WEll I hope it's soon. I was in the material room rendering thumbnails for a character I'm making. Rendered 4 thumbnails. They're only 91x91. Shouldn't be too heavy on system resources. Saved a fifth and then my head texture turned all blues and greens and striped and the hair on her head slowly slipped down to the floor. As I watched, the hair moved slowly lower and lower and lower until it disappeared from view. I have NEVER had anything this weird happen. Then the big crash of course. And I sat there saying, "OH NO, OH NO, OH NOOOOOOOOOOO."

That's really wierd. I had a skirt fall off my figure, straight down through the floor, in the cloth room, but nothing like that. The Mat room has been pretty stable for me, the only issue I have with it is that once a few nodes are added, it takes longer and longer to add more. All things considered, I am very happy with SR1. I have had exactly 1 virtual memory message since installing it, and I later realized that my anti-virus was auto-scanning in the background, along with multiple open browser windows, it was to be expected.

No, this is the first time I've ever had this happen with any version. And so far I haven't gotten any virtual memory messages but that's because I haven't rendered more than one figure or object. I always forget to turn off virus and WinPatrol and I have 33 things running in the background, or at least, that's what I'm told. And Photoshop, which I need to have running at the same time, is a problem. And I've had bad crashes with P6 that have killed my mouse. But the traveling hair...that's a new one. If I didn't have to do all my work over again it would have been funny. Watching it go lower and lower and I couldn't do anything to stop it. Oh well...no big thang. One thing I do notice. The memory problem is still there and has something to do with the loss of something with each successive render. Just opening the program is OK. Render once and it's OK. But render 5 or 6 times and it's worse with each render and then eventually crashes for no apparent reason. So the renders are killing or using up or adding to temp folder or something that I'm to computer illiterate to know. But I've seen it happen every time and I know it's there.

You know, now that you say that, maybe it is related to the saving of past renders. If anyone out there who has had the memory bug could post how many images they allow Poser to cache, maybe we could see if there is a correlation. It would actually make sense if this was the case. If Poser is holding on to memory saving those images, then this would obviously decrease the amount of memory available to the app. I have noticed that Poser runs slower the longer it runs. There have been a couple of times I left a render overnight, and in the morning, Poser needed a quick restart with my cup o'joe. (And there is nothing quick about restarting Poser.) It does bite that you lost work as a result of the hair issue. I have made a habit of saving everything I do, with different file names. I have tons of files with different numbers on the end to prevent things like this from happening. And if you have so much running in the background, you can expect to have more than one issue. My advice is to shut down everything but your anti-virus, spyware killer (assuming you have both, which you should,) Poser, and if you need it, Photoshop. Opening 'rosity once in a while is okay if it doesn't result in choking your system. Otherwise, you should try to shut other things down before working in Poser. Hope this works out for you. Did you submit a support request with e-Frontier? You never know, this may be an issue that helps improve the app for others if it is something that needs a fix. Good luck!

Yes, I've seen the "successive render crash syndrome" too.

I've gotten in the habit of exiting & re-starting Poser after one (1) heavy-duty render. Several simple, non-demanding renders in a row are usually OK. But one large final render eats up your PC's system resources -- and it doesn't let go of them afterwards.

In fact, doing more than one large render can then require a cold PC re-boot in order to clear up the system memory.

But this phenomenon isn't totally unprecedented. I've seen many programs besides Poser have exactly the same sort of terminate-and-stay-resident RAM-eating effect.

I would guess that this problem has something to do with the new "Cached render" feature? It seems that if a large render is cached it may eat up the resources and not let go of them. Just a guess on my part though. Joe

Joe, We are in agreement. See post #4. How many images do you all allow Poser to cache. I have mine down to 1 now. Though I would like to have a larger number of saved renders, I noticed quite some time ago that they seemed to be interfering with my system resources. Now I just feel more confident in my theory.

destro75: Sorry about that. I don't know how but I completely missed your post. :) Yes we are in agreement. Cheers, Joe

I have "1" saved. Now I'm going to set it to "0" if I can. But having to do something over isn't bad when it was just thumbnails. That's the problem. I'm rendering 91x91 72 dpi. And I only renderd three times. Then figure lost all textures and I lost my mouse and had to reboot. But I was jumping back and forth between Pose and Material Room. So what if it's that Poser uses a certain amount of memory for each render, doesn't release it, then after a bunch of renders depending on what you're doing, it adds up with each successive render and then you've used up all the free memory and you crash. And it would vary from person to person and system to system because of all the differences in everything.

Well now - I don't know that it's a Poser 6 thing to have memory problems on successive renders - I had that problem in Poser 4 as well. I got in the habit of closing Poser every few renders then. When I moved up to Windows XP my memory problems with 4 disappeared, but v6 is much more memory intensive than 4 so it may just be hitting the wall in XP. I don't think a lot of the Poser base code has been rewritten in awhile, so some of the old problems are still hanging around... Poser uses a lot of memory when rendering compared to other software that I have, but I still like it!

Agree that there's some kind of memory leak still in P6. But that's been a problem with Poser since dinosaurs ruled the earth, so I doubt the cached renders are to blame.

I really wish they'd fix that. XP handles memory a lot better than 95/98/ME, but Poser still runs like a Windows 95 program. Probably because it is one...

In P6 before SR1 I noticed that Ben's hair moved around when going from one room to another and even going from the render window. It always jumped back though. Also I could load 4 V3s with clothes, etc pre SR1. Now it complains. XP would just increase the cache size to cope I think they've added their own memory management that inteferes with the OS. P6 is still a very good program for its price though!

Thank goodness there are others with the same problem, I was beginning to think I was going nuts. 8P
At this time, after I've added a new piece to a scene and done a render, I close P6, empty all the temp and rubbish files, defrag my drive, sort out the registry, then restart before I add anything more.
I know it's a rediculous thing to have to do but there doesn't seem to be any other way to get it to behave.
Another problem I've found is when importing another Poser document to the one I'm working on. When I try to save the merged file that's when it tells me I must save and close, I'm running out of memory, and this is when it saves those 0kb Pz3's.
I know this is a lie because if I build up a scene the way I said above, using the exact same components, the file can be gianormous, but it will save.
Pfft!to CL. 8)

Catlin