What is going on with backburner???

[Ramsay]

I have a scene that I am rendering at the moment... I have a dual 2000+ athlon workstation that renders the scene very quickly but if I use net render to send the scene to a slave dual 2400+ athlon, the processors on the 2400+ only run at between 4% - 8%

Obviously this takes forever to render the file! Any ideas?

Using Max 6 BTW

Craig

[Ramsay]

After a bit of testing this doesn't seem to be a problem with backburner after all I have loaded the file on all 4 machines and only my main workstation will render it using 100% of the processors... the others sit at between 4 - 10%

AAAARRRGGGGHHH What could be causing this???

[vlado]

The only reason I can think of is excessive disk swapping... check the memory usage on those machines. Do they have less RAM than your workstation? If yes, and if rendering requires more RAM than is physically present, Windows will use the disk for additional storage, which decreases performance drastically.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Ramsay]

Well I am not running out of memory, but the red led on the front of the case for the hard harddisks are going crazy! Any other ideas???

[Ramsay]

You are right tho my main workstation has 4GB of ram and the others have 2GB but it is not a big scene

[vlado]

Well I am not running out of memory, but the red led on the front of the case for the hard harddisks are going crazy!

That's the point... for some reason, Max or Windows needs to access the disk, which is what makes the rendering so slow. Do you have any textures? Lots of geometry?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Ramsay]

Just one texture and not a lot of geometry... it is just a cut away section of a stair case. I have just made a test file (A plane, spere and skylight) It renders fine on the main workstation, renders just as fast on the other workstations with 100% processors this time but the shaddows are seriously messed up on the slave machines.

I had the Max 6 version of vray on my workstation for a while now but just downloaded and installed it on the slaves today. Could there be something wrong with the files I downloaded today?

[vlado]

How "messed" are the shadows? Can you email me an image to vray@chaosgroup.com?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Ramsay]

Sure, I will send them through right now

[Ramsay]

Shadow problem solved - I dont have Vray authorised on the slave machines so I take it you can only render to these slaves through backburner to get correct results?

Still have the same problem with the stair file rendering rrrrrrreeeeeeeaaaalllyyy slow on the slaves

[Ramsay]

Ok I have done some testing and here are the results:

Using max 5 to render scene

(Dual athlon 2000+ 4GB RAM) 640x480: 1m 20s (PU:100%)
(Dual athlon 2400+ 2GB RAM) 640x480: 1m 35s (PU:100%)

(Dual athlon 2000+ 4GB RAM) 1600x1200: 6m 44s (PU:100%)
(Dual athlon 2400+ 2GB RAM) 1600x1200: 5m 39s (PU:100%)

Using max 6 to render scene

Dual athlon 2000+ 4GB RAM - 640x480: 1m 21s (PU:100%)
Dual athlon 2400+ 2GB RAM - 640x480: 1m 57s (PU:84-97%)

Dual athlon 2000+ 4GB RAM - 1600x1200: 6m 57s (PU:100%)
Dual athlon 2400+ 2GB RAM - 1600x1200: 13m 57s (PU:32-85%)

*PU: Processor usage


As you can see there seems to be a problem with Vray for Max 6 that is not present in the Max 5 version Can you please take a look at it Vlado? Give me a shout if you want me to e-mail the file.

Cheers,

Craig

[DP]

that looks like for some reason that the max6 setup is using more ram which ties in with the 4gb Ram setup being the same and the lower processor % on the 2gb....looks like its using swap...why, i dont know.

[Ramsay]

Is nobody else having this problem???

[RErender]

The Mray thing didn't help?

[Ramsay]

Only on low res renders like 640 x 480... but makes no difference for larger renders