PC Underperforming

[Matt Sugden]

I have 8 render PCs in my mini farm, of which 3 are identical confiuration, CPU/RAM/Mobo/HD case etc... while I'm checking backburner I can see I am getting quite varied performance out of al three of them, with two of the PCs consistantly and greatly underperforming compared to the third. It is a given that they are all rendering almost identical scene data, as in frames either side of an animation, so that is not the issue.

 

Can anyone shed any insight as to why this might be happening, could it be a cooling issue perhaps? Or is there an easy way to diagnose this without having to patch them up individual to an external monitor, i.e. I control them all remotely from my workstation, and very rarely remove them from the rack to hook them up to a main monitor. Cheers

Edited November 13, 2009 by Bewdy

[Noise]

I have exactly the same problem and have not been able to resolve it.

 

One thing the guys from the shop where we bought the machines mentioned, was to check that the ram was the same in all the machines. I haven't done this yet but, will do so when I get back in the office.

[Slinger]

I assume all 3 are identical, cpu, ram etc? If that is the case, what programs are loaded on each system, not just the OS but all programs? Look in task manager and see if each machine has identical programs running in the background.

[Matt Sugden]

These machines are identical, as in same software, same hardware. I just dont have any idea why there is an performance difference.

[Devin Johnston]

Did you install the software individually on each machine or do a hard drive image and copy one drive onto the other two? If you installed the software individually then you could have gotten slightly different installs which might affect performance. When you look at the performance index of each machine in Backburner, what is the spread on the numbers?

[ihabkal]

I have been running a render farm and had similar problems, so I suspect it is one of these things:

1- 3dsmax comes with a communication :plugin" that connects to Autodesk to check updates, even if you don't have internet connection on those sometimes this crashes and uses up constantly one core so it won't be available for rendering. Check the running processes and see if max is using 100% of the processors.

2- dirt could be accumulating on the cpu heatsink so the cpu runs at lower temperature to prevent being burned, you need to clean it with compressed air. cpuid could help see if the cpu is running at lower GHZ.

3-bad lan card or lan port, try pinging the machine from another one using the option to keep pinging it until you halt that. if it drops the communication even once that could be the problem.

try these and let me know...

[edwinb]

you could try a statup fix utility like zappit to check all the machines

Edwin

[amer abidi]

Usually a network bottleneck that causes this while loading files/bitmaps. Try installing all the maps/textures on each local machine and change their path to a local one lke C:\Maps\ and try a network rendering Job, you'll see a dramatic increase in performance/speed due to the fact that the computers are not hogging the LAN while pulling the same files at the same time.