Fast local render, Slow farm render

[insleight]

I can render frames locally at 30 mins per frame. On the farm it takes 15 hours per frame. This is a new problem and happening across various scenes.

IR/LC cached files, 1-16 .005 Render Elements baked in Max frame buffer (Multi Mattes, Zdepth, Spec, AO)
No proxys, no Displacement, No Xrefs, etc

Tried excluding the Render Elements to no avail.

I am sure someone has seen this before. Farm was all recently updated to VRay 2.3.

Ideas? Thanks

[svetlozar.draganov]

Hello there,

What versions of Max and Vray are you using, and what OS ?
Are you using Distributed Rendering or Backburner ?
How many machines do you have in the farm ? and can you specify their specification.
Do you have any firewall , anti-virus , anti-spy software installed ?
Have you noticed when this issue occurs ? Any updates , hardware or software changes and etc.
Have you tried to run a render to just one slave - no to the entire farm ?
Are you using any third party plug-ins ?
Is it possible to send us one of the scenes you have problem with ? We would like to peak how is set up , how big it is and etc.

We are looking for your reply.

[insleight]

Hi Svetlozar,

I will try to answer the questions as best as I can until I get in touch with IT tomorrow.

Max 2012 64bit, Vray 2.3, Windows 7 64bit
Deadline render manager
50 render machines as deadline slaves, 48-64gb ram each
I am the only one rendering on the farm now, and I have rendered two scenes for the last week so far and both have the issues.
I do not see any firewall on any rendernodes
The farm machines were all recently upgraded to VRay 2.3 early last week
I will try to render a single frame tomorrow morning
No third party plugins are being used in this file.

I have a 400gb file I can send you if you have an ftp?

Thanks,
Matan

[dorham]

Got the same issue on a movie project!
Renders takes about 4min on workstation (baked gi) and something like 12 on the farm.

[svetlozar.draganov]

I have a 400gb file I can send you if you have an ftp?

Matan

400GB or 400MB is the size of the file ?
For access to our FTP server - please write a support ticket to - vray@chaosgroup.com

Thanks in advance.

Got the same issue on a movie project!
Renders takes about 4min on workstation (baked gi) and something like 12 on the farm.

Is the issue appeared with 2.3 version ?

[joconnell]

How much memory does the scene take up? Do you have the bitmap pager enabled in the scene?

[Morbid Angel]

can all the machines pull the license correctly? What if you open a scene on one of them and render it as if its a user workstation?

[insleight]

Update. If we open 3dsmax on a render node and render a frame there locally, the CPU usage is 100%. Every job that renders a frame loaded by the deadline slave utilizes 4-5% cpu usage and uses one core.

[Morbid Angel]

Is deadline using all threads ?

[insleight]

Fix. This is quite ridiculous. Using Deadline 5.1, under Options, there is a box called "Automatically Update Job name...etc, etc" If we hover over that box a new box pops up in it's place with a check box checked and new text called "One CPU per task"
Now unchecked and renders normally... Oddly if you remove your mouse cursor from that box, the previous text jumps back into place

Thanks guys.

[Morbid Angel]

if its a bug you should report it to thinkbox developers.