Long time listener, first time caller.
tl;dr - in a small test animation, my local computer is much faster at rendering alone through Blender's native renderer, than it is rendering alone, or with my media PC, through Crowdrender. The culprit seems to be the delay (about 5 seconds) between frames where it just says "starting..." (circled in image below.)
What could be going on during this "starting..." phase of the render process?
My Setup:
Network: My main computer is on wifi downstairs (Orbi mesh decent), and my secondary is upstairs connected directly to router with ethernet cable.
Main computer:
-Ryzen 9 3900x
-RTX 3090
-64GB 3200MHz Ram
-Blender 2.90.1
-Crowdrender 0.2.9
Second Computer:
-Ryzen 5 1600
-GTX 1080
-GTX 970
-16GB 3200 Ram
-Blender 2.90.1
-Crowdrender 0.2.9
Hi Sean, I think you're correct in your assumption about scenes which only take 2 seconds to render :) The overhead of a few seconds is normal given what has to happen to start the render.
We're working on a new design which will remove the overhead in animation renders though, so stay tuned for that :)
James!
Thanks for the response😆
Rendering with Cycles (Cuda GPU's only). Everything is on M.2 and SSD drives. Is 3-6 seconds normal for the "starting..." phase between each frame? If so then maybe it isn't ideal for tiny test scenes where frames only take 2 seconds to render, but could even out on larger (and frankly more realistic scenes) where frames take more than 10 seconds each.
G'day Sean :)
Ok a direct answer to your question as to what is going on during the starting phase. This is the period where Crowdrender opens a background process of blender and then loads your file to be rendered. During this process a number of things are happening which can affect the speed of "starting..."
Where Blender is loaded from - depending on the location and size of your blender executable, where blender is loaded from will have an impact. Usually most people have a standard setup where blender's official build is loaded from an SSD which is very fast. Occasionally people have experimented with the following;
Loading blender from a NAS or other computer on the network, now each time a blender process loads it must be transferred across the network, unless your OS caches this (which I am not sure if it would, safer to assume it doesn't).
Loading addons from a NAS or other computer. Normally we don't think of addons as slowing things down, but if you have a lot of them, or a large one, or many large addons, then this can slow things down as the addons will most likely have to be loaded between frames as well.
Hosting large textures or external models on a NAS/other computer. Similarly to making Blender itself transfer across the network (or any addons and their data), textures, blend models, physics cache all need to travel across the network at render time to some degree. To load the blend file all of this data first needs to be transferred to the node.
These are the things that can slow down the starting phase. But this may not be the only thing that slows down the rendering. The choice of render engine likely has an effect depending on what you're doing. You mentioned the render is slower, but may I ask what engine you are rendering with?