Good Old Distributed Rendering Crashing

[dlparisi]

I'm running a single 3.2 xeon. It takes just over one hour to calc the IR for the first frame of the sequence at 800x600. I know that typically the first frame takes the longest, but from my experience, there's no good way to estimate how long it really will take and usually I come in the following morning and minimum progress has been made.

dlparisi,

What's the best way to get the backburner servers to save the IR map? Is autosave our only option? Will they run if I have the "don't render final image" option checked? I would much rather try this option then opening the scene up on serveral machines individually.

I don't know your scene, but an hour to calculate a low default IR map (mentioned in your first email) seems like a long time for a 800x600 frame. What are your other settings (LC?, Hemisph. subs, Int. Samples, etc.) Do you have a ton of lights in the scene?

[MegaPixel]

It is an interior shot so there are a decent amout of lights, maybe 2 dozen overall - some vray lights, but mostly photometric point lights with IES profiles. IR primary, QMC secondary, Adaptive Sampling -1 to 2, .001 noise, 1 global subdivs. There are a good handful of reflective glossies in the scene but no refractive glossies.

I have noticed that lights tend to add the most render time to my scenes and I usually only have this problem when doing interiors. I very rarely use area shadows though and I try to keep my light subdivs down. Not sure of a decent way to get around it and still maintain the look I want