I’ve recently subscribed to Greenbutton. $20/month seems like a good deal if you have a lot of rendering to do (and I do). But the subscription service seems to be very hit-and-miss. Sometimes it renders very fast, and sometimes it’s phenomenally slow.
The way the subscription works (as I understand it) is it has 100 processors that all the subscribers share. So if you happened to submit a job when no one else has, then you’re render will be lighting fast. On the other hand, if 100 other people have submitted jobs, then you’d have been better off rendering on your own multi-CPU machine.
Other render services like renderfarm.fi shows how many jobs are running on the server, etc. Is it possible to determine what the load on the Greenbutton cloud is? I haven’t found one yet.
BTW I know that you can pay extra to jump to the head of the line, but at this point I’d like to have a way of knowing whether I even need to consider it.
(In short, I’m still wondering if Greenbutton is worth investing in next month…)
At the moment there isn’t any way to monitor the other jobs in the system though we will be adding some more visibility as to the number of cores that are processing your job at any time.
The subscription service is run at a loss so we have to balance performance and cost of the service to us. There were however some teething problems with the auto core provisioning & allocation logic that did led to some jobs not getting any cores allocated to them for some time. That should all be fixed now, so each job at least gets a handful of cores - we start new cores if required when a new job is submitted so even if lots of jobs are already running you’ll get dedicated cores. The downside at the moment is it takes 10-15 minutes to start additional cores so occasionally there might be a bit of a delay before your job starts cranking along (while waiting for the new cores to start up, the allocation logic should start sharing the existing cores with your job).
I hope that helps clarify the subscription pool a bit and apologies for any poor performance you have experienced to date. It’s important to us that all our customers have a positive experience so we appreciate the feedback.