DOF bokeh always too noisy

[pokoy]

I'm hitting a wall here with a scene where some 'wet' reflective material produce sweet looking bokehs that unfortunately never refine well enough to be considered final.

I have tried various settings, ranging from lowering GI/AA ratio to 2 with enough passes to using Bucket mode in order to refine adaptively but they'll never look really smooth. Bucket mode seems to be better but it's hard to control. Judging by the gallery images it's possible, there are some beautiful looking examples with super smooth bokehs - so what's the secret here?

If anyone has some useful tips on how to solve this, I'm all ears!

[Christa Noel]

I think I really need this too, because I'm not good at post-production for dof/bokeh major case.
so is there anybody would like to put a little help here?

[maru]

There are several ways to improve rendering speed/quality of DoF:
-decrease GIvsAA (also LSM if possible) and let it render through a lot of passes
-use buckets with extreme samples and passes values
-tweak your reflective material - decrease reflectivity and glossiness as far as acceptable
-avoid small, sharp light sources being reflected - if it's possible...
-use gaussian image filter with bigger width
-use int resolution = 2

-if everything fails, you can region-render some of the most noisy areas (of course if they are not over the whole image...) and let them cook for a while, then paste the result onto the final image
-use denoising software

But these may still not be very helpful in some cases. It would be great if you could post screenshots/renders of your problem.