*SLOW* Multi Machine rendering!

I'm trying to crank out an animation using 11 i5 apple desktops.

All of the desktops are accessing a server for both the asset information (all the files to render the file) as well as export directories as finalized .tiff files.

However the rendering process is ungodly slow! its 252 hours for a render on 11 i5 Apple machines, where as my single laptop which is a dual core PC (HP DV6000) is rendering the SAME scene but only 40 hours remain.

What in the WORLD is going on, why is it so SLOW?!

[Frank Lima] "All of the desktops are accessing a server for both the asset information (all the files to render the file) as well as export directories as finalized .tiff files."

[Frank Lima] "The server is a single core AMD. It's CPU usage is at 25% and its Network usage is at 90-99%"

If one resource is maximized (server network usage) while others are not (CPU usage on server and on render nodes), that indicates a bottleneck in the system.

Here, it looks like the server's network connection is the limiting factor. After that, the server's disk I/O is next likely.

The AE watch-folder network renderer is naive and extremely I/O-intensive. You would probably get faster results by collecting your project and copying it to all machines, manually splitting the comp into unique ranges of frames for each nodes to render to local image sequences, then copying them to shared storage and merging.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog - What I'm thinking when my workstation's thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events