Render Farm extremely slow

[EricE]

I have this weird render farm issue. At the beginning of January we upgraded to max 2015 and also got a new render farm from Boxx. We are only using vray version 2 for 2015. On allot files on the render farm are faster than the work stations and that is what we expect. But randomly a certain file will take double the time on the renderfarm than the workstations. Its been hard to pin down what the cause is but after allot of test rendering with the issue files. Its seems to be the maps from the texture. We double and triples check the network speed. Has anyone else had this issue.
RenderBoxx R10600 Series
DUAL XEON E5-2650v2 2.6GHz, 20MB cache, 8.00 QPI (Eight-Core)
32GB DDR3-1866 REG ECC (8 - 4GB DIMMS)
120GB SSD SATA
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Edition 64-Bit

Specs on workstation are
3dBoxx W4920
Intel(R) i7-3970X CPU @ 3.50GHZ (Six-Cores)
32GB Ram
200GB SSD SATA
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Edition 64-Bit

[Morbid Angel]

Its certainly hard to say what this might be. We experienced similar slow downs in maya/vray a while back. It was related to tiled exrs and how the thread allocation worked with that. Are you using them for textures?

[EricE]

The maps are only being used for textures. Not using it for a light source.

[Morbid Angel]

That's not what I meant. Exr can be used as texture as well.

[glorybound]

What did you get from BOXX, and if you don't mind me asking, how much did you pay?

I have this weird render farm issue. At the beginning of January we upgraded to max 2015 and also got a new render farm from Boxx. We are only using vray version 2 for 2015. On allot files on the render farm are faster than the work stations and that is what we expect. But randomly a certain file will take double the time on the renderfarm than the workstations. Its been hard to pin down what the cause is but after allot of test rendering with the issue files. Its seems to be the maps from the texture. We double and triples check the network speed. Has anyone else had this issue.
RenderBoxx R10600 Series
DUAL XEON E5-2650v2 2.6GHz, 20MB cache, 8.00 QPI (Eight-Core)
32GB DDR3-1866 REG ECC (8 - 4GB DIMMS)
120GB SSD SATA
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Edition 64-Bit

Specs on workstation are
3dBoxx W4920
Intel(R) i7-3970X CPU @ 3.50GHZ (Six-Cores)
32GB Ram
200GB SSD SATA
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Edition 64-Bit

[EricE]

That's not what I meant. Exr can be used as texture as well.

sorry
jpg and tga are the file formats

[EricE]

we bought 10 all together for a rack, think it was about 55,000 US plus tax.

[Morbid Angel]

Well for us it was definitely an issue with multithreading on high core count. Disabling HT fixed that problem back then. However with new machines heavily relying on HT its not really the best solution. Do you have a lot of dynamic geo in your scene like displacement? or vray proxies?

[glorybound]

A little out of my budget Are you liking them?

we bought 10 all together for a rack, think it was about 55,000 US plus tax.

[EricE]

Well for us it was definitely an issue with multithreading on high core count. Disabling HT fixed that problem back then. However with new machines heavily relying on HT its not really the best solution. Do you have a lot of dynamic geo in your scene like displacement? or vray proxies?

No proxies or displacement. Allot of normal and bumps maps. But I did do a test. I removed all of the bump and normal, it did speed up the render but the workstation were still faster by a few minutes

[EricE]

A little out of my budget Are you liking them?

most of the time but right now just trying to work out the bugs.

[EricE]

A little out of my budget Are you liking them?

so much better than the old farm we had

[glorybound]

I am sure it'll pay for itself eventually, but heck, that's a lot of money.

so much better than the old farm we had

[EricE]

they are worth it, its hard to do what we do with out a render farm of some type

[glorybound]

I have to get over the extra V-Ray dongle for every machine issue I have. I just went to BOXX, scoped out a render pro box for $3600, but then I remembered that I'll need another V-Ray license. It's probably not a big deal, but when you go from 10 nodes with your license to only 1, it's a hard pill to swallow. Did you have to purchase 10 more V-Ray seats?