Network Rendering Large Job Bottleneck Frames

[Brouwers]

Hi,

1. Computer make and specs:
- Windows Server 2012 R2 (Master and slave)
- No Graphics card
- Uses 16 cores as slave

- Windows 7 (Slave)
- Don't know what sort of graphics card
- Uses 10 cores as slave

(The cores are not internal on these systems, they are connected to a large cpu cluster)

2. Keyshot 8.2.80
3. Creo 2.0
4. I send my specific scene to the network to get rendered. I realize the problem might lie with my specific project.

Unfortunately I better not share the scene or CAD data at this moment, because it's confidential. I'll try to explain the issue the best I can:
I sent an animation of a very large scene (large as in there's a lot of stuff happening) to the Network to get rendered. Nothing special quality wise:
1920x1441, Render type: Max Samples, 64 Samples, 1305 frames
It renders at a normal acceptable pace to about frame 260. This took maybe 3-4 days or something. But then for the next 10-15 frames it takes 2 full weeks! I don't think this is acceptable, even if the scene is very busy.
Then after those two weeks, it got past that bottleneck and goes to 96% completed in about 4 days. Now after 3 days from then, it's still at 96% and still the same frame as 3 days ago. And it's not even at 25% of the task progress.
How is this possible, I wonder?
This has to be some sort of bug, because this is the first time I've experienced it. I made similar scene's before that that weren't an issue. Yes, they took a long time to render, but they were consistent with the progress throughout. This one is absolutely not consistent. The Network Monitor doesn't even provide "Estimated Remaining time".

My question is if anybody has experienced something similar? I realize it's very hard to know what exactly is going, since I didn't provide all information.

Thank you for your insight!

[Bruno F]

Hello Browers,

Thank you for posting. Very strange. I have not heard of anyone else having this issue in the support inbox. However, if you are able to reproduce this issue with a simpler scene that you can share, we'd love to check this out for you.

For now, resetting any "weirdness" in the scene is a good idea. You could try to import the BIP into a blank KeyShot scene and run a shorter animation job at a lower resolution as a test. If it renders at an expected pace, then you can render the entire animation like this.

[Brouwers]

Hello Bruno,

Thank you for your reply!
I've tried to reproduce the problem, but wasn't able to. It seems to be specific to this animation somehow. I have never encountered anything similar with all the other animations I rendered over the network.
Since your post it's only managed to complete a single task out of the 1307. But the animation is at 96%, so I really don't want to risk losing that progress, even if it's ridiculously slow.
So after it's finally done, I'll run some tests with the same animation, like you mentioned.

I'll try and let you know if I find anything out. Maybe at that point I'll feel comfortable enough with sending the complete scene, so you can see for yourself.

Thank you very much for your support!

[Bruno F]

Hello Brouwers,

Yes, please let me know how those tests turn out and if you need additional help.