network speed

[radioVOY]

hi everyone!!

 

my ofice's network is a 100 mbps speed, four computers with onboard 100mpbs lan conection all atached to a 10/100 ethernet hub always working at 100mbps.

 

the problem is the real speed of the network isnt that 100 that the hub or windows says, in the task manager i follow a data transfer and works only at 25% of the total bandwidth, someone knows if this is normal or if there is a way to increase the data rate speed????

 

thanks in andvance.

[luckytohaveher]

Make sure the hub is processing at 100mb FULL-DUPLEX. There is sometimes a switch for this via a software setting. Usually there is either a red or green light for the speed. You can also set the cards, via the properties dialogue box in windows, to 100MB FULL DUPLEX. If you set everything to auto, which is the default, it may be switching down to talk to one particular device.

 

If you are doing MAX or VIZ network rendering it is WORTH THE MONEY to go out and buy a 1GB switch, network cards, and cable. There is a tremendous speed improvement for network rendering.

 

[AJLynn]

If it's just a hub it probably doesn't have software settings, may or may not have full duplex and the 100mbps (that's megabits, not megabytes) is shared among all computers. And the 100mbps figure assumes your computers are operating at 100% efficiency, which usually won't happen when it's Windows and it's handling TCP/IP in software.

[radioVOY]

I'll check that, thanks Andrew.

 

and Ted thanks for the advice im just starting to seting up my network rendering.

[luckytohaveher]

One other piece of advice.

 

SuperCache II

http://www.superspeed.com/servers/supercache.php

 

1.) I have gotten up to a 30% gain across the board by loading this on my rendering server (the one feeding the jobs).

 

2.) Make sure the lazy write is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS set to '0' on system and critical data drives. I run a seperate partition and drive for my network batch jobs and then set lazywrite to 60 seconds. Also the size should be at least 256MB. I have seen diminishing returns above 512MB. It just depends on your job size from the server to the nodes.

 

3.) It's FREE to try. Download it, give it a try, and see what happens. If doesn't work great for you, just uninstall it...