your cpu into a egg Pan at 220c mostly you realize it when the Win explorer makes a crash and reboot :) 

But that issue with Poser is sure not normal. Might be that it is pointing to other system resources and applications, sometimes just little conflicts causing a rat tail.

none of the beta test team reported this issue. I myself am running W10 on a modest air cooled system. No problems here.

ghostship2 posted at 11:08 AM Tue, 4 April 2023 - #4460732

none of the beta test team reported this issue. I myself am running W10 on a modest air cooled system. No problems here.

Thank you for the information, it looks for all the world as though it looks very much like Poser 12 did when it was doing an auto save, but every two minutes or so,  but I do not have that selected in Poser 13.  

Maybe time to reset your Poser preffs file

One thing you may want to try. Edit the Poser.ini, about 80 lines down there is a TEMP_PATH line. Set that to a non boot ssd drive in a directory just for Poser temp files. Create a directory on that drive to match. Start Poser and Increase the texture cache size (in preferences on the render tab) to about 50000 (50 gig). Set render threads to two less threads than your system has (30 with a 1950x, and you may have to go way lower if it is a parallelization issue in the CPU), Then restart Poser again, and see if it still does it. My system is running Windows 11, and that is how I have it set up. The only hangs I get is when cancelling renders, which is normal since I GPU render 99% of the time....

And for those that aren't at ease with INI files editing, the TEMP_PATH is here: 

Y-Phil posted at 4:39 AM Wed, 5 April 2023 - #4460834

And for those that aren't at ease with INI files editing, the TEMP_PATH is here: 

Thank you for adding that.

To be honest I had a nightmare of a day yesterday when a started this thread, my broadband provider was having a bad time too as my Internet connection was up and down like a fiddler's elbow.  Now I know for some people reading this that could be the norm so I know how lucky I am but they are normally good as a provider and I pay a lot each month for a fast connection.  This on top of the F-Secure  nonsense managed to push my buttons something that is hard to do with me usually.  When I am having bad days like this I tend to turn to Poser as an escape from the real world so when that started throwing a wobbly, my mood dipped even further.  Having had to reinstall Poser 13 due to F-Secure ( I restarted my machine and F-Secure deleted the quarantined the file in question) I tried to set up the Poser UI by moving many of the windows onto my second screen.  Try being the operative word, as many refused to go across and docked when told not to, after a frustrating 40 minutes I gave up and generated this thread.  Only then did I discover the the problem with moving windows existed outside of Poser and my rather expensive gaming mouse had decided to stop tracking smoothly, assuming it tracked at all, some minutes earlier.

So summary, mouse has been changed (it could well have added to the walkabout problem in Poser) and the UI is set and recoverable using the UI buttons.  The F-Secure problem still exists but is easy to solve as long as I tell F-Secure to put the file it had quarantined back before I do a restart.  Poser log suggested I should increase my Texture Caching so I have done that and the situation is much improved.  It still goes off doing it's own thing but not for as long and it does seem to hog memory, starting from an empty scene and adding a single Dawn SE figure with an outfit of a suit, gloves and boots and a single light wipes 49% of available memory when I started with 64gig, some of which is of course reserved.  

I will plod on but I have to say I find myself comparing Poser 13 to 12 and the comparison is not good.  Probably and unfair comparison as you would expect some issues with a new release and the gains in the rendering with 13 is exceptional.  

I'm somewhat astonished by your RAM problems. I mean: I have a scene with 13 Victoria4's, each with its own diffuse+bmp bitmaps for each part of the body (head, torso + limbs) the rest of the bitmaps being often shared.
Poser13's RAM needs climbed up to 5Gb of RAM, nothing more. I think that it jumped up to 18Gb at render time.
MY PC is a 4 years old one (in July), equipped with 32Gb, and Windows running on a fast SSD.

But when I remark that Poser (whatever the version) starts to act as if it's on quicksand, it's a sign for me that I have to reboot the PC (not turn off and on again: restart)

@Y-Phil check how many levels of undo you are using, also check how many renders your render cache stores. The defaults of these two parameters are too high I think.

ghostship2 posted at 9:38 AM Wed, 5 April 2023 - #4460846

@Y-Phil check how many levels of undo you are using, also check how many renders your render cache stores. The defaults of these two parameters are too high I think.

Do you think  that 100 undo levels and 200 cached renders are too high values?

@Y-Phil Yes, way too high. I store about 20 renders and have undo set to 20. Every time you load a figure or whatever it stores that in memory. That is a huge amount of memory in one session.

Well I seems I am being misled my Task Manager because Performance Monitor is showing I still have 41gig available.   When Task Manager states Poser is using 25% of memory performance Monitor states is around 10gig, which with my poor maths I think is less than 20%. 

ghostship2 posted at 10:00 AM Wed, 5 April 2023 - #4460853

@Y-Phil Yes, way too high. I store about 20 renders and have undo set to 20. Every time you load a figure or whatever it stores that in memory. That is a huge amount of memory in one session.

I understand, I've reduced both values down to 50. I've encountered many time that limit of 20 

Thanks to the discussion here I have just checked my levels here and the levels of undo was set to one, certainly way too low for the way I work but, in contrast the limit on renders was set to 200.  There are not that number of renders yet but that could have come back to bite me in the future.

Thanks for the discussion.

