Network storage suggestions Tweet

[tangelo-otoy]

Sorry, had posted this incorrectly in the wrong area of the forum

Hey all, need some help working through a significant bottleneck we've run into doing Octane renders with Cinema4d.

We have a 10gbe network - 10gbe to NAS, render masters, and render slave. NAS can push and pull at 300-400 mbps sustained with large sequential files, but drops down to 200kbps for many small files (like lightmaps).

When rendering a file stored on the NAS, we're seeing very poor network rendering performance. Frames that take 51 seconds to render on the workstation by itself (1x 980ti) take 41 seconds to render over the network (with the 1x 980ti in the workstation plus 4x 1080 and 2x 980ti in the render slave). However if we copy the project to local storage on the master and then render it, it takes 10 seconds with just the master and just 4 seconds per frame with network rendering.

So it seems to be something about how Cinema4D and/or Octane *read* the files off the NAS. Any pointers on making network rendering from a NAS work really well highly welcome.

Thanks!

~Micah

[tangelo-otoy]

Just a quick addition - I'm trying to work out how to use a standardized measurement to evaluate changes I make to the configuration. As As mentioned, I've isolated the performance to data locality (as opposed to render locality) - if a project lives on the NAS it takes much longer to transfer and render (via Octane plugin in C4D), regardless of where the render GPUs live (local or network).

I've run OctaneBench from a local directory and from the NAS directory and gotten the same results. I'm also getting equal render times in an Octane Standalone test scene we made specifically to test this. However I suspect that both OctaneBench and the render times reported by Standalone do not take into account the length of time it takes to prepare the scene for rendering - only the actual render time itself. So if it takes 4x longer to prep the scene from NAS, we still get the same render time, right?? I've looked for an explanation as to the process of opening, transferring, rendering, and returning a scene/output but am probably not using the right keywords - can't find anything useful.

So, any recommendations on how I can establish a repeatable test of the overall time to return a render, that would be awesome.

[bomperstudio]

We're running the same system with a mixed mac/pc combo so will try and do a few test as soon as we have some free time.

What I can say is that we had loads of issues with errors and dropped packets until we changed our cables to CAT6a. We were getting machines dropping out etc we're now getting 900mb and closer to 450mb when everyone is using the server. Also whats the setup of your switch with flow control etc, what make is your nas?

Have you made sure that all bitmap images are within an image node? We've had issues with the Takes system and Beppe suggested making sure every bitmap is within an image node and that there are no c4d shaders in the files - could speed up any issues.

I'll post our result when I get time.

Em