Netrender slows down entire network - normal?

[deano]

Hi-
I have a 1300 frame water simulation (22-40MB per frame.) When net rendering on a handful of our renderfarm machines, I noticed a significant slowdown to the network, making production virtually impossible. Other than copying around 24GB of .aur files to each machine on the farm and telling Phoenix to look at the C drive, have others noticed such a network slowdown as well and is this typical? We have a robust internal network pipeline and have not noticed this slowdown when rendering before even with projects containing GB's of xrefs and materials.
Thanks!!
Dean

[Morbid Angel]

Hmm, I did experience a dramatic slowdown during phoenix renders but my frames were more like 200 mb per frame and I only have a 1 gb network, essentially when 18 machines are rendering it comes to a crawl.

With that said, limit the number of rendered frames and it should be better.

[deano]

Good to know its not unique then - although not sure the rest of the office will appreciate the slowdown when we start rendering Thanks for the input!

[Ivaylo Katev]

well, depends on your network architecture, 40M does not sound like too big. you can make a test using not phoenix, but other assets, for example animated texture with size 40MB per frame.