So nobody said it is your fault.
If people are trying to help you by suggesting to change settings it does not necessarily mean there is something wrong with your settings, just that other settings may get better results.
 

Who says: "There is nothing wrong with P8.!!   It is all YOUR fault.!"

If you want to use the Windows search by itself - for instance to look for .obj files when Poser can't find them, you have to include the obj extension explicitly to the Windows search indexer. The default will not include them in the index (although you can find them with a complete search, which is much slower)

I think the Windows search is really useful since you can invoke it directly from the open/locate window - just do a control-c (copy) and paste it in the right top search box. Given all the broken references of texture and obj files over time it is a real time saver.

My runtime is about 398GB (1.4M files, 53.7K folders), so I don't think runtime size matters.

This is a intel quad system with 8GB of memory running Vista64. I get similar results on an i7 with 6GB on Windows 7-64. On this last system I have the external runtime attached as a networked drive. So it is a bit slower when filling the library.

What tool do you use to monitor RAM usage? I run (Microsoft's System Internal) Process Explorer all the time which gives me a complete overview of what every process and program uses for resources.

Memory usage is very complicated issue, especially where virtual memory is concerned. In task manager you can look at the "working set". That is the actual amount of memory the program has allocated and reserved for its own usage. This will increase when you load figures and props. Once you reach the 4GB barrier on a 64bit system you run out of memory on Poser.

On Vista and Windows 7 you need to have the runtimes included in the Search Index locations. P8 uses the Search engine of the OS and if the locations are not included, it will not find them.
These can be modified in the control panel.

On my systems P8 starts up in about 7 seconds compared to about 180 seconds for PoserPro. I have a large library, so if I turn off the tree functionality of PoserPro it will load in about 20 seconds.
Filling the library of P8 with items depends on the number of open folders. Normally that will take about 5 seconds. PoserPro does not have a Search function, but P8 search takes about 5-20 seconds depending on the category setting and the number of results.

Regarding memory usage: If P8 is loaded with my unreasonably large library, it will take up 233MB of adress space, which is comparable to PoserPro

So P8 is much more efficient as PoserPro in these points

I use pretty complicated scenes with IDL. Rendertimes are comparable to using multiple RT lights with soft shadows and AO. It is much easier to setup your lights with IDL because it is more intuitive.
As bagginsbil said - learn how to use the parameters on lights, rendersettings, reflection and diffuse nodes.
Some tips:

• Reflect/fresnel/refract often do not need a higher quailty as 0.1.
• For many lights such as a sun a low shadowblur (1.0-2.0)  is fine.
• Separate Raytrace bounces from IDL bounces with Dimension3D's script. You often do not need 3 or more bounces for IDL when you might need it for refraction.
• Experiment with max bucketsize. The optimum size depends on the object distribution in your scene. 32 is a good average in Poser 8 which is different from the 64 in Poser 7/Pro
• Min Shading rate has a high impact on render time. It is not always necessary to set it to 0.2 or lower. Especially in draft renders, set it much higher

Each of these settings may influence the rendertime by a factor of 2 or more

If you use multiple bounces for IDL you might want to decrease the diffuse light intensity on walls/floors and other objects instead of lowering the intensity of your main light. This way you preserve the shadows and lower the overal intensity of the light

Anthanasius - thanks for the tips!
I never realized that you could move a single element in the animation frame and I totally forgot about turning off animation for lights.  This makes it much easier.

One thing I find frustrating about using dynamic cloth is the fact that I keep forgetting to go back to frame 1 to position other figures, props and lights. I keep addiing them on the last frame of the simulation. Usually not a issue except that if you want to add another dynamic cloth to a figure, things get messy  because on frame 1 all the new objects are out of position and you often have to move all the changes from the last frame to the 1st. Not really a problem, just (sometimes) a lot of extra work.

But I do love dynamic clothing for its versatility. You can get much better results as with magnets or morphs to which you are limited if you use conforming clothing.
I just hope they will add multiple choreographed groups for a single clothing prop in the future. That would allow you to have much more control over how a cloth behaves and will allow things like opening a coat.

