[davidhard]

Hi,
I've recently networked a few Mac here at my office and have started doing cooperative renderings. Everything seems to have been running smoothly until today. I queued up a bunch of MXS files and the first two finished great but when I came in this morning, I notice that the next one one the list seems to be having a little problem. Two of the servers say that they are rendering and are both a 69%. The third server still says that it is still receiving the MXS and hasn't started rendering. I'm guessing that this is because the server has frozen? What is the best thing to do in this case? should I restart the server? I've read some post that advise against that.is there a way to take the stalled server out of the cooperative render so that it doesn't mess up the other two? Let me know what your thoughts are.

[Bubbaloo]

Does the server respond to mouse movements or is it really frozen up? This has happened very rarely here where I work, but when it does, a restart is necessary. Also, a frozen server can be a sign of overheating. Make sure it's dust free and well ventilated. I had one that would freeze up occasionally because I overclocked it too much...

[dmeyer]

Check to see if the ones that are still listed as rendering are actually doing so, check the Activity Monitor for CPU usage.

Maxwell Manager has a tendency to freak out easily if one of the servers is having an issue.

[davidhard]

well.
I went ahead and restarted the frozen server. It was the application that froze and not the CPU. the server that was restarted was able to render to about 20% before the others finished rendering and stared to merge the MXI's at which point, I stopped the render and let the 20% MXI merge with the others even though it wasn't at 100%. The render still came out looking fantastic! very clean and crisp.
like I said before, I am new to cooperative rendering and I was wondering how much faster it is compared to just rendering on one CPU.
Here's my set-up. I have 3 macs networked using the maxwell server manager app. The first and original Mac is a Quad-Core 3.2 Ghz Intel Xeon with 16 gigs of ram and the two new Macs are 2x2.93 Ghz Quad Core Intel Xeon with 16 gigs of ram each. Before I had the two additional macs, I would render one scene and usually let it go for 24 hours to get a good clean noise free render. How do I calculate how much faster a cooperative render is? Do I simply divide the time by three? So instead of 24 hours, I can get the same quality at 8 hours? Or is it better to have three renderings running simultaneously on individual nodes?

[Bubbaloo]

If the processor specs and benchmarks are close to the same, Maxwell will scale pretty linearly. So yes, 3 computers will render to a certain S.L. in about 1/3 the time of one of those computers.