In Studio 2.2 I am working on a scene featuring 2 V4's, one with April Mersada Hair, the other with Kozaburo's Short Bob. No clothing items are defined. The scene light has two faint infinite lights to lighten the shadows a little bit and one dominant point light. So, all toghether, nothing special.
Yet it takes HOURS for DS to render the scene to 800 pix squared.  I did reduce the number of Raytrace bounces to 4, memory is not the issue, and both cores of my Athlon 4200+ are fully ablaze all the time. Focal depth is off.

Is this normal preformance for DS?

have you tried saving the scene and then closing D/S and reopening it then trying to render the scene. i'm having to do that right now for a scene i've altered just with lights

Are you using any advanced shaders, especially anything with Ambient Occlusion (such as pwSurface)? How much of the scene is taken up with the hair - multiple layers of transparency can slow things down? Is the point light casting shadows? If so they will be ray-traced, which is also slow (especially with transparency on the hair).

When you create your render, check  your stuff used, that are not seen, remove that. If you use alot of textures and you can't see it hiding behind stuff, remove it. It takes alot of time. Then if you render make sure you render in bigger sizes than small, like 2100x2100, etc. I have experience with the smaller the picture, the longer it renders. The bigger the better. A glitch or something in 2.2. Just my 2 cents I figured out. Hugs

Attached Link: Optimising render settings in DAZ|Studio

I suspect you have settings cranked up to maximum for no good reason. I wrote this article to address the issue of long render times in D|S.

Well,  I followed your advice  and played a little bit with the settings. Compared with your recommendations, the number of shadow samples was indeed high (16). Cutting this number down to 2 did give a speed increase by a factor of something like 8 (half an hour instead of 4 hours), but an unacceptable loss in quality, skin textures degrading to what at best is a very serious skin disease, especially where the light 'strikes' the skin surface. 
Maybe it disapears at 4 or 8 shadow samples, but boosting up render times again.

Anyway, thanks for the advice. I may have a way to cut render time by a factor or two, which gives me time to walk the dog and be social with my wife. ;=)

To emphasize a point made in earlier post, try using deep shadow map instead of raytraced shadows.  Especially in scenes with lots of hair.

Deep Shadow Map are best for spot lights. For distant lights DSM produce very soft shadows.
Therefore I use Ray Trace for distant lights to give sharp shadows.

I know RT is slower than DSM therefore I have only one distant light with shadow turned on. All other distant lights are just to get more illumination.

You don't have to turn shadows on for every light. If I have a mixture of spot lights and distant lights I have to decide which lights to give me the desired shadow.  All the other lights have shadows turned off, they are there for illumination only.

I see some renders by others with outdoor scene where their figures have multiple ground shadows. I don't know about you but when I last checked we only have one sun and it produces only one shadow of me. LOL.

The rendering of the shadow maps was only a short phase of the process. What took so long was the actual rendering.

The following is a link to to an excellent tutorial called "Optimising render settings in DAZ|Studio" contributed by rubicondigital. This link can also be found under Renderositys' Tutorials section for DAZ|Studio.

http://www.rubicondigital.110mb.com/Code/DSRenders.html

I hope this helps.