ArsGeek

Well,

The first of the renderfarm tests are in. I ran the same file three seperate times today, under three seperate configurations.

The first was run under my standard render farm, which is a conglomeration of old machines, semi-out-of-service laptops and a few Win2k3 servers used for testing.

The second was on the standard render farm, with the addition of 2 virtual windows 2k3r2 servers. Each virtual server had 2 processors and 2 gigs of memory.

The third render had me doing things a bit differently. I noticed that the two VMs were running at about 34% CPU capacity and 10% memory. So, I used the clone function in ESX and created 4 virtual machines in total. Each machine has 1 cpu and 1.5 GB of RAM.

The file in question was rendered at 1600×1200, with everything turned up/on. The times are in Hour:Minute:Second format.

1:05:56 RUN2watcher.br5 Standard render farm
0:34:29 RUN2watcher.br5 Addition of 2x 2 CPU 2 GB memory machines (virtual)
0:25:40 Run2watcher.br5 Division of 2x 2 CPU virtual machines into 4 1x CPU, 1.5 GB memory
machines.

That's quite a difference. It cut down the rendering time from just over an hour to just under a half hour. Wow!

I'm currently rendering a complicated scene I made for this test, with lots of volumetrics and a very unhappy cockroach. Once I get them converted to .jpgs I'll post the two files here.

geek out.

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