NAS Bottleneck Question

[instinct]

K that's about what i thought. The problems i was referring to earlier didnt appear as long as we didnt exceed 30-40 slaves if i recall right.

Regards,
Throsten

[jujubee]

The batch file works like a charm - saves a TON of time thank you and also seems to be faster than using the Windows GUI LOL.

I take it that if I want to delete files I would add 'delete' instead of 'copy.' Is there any way during deletion that I could add a parameter to prevent the deletion of the .bat file itself?

[RErender]

You could specify the types of files you do want to delete

del *.jpg *.tga

[serge]

nas are a little slow in my experience
in most of case nas can be the right way
but when you have many vray proxy
botltleneck can be awfull
testing a scene

all servers take 30min to render
first frame
(botltleneck of nas network i think)
max file archive was 350M
30 min for the first frame
10 min for folowing frames

in my experience
if you have 10 renderslaves or more
you must have w03 or 08 server
or some linux server running
backburner manager


just copy all proxy and bitmap
in local server

4min to render
first frame
4 min for folowing frames

my reflection about that experience is:
have your maps in your rendering server
max files in your W03 or W08 server or nas
frames can be on nas
maps in your local rendering server

[jujubee]

Well, I've concluded a NAS is not efficient for handling large scenes with many proxies or large IRMap/LC saved calculations saved to it. It causes slaves to hang by a bottleneck until all the files are distributed. This could add 10 minutes + in some situations (for mine, it was actually 20) before the scenes start to move.

Moving all the files locally to each computer results in an almost instantaneous startup of the slaves.

It would be nice to have all the files in one centralized location. It seems a better production quality NAS, a dedicated Samba server, W3k, or W8 may work a lot better. I bought one that had stellar reviews - it's great for working and DR, but bad for animations. But even so, I have a difficult time thinking these files are handled more easily when multiple machines and people are accessing/transferring files from one place at the same exact time.

[trixian]

We are using a Thecus n5200, and its fine for small stuff, but once you start accessing folders with a couple of thousand exr's and such, it starts choking. This is more to do with ntfs than the nas itself. Wondering if we should go through the trouble of reinstalling it with samba or similar, as the manufacturer states this is possible. I know from experience that this is handled very efficiently, and as a bonus you don't get fragmented files either.

[jujubee]

Well - my NAS is running some flavor of Linux as well and I'm not impressed. It still didn't solve the problem of having more than 10 comps on a home network.

Perhaps being more of a mid-consumer level device the processor within it can't handle large data sets efficiently. I know this is the case with consumer-level network switches.