I have set up network rendering in blender across 3 apple xserves which are set up as 1 master and 2 are slaves, and used my macbook pro as the client. So when I send a job to the xserves the rendering is very, very slow. I can render the same animation on my macbook pro faster than rendering it over the network. I thought that was the whole idea behind network rendering was to render faster than using just one computers resources. just to note, the xserves are over twice as powerful as my macbook pro. What am I doing wrong?
Is your network 1GBps ?
You need a fast network to render through network because if you have like 100mbps
for example you’ll have a bottleneck.
Thank you very much for the help, that seems to have fixed my problem. I was wondering what I should set the chunks to when sending a job over the network. Does it make it any faster to set the chunks to a higher value or a lower value. Also does the computer that I am using for the master need to be as good as the slaves or can I use just an older computer for the master and the powerful ones for the slaves?
Hmm I don’t know since I never try to render with blender through network.
I used to render with maya and mental ray(network), so I don’t have experience about how to set up
blender network render.
But I know that your master doesn’t need to be as good as slaves.
Maybe tomorrow I will test it and I 'll tell you.
Ok MacSteve finally I found time to test blender network rendering.
I used default settings and it worked just fine.
I tested also cycles(cpu mode) don’t know if GPU supported but anyway my other pc has an AMD card so I can’t test it
and also worked nicely.