Regarding the usage of conforming clothing with the clothroom: It is possible, but you have to use the constrained zone properly otherwise it will tear. For skirt-type clothing it will usually work fine if there are enough vertices on the right places to work with. If not, the folds will not look natural and it will not look very good.

.

I disagree
It is exactly what the majority of users have asked for since a long time:

• Make the User Interface more flexible
• Improve the library
• Indirect lighting
• improve the morphing tool
• improve the hair and clothing room
• Faster rendering
• Better rigging
• Normal mapping
• New figures
• Better plugin support

These are all new features not present in Poser Pro 7
Of course there is room for improvement, but they certainly listened to their customers

And if there are problems or bugs, report them to Smith Micro so they can get fixed. I do not have those problems with reflections and different shader outputs, so I can't help you with that

The limiting factor is the amount of memory Poser can use. In a 64bit OS this is considerably more (3.5GB  instead of 1.5 or 2.5GB depending on the /3GB switch). If you do not have enough physical memory, the OS will use virtual memory and start swapping to disk. This is much slower as physical memory, but scenes will continue to load.

Both conforming and dynamic clothing have their pros and cons.
The advantage of conforming over dynamic is the morphs which are often present in the conforming items (not only bodymorphs, but also additional morphs such as open/close, lift, twist, etc). Most dynamic cloth does not have these and it is sometimes very complicated or impossible to do without serious modifications to the cloth itself.
With dynamic clothing it is much easier to create natural clothing shapes and they do look better. In animation it saves tons of work to use it.

Another often forgotten thing which comes into play with dynamic clothing is that you have to adust your workflow and start planning your scene in advance. Frame 1 zeroed figure, frame 5 morphed figure, frame 30 posed figure. If you have it interact with props, then you need to position and move these so they end up in the pose of frame 30 and do not interfere with the draping of the cloth in earlier frames. The order in which you run your simulations become important, etc.
With conforming clothing you do not have these problems

The search in WIndows 7 does not take more than 50MB - all of which is in its own address space and does not influence the amount of memory available to Poser. The same is true for most (if not all) of the other windows components.
Windows 7 64, Vista 64 and XP64 all have 4GB address space available for Poser. During the render phase some of it is used as shared memory leaving about 3.5GB for loading scenes.
Before you reach that you probably run out of other resources in Poser - independent of the OS.

On the 32bit versions you have 1.5GB available or 2.5GB if you enable the /3GB switch

There are many things I can think of which would improve Poser for me. Many wishes I had in the past have been implemented in this and in previous versions. And no doubt that the next version of Poser will implement more things I would like to see.

Using a multi-platform building environment like flex for writing (part of) your application is always a trade-off. On one hand you lose control over part of the code you deliver but on the other hand you gain functionality with less effort meaning lower development costs. What new functionality this will bring and whether or not it is worth it, will be seen in the future.
But with the new additional python support 3rd party tools like XL, P3dO or PzDB can offer an even more integrated alternative for Posers library. I have no doubt that that will happen.

Poser 8 brought Indirect Lighting, new library system, improved rendertimes, new user interface, new figures, new rigging system and multiple falloff zones for joints, morphing tool can be used over multiple bodyparts, dependent parameters, inverse square falloff for lights, better plugin support, tone mapping, better OpenGL support and other improvements. All features requested by the community for a long time.
This is a major new version of Poser and much more than a glorified service release.

Poser 1 and 2 were released by Fractal Design in the 90s. It did not even include transparency support and was no more than a tool for (hand) drawing. It still can be used as such, but has grown into much more when it added animation, figure rigging and much more realistic rendering,

When I bought Poser 4 Pro - which some mention as the most stable release of Poser - I deinstalled it after a few weeks and went back to Poser 4 because it trashed my saved files continuously. Poser 4 never had that problem. Half a year later I bought a new PC and tried Poser 4 Pro again and never had any problems of this kind at all anymore. Was it a problem with Poser or with my old machine?
I really have no idea.