rendering slowing internet connection

[Steve Brame]

Rendering/encoding video is a CPU intensive operation. I would venture to say that it isn’t actually your internet connection that is slowing, but your CPU is so being monopolized by the render process that any other CPU activity going on simultaneously, including internet usage, will be slowed – giving the perception that it is the internet connection that is being compromised.

I’d run a broadband speed test during encoding to see if there is any real speed difference. I just ran such a test and my speeds are identical, with or without encoding going on.

Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia Quadro 4000 * Windows 7 Premium 64bit * System Drive – WD Caviar Black 500GB * 2nd Drive(Pagefile, Previews) – WD Velociraptor 10K drive 600GB * Media Drive – 2TB RAID0 (4 – WD Caviar Black 500GB drive) * Matrox MX02 Mini * Adobe CC
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“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Richard,

Writing to a network drive perhaps? Otherwise, I don’t know, have never noticed this phenomenon myself.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Tim Kolb]

I’d echo Steve’s comments.

When your CPU is being used as heavily as Adobe’s encoding process (it uses pretty much every CPU thread it can acquire), everything else the computer is doing will be affected…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Richard Angle]

But I truly don’t get the connection between the two. To me, it seems that internet connection speed should remain constant even if I am taxing my CPU at the same time. Think of it this way. A fast internet connection is available regardless of the computer’s CPU computing potential. If I were to have a much older model computer on a 56k modem, I’d suspect this performance. But put the same old box on a modern broadband connection and it should fly as far as general web surfing. No? I’m not talking about using graphics heavy programs. And even if I was, what does graphics processing have to do with internet connection speeds? Simply “surfing” the web slows to unimaginable speeds while encoding in both Premiere and Media Encoder and it’s like night and day and every single time. What does CPU potential have to do with the potential of the internet connection speed? Seems to me that they should not affect each other. They never interfere with each other while using other applications. They certainly never did in my old FCP days. Any help in understanding this on a truly technical level is very much appreciated.

[Tim Kolb]

FCP7 was a 32 bit program that probably didn’t bite down as hard on your CPU as 64 bit PPro/ME does when encoding.

What you’re seeing isn’t the speed of the connection…you’re seeing the CPU trying to simply process and load the pages. Everything on your computer uses the CPU…everything. If some program is dominating the CPU resources, every other process on the machine will slow, web browsers, anti-virus, media players, the operating system itself…it all uses the CPU.

The data can come in as fast as you like…if you can’t process it, it will seem less reponsive. I’m guessing that if you look at all the other things I mentioned, you’ll find that they slow down too.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Richard Angle]

Thank you, Tim, for your response and explanation. However, if this is the issue, shouldn’t dedicating more memory to the Adobe global application make a significant difference? I don’t necessarily mind slowing down the background rendering in most cases. Could you suggest any work-around? I have a multi-purpose machine. Last I checked. computers are pretty darned good at multitasking these days. I’m telling you, It’s either Adobe on or Adobe off in this situation.

Thanks, man.

[Steve Brame]

Internet usage is not a CPU independent activity. It’s not as if there is a separate pipeline between the internet connection and your graphics card. All internet usage goes through the CPU before it makes it to your screen. Therefore, even if your internet speed is remaining the same while encoding, the CPU during the encoding process is creating a bottleneck, slowing all processes down.

Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia Quadro 4000 * Windows 7 Premium 64bit * System Drive – WD Caviar Black 500GB * 2nd Drive(Pagefile, Previews) – WD Velociraptor 10K drive 600GB * Media Drive – 2TB RAID0 (4 – WD Caviar Black 500GB drive) * Matrox MX02 Mini * Adobe CC
——————————————-
“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions

[Tim Kolb]

Unfortunately you have a professional application running on your multi-purpose machine…and most of us want encoding to be as fast as possible so we can get the file to our client (who always needs everything yesterday) and get on to other things.

Adobe’s approach is to grab all the CPU it can get it’s hands on and use it to encode faster. It’s one of the more efficient applications that exists in this sense.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Chris Robinson]

Hey Jeff.

I have having issues similar to the OP but over network drives. We have a high powered video editing NAS (Isilon). Scratch disks are currently stored with the project on the network drive. Lately whenever we render a project, it sporadically disconnects us from the internet. Its extremely weird.

I can ping https://www.google.com and get replies constantly…and then render a project in Premiere CS6 and sometimes (sometimes it works) it disconnects me from our network completely. No pings. No websites. NO network drive. Nothing. I get an alert on my Mac that the share has been disconnected and the ping attempts time out.

At this point Premiere freezes at rendering a frame.

Most of the time if I just sit there, it will automatically reconnect and continue rendering where it left off with no problems. There is no specific time frame on when and if internet will be restored but restarting the computer always brings back the internet.

This isn’t happening on just one computer, but 4 of my Edit Suites .

If I point the scratch disks to the local desktop, the render works fine. However, there are times where different editors will edit different pieces of a project. We need that scratch disk to be locally available to all the editors.

Could you explain your issues with network drives and scratch disks?

[Tim Kolb]

It sounds like the loss of internet is simply a symptom of your whole network going offline sporadically.

Does it happen more often when rendering using assets that are in use on one or more of the other workstations?

What sort of throughput are you designed for…vs what kind of throughput are you expecting?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor