Network Rendering Setup Question

[joeycamacho]

Hey Ahmet and team...

I've set up network rendering between my main workstation (Mac Pro 2012 - OSX 10.10.2) and a new rendering machine (PC - Windows 7).
They two machines are talking to eachother and the GPUs show up in my Network Preferences inside Cinema 4D.

Here are the tests I've done on both machines rendering a 4K frame
1. 10:26 - Only the Mac Pro (Titan Black and Titan X GPUS)
2. 4:30 - Only the PC (4 Titan Xs)
3. 3:09 - PC as Master, Mac as Slave
4. 9:46 - Mac as Master, PC as Slave

Ideally I'd like to work on the Mac, but it looks like something is wrong when the PC is the slave.
While the image is rendering in the picture viewer, the Octane info for GPUS is red - indicating 0/4 GPUs from the slave, but then changes green - showing Netrender 4/4 GPUs. The Ms/Sec do not increase.

What would be causing this?

[aoktar]

Hi,
Network process is a little blackbox on my side. Operation is not handled by plugins. Marcus(Abstrax) can give better answer for this.

[abstrax]

It's hard to tell without more information, but my first guess is that the network connection is too slow or for some reason the Mac can't send data to the PC at all. Does it work with small scenes?

Could you try to run this test and send me the log files? Thanks.

[joeycamacho]

Hey Abstrax,

Thanks for the info. I was reading that thread earlier.....
A couple of questions.
1. Where do the txt files get installed on the MacOS? I can put them in the Standalone folder no problem on the PC.
2. Where do the log files get output to on both PC/Mac?

When I ran the test I could see the data being logged into the PC (slave) daemon, and the numbers looked more correct - not sure what made the difference. (Different scene was tested at lower resolution ouput).
1. 2:17 - Only the Mac Pro (Titan Black and single Titan X)
2. 0:59 - Only the PC (4 Titan Xs)
3. 0:46 - PC as Master, Mac as Slave
4. 0:44 - Mac as Master, PC as Slave

It's the last two numbers that make more sense now. Once I know where to gather up the log files I will send over.

Thanks for your help!!!

[aoktar]

Can you do some tests? Use light-weight objects to test render contribution of client. You can check when a client start to contribute rendering. See "Netrender:1/1" in picture. First number shows the numbers of clients which start to render.

[joeycamacho]

Thanks Ahmet...

Here are the examples.

It seemed to have been working this morning for some reason - as I could get similar speeds on both setups, but now it is back to the Mac (as master) being slower.

EDIT - Looking at those images now - it looks like the PC isn't picking up the Mac as slave either because the VRAM is showing 12GB - and there is a Titan Black 6GB on the Mac....
Why is it showing that the NetRender is successful? And shouldn't the times be the same on both machines - with one using the other as a slave?

Thanks again guys...I am probably missing something very obvious here that is tripping me up.

[abstrax]

The master doesn't track the available memory on the slaves. That's currently a limitation.

All indications point to a slow network connection. If it works with small scenes and small resolutions, but not with large scenes and large resolutions, the data transfer is probably blocking/starving rendering. On Mac OS you have to place the log flags file next to the "octane" binary in the application bundle. For that you have to open the bundle (right mouse button -> "Show package contents") and copy the octane_log_flags.txt into the package folder Contents/MacOS. The log file will then be created in the directory containing the bundle. This will probably fail if Octane is installed in the applications folder, because Octane won't have the permissions to do that. In that case you should copy the bundle into your user folder and run it from there.

[joeycamacho]

Abstrax - here's are the files that were produced. I could not manage to produce a daemon log on either machine...will keep trying.
Do these reveal anything?

[abstrax]

According to the logs everything works fine. The data update was done in ~2s and the slave PC has contributed thousands of samples in all cases. Are you sure that the render time doesn't go down?

[joeycamacho]

Hey Abstrax,

Would turning the slave daemon off on the mac while the PC is actually the slave have anything to do with it? If both slave daemons are running on the Mac and PC - would that impact anything?