Keep in mind that he has a 1950x processor, which works a bit differently than most processors. It is technically 2 processors on the same chip and has memory and microcode downfalls because of that. The memory and processor can be set up two ways, and it matters with many programs. (Game versus Creator cpu, UMA versus NUMA memory). Setting it to Creator, sets the system up specifically for multicore tasks and introduces potentially massive latency in memory and single thread operations. It also separates the memory into two banks, one for each cpu.... Poser should probably be run in Game mode with local memory access since most of it is single core operations, literally turning off half the CPU and using the memory as one block. There are also some really odd issues with Windows 10 past 1809 with that motherboard chipset as well. If the chipset driver was not updated for that, the system will even more issues if Windows updates are current..... The memory issues don't surprise me a bit... That is a feature with Zen.... And it is even worse in Creator mode.....

shvrdavid posted at 12:06 PM Wed, 5 April 2023 - #4460861

Keep in mind that he has a 1950x processor, which works a bit differently than most processors. It is technically 2 processors on the same chip and has memory and microcode downfalls because of that. The memory and processor can be set up two ways, and it matters with many programs. (Game versus Creator cpu, UMA versus NUMA memory). Setting it to Creator, sets the system up specifically for multicore tasks and introduces potentially massive latency in memory and single thread operations. It also separates the memory into two banks, one for each cpu.... Poser should probably be run in Game mode with local memory access since most of it is single core operations, literally turning off half the CPU and using the memory as one block. There are also some really odd issues with Windows 10 past 1809 with that motherboard chipset as well. If the chipset driver was not updated for that, the system will even more issues if Windows updates are current..... The memory issues don't surprise me a bit... That is a feature with Zen.... And it is even worse in Creator mode.....

WOW, all information that was new to me and the choice of the CPU was actually and accident.  It was a few years ago now and I had the system built for me, I have built my own systems in the past but this was so high spec at the time I chickened out on doing it myself.  It was a company that gave a base system set up and you can play with the configuration to customise it.  It was meant to take a few days to build so when, after a few days, I had heard nothing I contacted them only to find my choice of CPU was not in stock and no one had a bothered to tell me.  They recommended the 1950x based on my original choice and offered a slight discount which is how I ended up with it.  I suspect they would have set it up in game mode based on my discussions at the time.  

If you have 32 threads (16 cores) available in task manager, it is in Content Mode. If you have 16 threads (8 cores), it is in Game mode. But there are far more settings than that... There should be a program on your system call Ryzen Master to change settings. Just be warned that there are some issues with changing between them. There is a massive amount of information to learn about, before diving in and changing or switching modes. And you better have another boot device handy incase it doesn't work. I suggest you google "AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950x Game Mode Benchmarked" and read the very long article on Toms Hardware about the differences, just as a primer to what the settings may effect. Learning BcEdit to manually change boot info from the DOS prompt is a good idea as well. It is a very odd cpu to set up, to say the least. There are some issues with installing the Ryzen Master programs on 1809 + if they are not already on there as well, but it has been a few years since I messed with a 1950x and I don't recall what those issues exactly are... Most of that should be detailed in the motherboard support pages on order of install, requirements, etc.. The 1950x is a great processor, but it is more than a bit odd at the same time.... Some even claim the promote baldness.....

shvrdavid posted at 5:03 PM Wed, 5 April 2023 - #4460878

If you have 32 threads (16 cores) available in task manager, it is in Content Mode. If you have 16 threads (8 cores), it is in Game mode. But there are far more settings than that... There should be a program on your system call Ryzen Master to change settings. Just be warned that there are some issues with changing between them. There is a massive amount of information to learn about, before diving in and changing or switching modes. And you better have another boot device handy incase it doesn't work. I suggest you google "AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950x Game Mode Benchmarked" and read the very long article on Toms Hardware about the differences, just as a primer to what the settings may effect. Learning BcEdit to manually change boot info from the DOS prompt is a good idea as well. It is a very odd cpu to set up, to say the least. There are some issues with installing the Ryzen Master programs on 1809 + if they are not already on there as well, but it has been a few years since I messed with a 1950x and I don't recall what those issues exactly are... Most of that should be detailed in the motherboard support pages on order of install, requirements, etc.. The 1950x is a great processor, but it is more than a bit odd at the same time.... Some even claim the promote baldness.....

Thank you for that and it answers one question, my system is in Content Mode as I definitely have 32 threads.  The system appears to work well so I think I will need to do a lot or research before I start playing with the CPU.

If you want to leave it in Creator mode and have Poser respond quicker (or many other programs), research into setting up the affinity for Poser.exe to only ever run on one CCX core. You basically never want a single program to use more than half the processor for it to remain fast. This can be done with Gaming mode with no issues, but it can also be done another way with varying success. It can be done with a special shortcut to launch the program. Doing this will not require any modifications to the boot sequence or hardware used, and will leave the system in Creator mode. It does not work perfectly every time, or all the time. But it is better than nothing and will work on programs that oddly wont launch in Creator mode on Zen 1.. Google "How to Permanently set Priority and Affinity with shortcut file" and read up on it on the Microsoft sites. Again, this doesn't always help, but it almost always allow programs that wont launch on a 1950x to launch. You will get more fps in most games launching them like this as well. Basically you limit the cores a program can use, so it never switches to the other cpu in the die. This may not be the best idea if you rely on 32 cores for firefly, but it is good to know how to do it for lots of other programs.