Will 10gbps network improve network render starting speeds? Tweet

[itsallgoode9]

At work our lan connection running from my main machine to the nodes is a 1gbps line and I'm wondering if upgrading that to a 10gbps line would help the speed up getting the render nodes to start a render a bit faster. If so, is there a way I can test this out so I can have data to show to our IT to justify running new lines or installing proper network card, etc?

On heavier scenes it can take a little bit for the node to start running so I'm wondering if this will help improve it? Or is 1gbps fast enough and there are other bottlenecks on a network that would be more of an issue that would outweigh this. Thanks for helping point me in the right direction--network related stuff is not at all my strong suit.

[frankmci]

As a ballpark test, you might want to compare how long it takes a scene to load into the Octane Live Viewer the first time locally, with the time it takes a network machine to load the same scene and start contributing when you first add it to the network render. As I understand it, there's a certain amount of processing that has to be done as the data is ingested into the engine, so if that ingestion process is fully saturated, or at least close to saturated by 1gbs. then boosting your LAN won't make much of a difference.

In my own test on a current scene, local render on a reasonably dense scene starts in about 15-16 seconds, while over 1gbs LAN the slave node starts in about 19 seconds, so at least in our case, the LAN isn't much of a bottleneck.