[acrighton]

Hi...

Network rendering is playing up, but on only one workstation out of 5 I have in network. Same workstation every time, is delayed in starting by as much as 4 minutes behind the others. Windows 7 Pro on all systems, all up-to-date, and running Maxwell 3.1. Materials seem to be sent OK, but for each material it states "Searching in alternative paths" and seems to take far too long, all other workstations are already rendering at this point. Final message is "Default Material not found in >. Lambert grey will be used instead of mxm". At this point, the workstation appears unresponsive, but then starts rendering 2,3, or 4 minutes after the remaining workstations.

Any clue as to what would cause this? Everything was working fine, unsure if this is related to the update to 3.1 I recently installed? I tend to think not, since it's always the same worksattion that's affected.

Any help or guidance to resolve would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

[Mihai]

It seems to be waiting for one or a few time outs... Is your scene referencing materials in a shared network folder on another computer? What if you just load this MXS in Maxwell on this machine, does it start rendering right away? Another test would be to try and close any firewalls on this computer and your Manager computer and see if it starts right away. Do a network test but only using this computer to see if it still slows down.

[numerobis]

Interesting... i had a similar problem since 2011 (maybe since v2.5, i don't remember) - but without the material message
http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 72&t=37997

and v3.1 seems to have fixed it for me - until now! i hope it stays this way...!!!

Good luck! it's a very annoying problem and especially for test renderings i had to exclude the slow ones because with bigger scenes they sometimes were 30-45 minutes behind
- it was only one node lately (after v3 i think) - i had up to four at the hardest times

[acrighton]

Hi Mihai/Numerobis,

Thanks for the responses. I store all materials, HDRI etc on one central file location, all (other) machines get the dependencies just fine, except this one. I'll check the firewall status of the machines and then try running the MXS on this one machine on it's own, then render test the same machine. I'll report back what I find.

Needless to say, the machine that's affected is the fastest workstation I have

[acrighton]

OK, eventually got to this.... machine is a HP Z800, dual Xeon, so a pretty fast workstation. I tried rendering on this machine only, using the pack and go feature, and since it wasn't relying on remotely accessing dependencies, it starts up just fine. I checked the other workstations status on startup, and similar messages about "searching in alternative paths", but without ANY associated delays in starting to render. The problem seems to be specific to this machine, which seemed to work fine on an earlier version. All machines in network are up to date, latest BIOS, all drivers updated etc. etc. etc.... tried disabling all firewalls and still no difference, swapped our Ethernet cable, just in case it was that.

I'm a little resigned to the fact that this workstation, for whatever reason, is simply very slow to start