Network rendering on mixed network

[Stewartwright]

Hello all.
I was wondering if anyone has any experience of network rendering in a mixed computer office. We current have a PC (4 core with a good graphic card etc) which is acting as the master and a slave - all jobs for the network are sent from this machine. We then have a load of imac's (5 in total - a couple have 2 cores and the rest have 4). In total the network is using 6 slaves and 21 cores, everything is connected via a LAN. Although we have seen a reduction in rendering time compared to just rendering on the 1 PC we have not seen the huge reduction in time we were expecting considering we've gone from 4 to 21 cores.

We are wondering if the setup can be improved to decrease render times and hoped there might be some other users who have some tips. For example as the network is primarily mac based is it better to have one of the mac's act as the master?

Any advice or discoveries welcome.

Thanks,
Stewart

[guest84672]

This has nothing to do with it. How big is the render job?

[stewart]

When you say how big I assume you mean the pixel size of the image/s.

We are rendering a 1920x1080 image sequence - 250 frames.
The scene contains 1 model and is around 35mb in file size, I dont know how many triangles the scene uses as I haven't got it in front of me.

When this was previously rendered just on the PC it took 15 hours to do the 250 frames (using your normal settings), when we did it using network rendering it took 8 hours. This is not what was expected after reading the following on the network rendering page on your website...

"Since KeyShot