Throttling Render Nodes

[m4rtyn]

Hi all

I have a render farm set up using other designers nodes. We can set the affinity of the render nodes to only use 50% (ie one of the two available Xeons on their machines) This allows us to distribute-render through the day but also gives the designer on the node the ability to do other tasks without 100% of the CPU being used.
This works when setting one frame rendering as you go into task manager and set the affinity to use only one Xeon, the problem is that for every frame on say an animation, vrayspawner resets/relaunches which also resets the affinity.

Is there a way to throttle the usage of independent nodes so that the full 100% isnt used on a sequence of animation frames as opposed to on a frame by frame basis?

Hope this makes sense

thanks!

[yavor.rubenov]

Hello,

Changing affinity is not the right thing to do - it only tells windows to run the process on some of the CPU cores. The process itself will still try to run as many threads as it did before - for V-Ray in the default case that would be the number of the CPU cores.
So for example if you have 8 cores and set affinity to only 4 of them - V-Ray will still start 8 threads. Then due to the changed affinity those 8 threads will run only on 4 cores competing with each other and slowing each other.

There are two better ways to limit the CPU usage:

• Lower the process priority - that way rendering will use the full machine power if you are not using it and should be more responsive if a designer tries to use it.
• Lower the number of threads that V-Ray uses. That can be done with MaxScript and setting renderers.current.system_numThreads to the required number of threads (for example sysInfo.cpucount/2 for half the cpu cores). Another way to set the number of threads is through the environment variable VRAY_NUM_THREADS.

Also you could read some more discussions here:
http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...nity-with-3-40

Best regards,
Yavor

[m4rtyn]

amazing thanks so much!