Creative Communities of the World Forums

The peer to peer support community for media production professionals.

Activity Forums Adobe After Effects *SLOW* Multi Machine rendering!

  • *SLOW* Multi Machine rendering!

    Posted by Frank Lima on September 8, 2012 at 2:02 am

    I’m trying to crank out an animation using 11 i5 apple desktops.

    All of the desktops are accessing a server for both the asset information (all the files to render the file) as well as export directories as finalized .tiff files.

    However the rendering process is ungodly slow! its 252 hours for a render on 11 i5 Apple machines, where as my single laptop which is a dual core PC (HP DV6000) is rendering the SAME scene but only 40 hours remain.

    What in the WORLD is going on, why is it so SLOW?!

    Walter Soyka replied 13 years, 11 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Frank Lima

    September 8, 2012 at 2:25 am

    The server is a single core AMD.
    It’s CPU usage is at 25% and its Network usage is at 90-99%

  • Walter Soyka

    September 8, 2012 at 2:16 pm

    [Frank Lima] “All of the desktops are accessing a server for both the asset information (all the files to render the file) as well as export directories as finalized .tiff files.”

    [Frank Lima] “The server is a single core AMD. It’s CPU usage is at 25% and its Network usage is at 90-99%”

    If one resource is maximized (server network usage) while others are not (CPU usage on server and on render nodes), that indicates a bottleneck in the system.

    Here, it looks like the server’s network connection is the limiting factor. After that, the server’s disk I/O is next likely.

    The AE watch-folder network renderer is naive and extremely I/O-intensive. You would probably get faster results by collecting your project and copying it to all machines, manually splitting the comp into unique ranges of frames for each nodes to render to local image sequences, then copying them to shared storage and merging.

    Walter Soyka
    Principal & Designer at Keen Live
    Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
    RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
    Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

We use anonymous cookies to give you the best experience we can.
Our Privacy policy | GDPR Policy