Starting from Poser 7 and going through Pro2010 I have gotten increasingly aware of what I feel are long file access times.  For example, it can take me well over a minute to save a scene that only ends up 100MB or so.  And that is on a pretty decent system, Phenom II x6 @3.8 GHz, 8GB ram, Windows 7 x64.  To put my mind at ease, I ran some tests.  I timed some load/save operations in the library as well as a scene file, using my hard drive as the storage medium.  Then I ran the same test using my 2-SSD RAID 0 array.  Utterly shocked by the results, I set up a RAM drive and ran the test there.  All three results were identical.  Maybe not exactly identical since I used a stopwatch, but a few tenths of a second according to my thumb is close enough to call it considering the vast discrepancy in the access and read/write times of the different storage media.

Utterly confounded by this, I opened up Microsoft's Process Monitor and kept an eye on what was happening as I saved and loaded files.  Poser appeared to be accessing the disk in 4k increments.  This is fine by me when the program is accessing its temp files or internal files, but when it is loading a several hundred megabyte scene or figure it seems odd to do it in 4k bursts, considering 4k read/write times are the major slow point for ANY type of storage media.

This does not explain the identical results when accessing the RAM disk, but I know that Poser is doing compressing/compiling/whatever to the data before it actually writes anything, so I'm sure that has something to do with it, also.  Regardless, watching the activity in Process Manager I think it is still taking WAY too long reading the data in 4k segments as opposed to just dumping the whole thing into RAM and working from there.

Anybody have any thoughts on this?

 

Also, please don't let me derail my own thread by this, but how do I find my subscribed threads?  I keep losing track of threads I posted in or wanted to watch.