optimise bucket size?

[muoto]

Hello,

i got a small render farm set up, and i found out that it takes quite some time to send the data over to the nodes, or to save the multichannel .exr to the server.
Sometimes i render an image for 1 minute, and need 20 seconds to save the data, so i loose quite some time before the next frame starts
btw, the lan is all on 1gbit

edit : i often use DR also

is there a way to optimise the network data speed, for instance by reducing or enlarging the buckets ?
or something else? would it be possible to start rendering a new frame while saving the previous in "background" ?

thanks !

[Neilg]

this is probably a really bad idea, but i guess you could render all the frames to a local folder which is the same on all machines, and set up windows sync on each machine to copy whatever ends up in that folder to a place on the network. windows sync will assemble the completed folder of frames on the network and max will still be saving locally so it can move onto the next frame faster.
you could also use windows sync on every machine pulling maps off a server and the relink bitmaps script to do this with each projects maps.

Basically on the network you'd have 'finished frames', and on each local machine you'd have c:/frames in progress which you're set to render to. on the network you'd have 'project maps' and each local machine would copy from there to a c:/tempmaps so you could archive, drop them in there, wait for it to sync to you, and relink maps to the ones just copied to your c:/
if you just use the network folders as temporary ones and cleaned them out after each job later you're good and dont need to change sync settings once it's going.

I thought about doing this once, figured once it was set up it'd work pretty seamlessly and we'd probably save a lot of time. I couldn't be arsed though and it wasn't that big an issue at the time. plus there's the issue that local machines had 100gb drives and the network had 25tb....

[jacksc02]

it sounds like there is a network issue.
What file types are you trying to save?

If you save out to VRIMG it will write to file as it completes buckets so the final saving of the file is pretty quick.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Have you tested how much time does it take to save the image if you are not using DR?

In general the calculated bucket information is returned to the workstation machine immediately and it is saved to HDD at render end, so with or without DR the saving process should take similar amount of time. The saving time depends from the image resolution, number of render elements, image compression, HDD speed and etc - I've just run a quick test and the Image with 2000x1500 resolution, 32bit EXR file format and with all render elements was saved for about 30seconds with and without DR.

The VRIMG file format like jacksc02 mentioned is stored directly to the HDD so you can save up some time if you switch to vrimg instead exr. Please note that with VRIMG file format the rendering is a bit slower than using any other file format since V-Ray calculates and save the image simultaneously.

[muoto]

I save out as .exr to be able to open them in Nuke for post prod, with a few channels (shadows, multimat etc). Size on fixed images is around 3840x2160, and exr files are around 50-80mb each.

i will do some testing, saving locally with or without DR, in exe and vrimg

[YoyoBoy]

I had an issue like this some months ago. It turned out that my network was really slow because I had uninstalled a network management program ("Killer Network Manager") because I thought it was some sort of bloatware.