again please need help with network rendering

[abstrax]

It should work. An update usually takes only a few seconds, i.e. something isn't set up correctly.

What is the network connection you are using? On which operating systems are you running the master (C4D plugin) and the slave?

[Iksmada]

Hmmm,

unfortunately, now comes the disillusionment.
Slave GPUs are listed correctly and running, but they don't start to render.

A 7000px image needs about 1 hour 20min to render on my Master with 2 Titans.
So I thought another Titan-Z would be helpful. But...
For 26 minutes the Slave-Status is on "updating" and in MInute 27 the Slave stopped working.
"Detecting that heart beat of slave stopped ..."

For animation when a frame renders about 2 or 3 minutes, the slave never gets a
chance to start rendering.

So it seams, that Network-Rendering does not make much sense in my case, because the
upload/updating times are way to long.

But anyway! Thanks much for your support!

Mike

I have been experiencing this exact problem with the error "Detecting that heart beat of slave stopped ...". It does just seem to happen on big scene files which take several minutes to render each frame.

However, even when I can get network rendering to work properly, the performance is actually slower than just rendering locally.

At work I have 2 PCs each with 4 Titan X cards in them. Here is an example of the performance difference.

With all 8 cards in both PCs used:-

octane_network_render.jpg (38.94 KiB) Viewed 6120 times

With 4 cards used in 1 PC:-

octane_standalone_render.jpg (38.27 KiB) Viewed 6120 times

In the above example, when all 8 cards are used, it actually takes around 40 seconds per frame to render but then around the same time again to save the frame. It shows 1,992 samples / 2,000 samples complete, then it takes an additonal 40 seconds to save the frame.

This scene is set to 'resend only updated objects':-

If a frame is taking 48 seconds to render locally, wouldn't you expect fairly close to half that time with twice the render power? Certainly to take twice as long with twice the render power would be a big problem! The difference between a render time of 0m30s and 1m30s per frame is just massive for the amount of rendering we do.

Is this purely down to network performance? How can I fix this so it doesn't take over twice as long to render as it should when using Network Rendering? Would using a 10 GbE connection help with this?

I'd really appreciate some help with this; the network rendering speed of Octane is critical for my company. Thanks!

Specs: Both PCs Win 7x64, Dual Xeons, 64GB RAM, 4x Titan X cards in each. C4D R16, Octane 2.22.2 on both. Scene file mentioned above is 4.8million polys, 300mb.

[miohn]

Hi Abstrax,

Master: Win 7 64, R16, Plug: 2.23.1 R4, Standalone: 2.23.1, 64GigRam, Dual Xeon 2680, 2 Titan
Slave: same Software/Versions, 16 GigRam, 2600K, GTX560 and Titan-Z
Connected via Fritzbox Cable 6360 all Ports/Switches at max. Speed

I'm starting "run_installed_deamon-bat" on the Slave.
Seams o.k. for me so far.
Then on Master Plugin I enable network rendering and activate the Slave Gpus

Status says: updating (even on a simple scene)
But Slave never renders.
After a while Slave stoppes.

thanks
Mike

[abstrax]

In both cases: What is the network connection you are using? 100Mbit/s or 1000Mbit/s?

In both cases, your description points to a very slow network connection. The data to render doesn't magically appear on the slave, but needs to be sent to it via the network. And when the slave sends back results they also have to go via the network. So anything slower than 1 Gbit/s usually is not really useful. To give you an idea: A 1 Gbit/s Ethernet connection allows Octane to send about 100-110 MByte/s and a 100Mbit/s connection only 10-11MByte/s.

[miohn]

Hi Abstrax,

as written before:
Both Computers are connected via Fritzbox Cable 6360 and all Ports/Switches at max. Speed.
This means 1 Gbit/s Connection.
When copying to my NAS f.e. I get speed of about 100MB/sec.

Even with small scenes, where there is not a hugh data amount - status updating all the time.

I fear, though a connection exists and the slave is recognized that
absolutely no data transfer takes place.
So the slave does not receive "any" data. No matter if the connection is fast or slow.
What could be the reason, that no data transmission takes place?

regards
Mike

[abstrax]

Ok, thanks for the info. To figure out, if a network connection can be established and how fast it is, we added a command line argument to Octane Standalone to run a network speed test. Unfortunately that's currently broken in 2.23.2, but here you can download a Windows version that is fixed:
http://render.otoy.com/rcdownloads/Octa ... _win64.zip

After you have downloaded the archive, please extract it on your master and your slave computer. The archive contains two batch files _run_net_test_master.bat and _run_net_test_slave.bat.

To run the Standalone in the network test mode, just run _run_net_test_master.bat on the master computer and open the log window, which should say something like this:

Make sure that network rendering is enabled and the master port is set to 21000:

To run the slave in network test mode, you have to edit _run_net_test_slave.bat on the slave computer in an editor of your choice. The file contains this after unpacking from the archive

Code: Select all

@set MASTER_IP=127.0.0.1
@set MASTER_PORT=21000

octane_slave -a %MASTER_IP% -p %MASTER_PORT% --net-test
pause

You will have to set the variable MASTER_IP to the IP address of your master computer, which you can find out by running ipconfig on the command prompt on the master computer:

In my case for example, I would change _run_net_test_slave.bat on the slave computer to:

Code: Select all

@set MASTER_IP=10.0.0.100
...

After you have done this, you can run the slave in network test mode by executing _run_net_test_slave.bat on the slave computer.

After slave and master have connected, you should see in the master log the speeds we achieve for sending packages of increasing sizes:

So, could you please run the above and let me know, which speeds you get? Thank you.

[miohn]

Hi Abstrax,

thanks!

even if CMD and Bat etc. is not my world, I will go trough this
and report later!

thanks so far!

Mike

[Iksmada]

Thanks for your help abstrax. We are going to get a 10GbE connection setup and see how that affects it.

I will report back when I can.

Thanks again

[miohn]

Hi Abstrax,

heres the result.
Seams that you're right. My speed is way to slow compared
to yours and implied that I did the test correct.

So question is: what could causes my slow network connection?
What should I try or change?

thanks
Mike

[Iksmada]

Hi Abstrax,

Looks like you were spot on - my results are also much slower than yours:-

Please can I ask you what speed your connection is? Do you think we will only get the full benefit of network rendering in Octane when using a 10GbE connection, especially with complex scenes?

I'd really appreciate your answer to that, so we know whether to invest in more 10GbE connections.

Thanks!