[b-kandor]

For me, I have 4 machines on a gigabit lan. This means that during normal file transfers data moves on my network at approx 28 MB/s or 28,000,000 bytes per second. This is only around 30% of the bandwidth of a gigabit lan and is actually a limit imposed by the harddrive read/write speeds.

When my coop render finishes and merging begins I can monitor the traffic between machines uses windows task manager. (under the network tab click view | select columns and check bytes sent and bytes received per second) What happens is that maxwell is sending data between machines at 300,000 bytes/second. (For reference - my cable modem downloads data from the internet 5 times faster than that)

What this means is that for a 2400 x 1600 image, with multi-light, which generates a 1.3 gb (approx.) mxi file is that the entire merging process takes almost 1:45 min.

Note: The ultra slow transfer seems to affect the initial merges, the final 2 systems (after 2 say success in the network tab) seem to transfer and a faster rate.

For now, It seems like I should stop using coop and render manually on each machine with different seed values. Since that way I can transfer the files manually at top speed.

Kandor

[Maxer]

I can't confirm the exact transfer speed but I will say it's extremely slow and from what you’re describing it sounds like I'm getting the same results. To be honest even though I have over 100 machines available to cooperative render I would never use more than 10 for the exact reason your talking about, it would take for ever to merge that many files together if the manager wouldn’t crash which I can almost guarantee it would.

[kraemerJK]

Same with me. I had a (if I remember correctly) MXI of about 10 MB, using coop it simply would not merge. I then started the renders on each node by hand assigning different seeds and merged them by hand. No problem at all. There seems to be a bug somewhere, and I think it was mentioned alread a couple of times.

[chrisvconley]

I had nine machines rendering (a coupe of workstations and then 7 other user machines in the office when they weren't there) and was suprised at how fast it was merging the solution. We have a NAS network storage device which holds all files and to which the final image is merged. I am wondering if that speeds things up.

Chris