DR & scenes with high memory usage

[CA Portugal]

Hello,

We´ve used DR for the past years without any big issue till now.

Before, DR slaves started always imediatly after render beggining but recently we have two projects that use a lot of memory and DR acts very differently.
One scene uses 30GB (840hectars of field + city with trees and cars) and a second scene with lots and lots of vegetation uses around 20Gb.
Render starts and only at the half end of the render all slaves start to slowly render too.

Main computer has 32GB available while the other slaves have 8GB.
Is this the problem? Shortage of Ram on the other slaves?

Software:
Vray 2.30.01
Max 2012

Cheers,
Jacinto

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Heya

Yes it could be because they try to load scene, run out of ram and start using HDD memory to store data which is quite slow. Other issues is maybe one proxy is broken and instead of instance its just a copy so its loading 2x or something like that...

Hard one.

Thanks, bye.

[Morbid Angel]

During rendering, how much does your main machine use out of the 32 GB of ram? If it uses a lot more then 8 Gb then its what DaDal says.

[alexyork]

As others have said, your DR performance is only as good as those individual nodes are able to push out. If they have less RAM than required to render the scene locally then they will fall back to page file etc. and you'll see slow-downs, artefacts (maybe), missing maps/geometry and crashes etc. Best to upgrade your nodes to comparable RAM of your main workstation, or optimise your scenes to get RAM usage down. You could, for example, turn off all the veg and render everything else across your DBR network, then just render the veg locally on the better machine.