I had troubles rendering a simple scene, Poser freeze in many temptatives, so I opened Windows task manager to watch memory usage.
The scene in preview mode before rendering used 280M, when firefly started  to render at a realtive low size (600x720) in final mode strange things happened with the memory.

Here is the screen-shot. If you sum all the menory used by all tasks  including Poser it gives a total of 139M. If you look below in the task manager you can see Commit Charge 1472M.
The question is: Where are the missing 1.333 GB ???

Who have I to blame, Poser6 or Window XP Task Manager?!

Stupidity also evolves!

Stupidity also evolves!

Your screenshot shows your commit as 1472 out of 1482 ... the missing is in your paging file because the computations for rendering go there.

Hugz from Phoenix, USA

Victoria

Remember, sometimes the dragon wins. Correction: MOST times.

Probably both of 'em.   Task Mangler is pretty useless when you really need it and the screen refreshes are geological ages slow.

If you want a real laugh, see what Windows system info makes of your processor speed and type.   95, 98 and XP get the speed hopelessly wrong (even without overclocking) and, if you have anything but an Intel processor, it just takes a wild stab at the type.

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1482 MB is the total available virtual memory (RAM + swap file) This value is correct.
1472 MB is all the memory used by all tasks, probably is correct because the computer is almost without memory and ready to crash in any moment.
The problem is that sum of memory used by all task doesn't match the total used ( 1 + 3 + 2 + 4 = 56).
The memory reported used by Poser during rendering is lower than the used in preview mode and if we assume that the missing 1.33 GB is used by Poser is a value ridiculous high for a simple scene.

Stupidity also evolves!

I have been down this road,  but I am running a Mac..  Swallows processor time in large lots as well.!

If your running windows 7 and have memory slots for digital cameras you can speed windows up a great deal by popping an 8 gig card in one of those and choosing to use it. I had one in there for a couple months but took it out to use in my camera and couldn't believe how much slower my system was without it.

"95, 98 and XP get the speed hopelessly wrong (even without overclocking) and, if you have anything but an Intel processor, it just takes a wild stab at the type." 

My XP sysinfo cpu info agrees with two different system info utilities, Speccy and PC Wizard on cpu ID and actual speed. The only difference from AMD CPUInfo is the processor family and I think from what I can see on Google that Windows (and the others) actually got it right.  SysInfo doesn't show the processor name but I'll give 'em a halfway pass on that since you can find it on System Properties when you right click on MyComputer. Course, my s**t is old. Them newfangled Dool Corps thingies may throw poor old Winders for a loop :-)

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken

yeah...if you're using that much memory...wow..;)  If you've added memory recently, you might check the paging file size; see if it's correct, or if it needs to be adjusted. While Win 7 can address more than 3 gigs, I don't think Poser can (but prove me wrong, that's no biggie)

If you peak out on actual memory, virtual (invisible) memory uses the hard drive as 'additional' memory, which is much slower..;) not that that's happening here, but it's been known to happen..at least on earlier Operating systems.

what I do (having a huge database and Poser up at the same time) is to have any unneeded programs off;  Browsers, games, whatever (but I think you already know that)

Hope this helps...

I wish I'd said that.. The Staircase Wit

anahl nathrak uth vas betude doth yel dyenvey..;)

quick note to the posters I've noticed above.. this is windows XP not vista or 7.

first, he's reading it wrong.

click the next tab over - performance.
you see there you get a breakdown of the Ram etc. all that is at the bottom of the page there is the end total of a lot of other information. you need the rest of the information.

second,
while poser is only showing X amount of Ram in that list, that list does not show memory allocated out by poser in temp files written to the swapfile etc.

third, none of this will matter anyway.....

oh. and it hit me that this may not be readily obvious... the commit charge there is for the ENTIRE system not just poser. that figure is counting the entire loaded system + swapfile + Ram + Ram used by services (this is not shown in processes), usage etc etc.

remember that every image file used in a texture gets expanded out as basically a bmp in memory.
I would have expected that to show under the task manager.

You can try to get a copy of Process Viewer. Its a tool with Microsoft Visual Studio but there may be copies available. It gives a lot more information on each process since its a programmers tool.

One possible explanation is that the task manager only shows the physical memory (RAM) used by a process and not the memory used, I must research this. If this is true then the task manager information is useless.
From a software point of view, the software doesn't see difference between RAM or disk memory, it only request some amount of memory and the operational system allocates this memory for the software or respond that this amount of memory is not available.
The operational system in this case Windows is responsable from where it gets this amount of memory, RAM, atatic RAM. dynamic RAM, Flash RAM, swap files, USB RAM or any other kind of storage.
I only want to know is how much memory is using the software.

Stupidity also evolves!

I'm not sure if this is a problem in 2010. But form the task manager it looks like you have zone alarm.  Zone Alarm has been known to have software conflicts with other programs. My family used to use Zone Alarm and would always experienced software problems not with zone alarm but with other programs running.  My family took zone alarm off and the number of programs freezes and crashes were greatly reduced.

Zone Alarm might be causing the problem especially if you are noticing that other programs are freezing or crashing. You can do a google search and read about the software conflicts that zone alarm is known for having.

In 2010 the problems are much worst than in 2000!
The problem that I have is not that Poser can or crash, if Poser have not enough memory it will crash and the computer too. The problem is the wrong memory usage report.

What I found until now is that the task manager only reports the RAM used by a task and not the total memory used by this task and here begin a lot of troubles.
I watched the behaviour of Poser rendering the same scene with other application that shows the physical and disk memory (swap file) usage by a task or process and its maximum.
Beforore I start with what I found is to remember, for whom foesn't know, that a task running disk memory runs very much slower that if it was using RAM.

What I found:

• Poser doesn't use all the available physical memory (RAM).
• During the rendering RAM memory is allocated, it increase, but quickly is thansfered  to disk memory and the RAM memory usage decrease, very bad.
• Repeating the same rendering without changing anything less RAM is transfered to disk.
• Each time I repeat the same rendering it render faster.
• After several repetitions no memory is tranfered from RAM to disk, Poser use all the RAM it needs and the rendering is done using one RAM and so it is fast.

My conclussion is that Windows decides what to do with memory and what to keep in RAM and what in disk. It looks that the criteria is based on how often the memory is used. If used only once it will go to the swap file, if is used several times the memory will be kept in RAM.
Windows tries to keep the RAM usage a its minimum!
As the renderings you only do once, most of ot will be done using the swap file.!!!

The only solution that I find is, if you have enough RAM that is common today, is to disable all the swap files in all the drives forcing Windows to use only RAM.
Of course, in this case if you run out of RAM the computer will crash.

Stupidity also evolves!

If you want to see the process physical ram + page file usage in WinXP task manager, try View->Select Columns->Virtual Memory Size.

Thank you!

Stupidity also evolves!