Render Farm - Maximum Tasks to Farm Out?

I had a question about the maximum tasks to farm out setting. If I have two quad core machine farmed out, what should my setting be? Inline with that question, slices do what for the rendering? It seems when I render the it makes it to the final slice, then stops. I want my rendering to keep rendering and not stop, so I can get a complete high quality rendering. Could you please advise me on how to keep the farmed rendering going.

Also, I had a question about the farming process in general.

Thanks,

Nick

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Permalink Reply by Olyz on January 30, 2014 at 4:25am

Hi Al,

I have discovered what I am doing wrong, in the " Maximum tasks to farm out" I have been putting 5 (2.5X 2 farm machines) but I should be doing 2.5X the number of processors available. Putting 5 tasks only used 5 cores, 6 tasks, 6 cores etc....So for 8 cores I guess I should be putting 8-20 tasks, 20 tasks being the suggested 2.5x.

I Have attached my screen shots anyway, a double screen shot left being one machine and right being the other.

Attachments:

2pc farm cpu_2actv(25%100).jpg, 855 KB

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on January 30, 2014 at 8:44am

That doesn't sound like the right solution. If the second machine is only using 1 core per task, then the additional tasks would use the additional cores.

But I suspect there is some other reason why the second machine is only using one core.

I will see if there is something during installation, or some setting which is limiting the number of cores to use.

Can you give me the specs - processor type, number of cores, etc. for both machines?

See next response below

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on January 30, 2014 at 1:28pm

It turns out that the Render Farm divides up tasks based on the number of cores and processors on each farm machine. For instance if you have 4 farm machines each with 4 cores, then you want to make sure you have at least 16 tasks to keep them busy.

We are changing the Render Farm Settings to specify the number of pixel rows of each slice, rather than the number of tasks, and recommending a default of 32.

This will be in the next release of IRender nXt.

(In the meantime set the number of tasks to about twice the number of cores total on all your farm machines, or just set it to 32)

See this New Thread: http://forum.irendernxt.com/forum/topics/render-farm-slices