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 :)