One node is faster than the others....

[Tommy L]

I have 8 nodes, all Q6600's, identical machines. 1 machine is twice as fast as the others at rendering frames sent from Maya (Mental Ray) over Backburner.

It is registering a performance index of 1.0 while all the others are at .66

Why can this be? I can think of nothing that is different about that machine, except that the manager is running on that machine. Wierd and quite annoying. I would like all my nodes to be as fast as the fast one.

Any ideas?

[ihabkal]

what's the average frame taking to render time wise?

 

My opinion is that you have a 100Mbit network, and the scene gest transferrerd to the other machines slowly, while it is accessed instantly by the manager machine, sionce it is already in its hard disk.

[Tommy L]

Thanks Ihab. That would make sense with small render times, but this is with frames that are between 3 and 30 minutes a frame.

[ihabkal]

what if the file is accessing proxies and maps over the network?

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Are they a dual proc machine and only the one has dual turned on in the OS?

[Tommy L]

No, they are quad core Q6600's. Single processor. The affinity is set to use all.

[neil poppleton]

try sending the file to render and include all maps to each machine, so each node has all the assets on their respective hard drive.

[Tommy L]

I think that maya bundles the maps etc with the file and sends it to the node's hard drive. I could be wrong though, I'll try your suggestion Neil. But I think Ill try it another time. I have the frames due to be complete at 10pm. I have to send out the animation tonight. I dont fancy screwing it up now on a gamble that I can make it 3 hours earlier.

Thanks for the help.

[ihabkal]

I love delivering stuff on Sunday. It's 12:30 after midnight here and I just received a bunch of scanned previews with notes from a client.

not long before my donut shop.

[Matt Sugden]

I have the exact same issue, I have 4 brand newi7s which have just gone online and I have a performance index difference of 1/0.78/0.78/0.86, very frustrating. All identical and none are the manager.

 

Did you get to the bottom of this?

[Matt McDonald]

I could be off base on this but I always thought that performance index was based on dropped frames rather than render time. Are the 7 slower machines dropping frames? I've seen frames fail, retry and render fine but never determined why. Might be something like that...