Why does the scene scrub when launching a DR render

[SonyBoy]

I'm pretty sure this wasn't the case a decade ago, but now when launching a batch render into the VFB, the scene scrubs all the way through the specified frame range.

I had previously thought this was related to GI, but I'm now doing some low quality renders without GI and noticing this still happens.

What is going on with this, why is it necessary, and is there a way to disable this behavior which can often take several minutes to complete.

My understanding of how DR works may be wrong, but I've always assumed the host machine is simply farming out buckets to other machines' CPUs to calculate, so it's a mystery to me why it should be necessary for the whole frame sequence to first scrub like this. There are no dynamics in my scene.

[hermit.crab]

Before "farming out" buckets to other machines, it writes a DR .vrscene file, then goes through the timeline and updates the frames so as to append them to the .vrscene. I guess the annoying part on your end is that it happens even without dynamics in the scene. But maybe there's something more to it. I'll contact the devs to get more info and write back.

[SonyBoy]

The point is that this timeline scrubbing only occurs with DR, so it's obviously related to that. But I can't see why the slave machines would need to know what's coming in the entire timeline before being able to assist in rendering the current frame. Perhaps there is a setting that can be toggled to stop this?