Team render with differing RAM

[rojharris]

Hi Folks,

I've just bought a new M1 Max laptop with 64Gb RAM in it to use as my main Corona machine. It's very nice but I'm fingin that when I try and team render with my other previous mac mini with only 16Gb Ram I'm getting very slow render times and sometimes the info message says 'rendering on 2 nodes' then drops to '1 node'... Is this because of the RAM difference? Is there a way I can have TR send smaller 'slices' to the mini so it handles them better?
Weirdly, when I had just the mini and an old PC (which had 64GB RAM), I could TR to the PC from the mini and I never had this problem, I got speedy renders and the node count was always 2.... I've even tried TR to the PC from the laptop, so both machines have 64GB but rendertimes are MUCH slower than with just the M! Max on its own (The PC is a 1st Gen Threadripper).
I've tried changing the TR settings to Arbitrated 20/256 packets but if anything it makes things worse...

All macs running Cinema R25 in M1 Silicon mode with lates V8 Corona build.

Any ideas?
Thanks.

[BigAl3D]

It should not be because of a RAM difference between the machines. If anything, you may be maxing out the 16 GB machine. I've been using my small farm and Team Render with Macs and PCs, 32 GB, 72 GB and 128 GB RAM, plus all different CPUs and I still get great results. Now I understand some of my machines are stacked with RAM, but if a client runs out of RAM, it should try and swap to virtual RAM and use the hard drive, which is of course, much slower. If you then run out of HD space, that's another issue.

[rojharris]

Thanks. That's what I hoped was supposed to happen. So it's probably not the RAM issue. The mini used to render just fine with its tiny 16Gb. So TR must be dropping nodes for some other reason.. It's always been problematic for me. For example none of my Laubwerk trees work over team render unless I freeze them and I have no idea why. LW can't reproduce it and they used to work fine in R20... (weirdly now that I've installed R25 they no longer work in R20!)...
As a work-around I'm having to unplug my render machines from the network and run Cinema on each one to render different parts of a sequence. Major pain in the backside but the only way I can get it to work. Ho hum..

[BigAl3D]

Have you looked at the console on the client machines? I had a similar problem way back and I found a message in the console that said I was missing the plugin "CV-ArtSmart" for example. All I had to do is copy that into the plugins folder on each client. This also may be true with other third-party libraries. Another question, is your LW trees formatted for the new Asset Browser system? Could that be an issue? I know there is  a "convert old .lib4 files to the new system.

[jojorender]

How is your M1 MBP connect to your LAN?
I don’t think Apple makes a TB4 to Ethernet adapter and TR over WIFI is probably less reliable than TR already is on a wired LAN.

[BigAl3D]

It's a Mac Mini M1 and it's using Ethernet. I don't think Team Render works at all over WiFi, although it should since my wireless at work is blazing fast.

[jojorender]

My previous comment was for rojharris.
Just sayin’ his disconnects might be a connection issue rather than a RAM issue.
Did you run connection tests from the TR machines panel?
Any clues in the TR node console why it disconnects?

[rojharris]

Sorry for the late reply.

The Macbook Pro is connected via ethernet into a hub. WiFi isn't even on.
There was an issue with cinevercity plugins in the python console at first, also some Nitro 3d ones but I took all of them out to see if that helped and it made no difference. It wasn't that they were missing but that they had conflicting plugin numbers or something like that.
The Laubwerk trees are fine if rendering on each machine without TR so I just freeze them to work over TR. They don't use the database anyhow as they have their own browser.
All machines ping and connect fine. It's not that they don't start rendering but that they drop out. If I TR to my 64Gb PC it's the same, not just to the mac mini.

I should point out that this is when rendering a single image and not a sequence. The sequence issue was only the trees, which I can work-around. I render mainly single images but they're high res. Upwards of 10000x10000 pixels sometimes. They used to render fine in Corona V7 over TR and that's one reason I love Corona; because you can render single images with TR just like native Cinema.

I'm going to re-install V7 today and see if it works now. I'm not sure I had R25 when I last used V7 so I'll let you know. I guess if V7 works then it's deffo a V8 issue.

Thanks
Roger