Hi,
I have been struggling solving this issue myself. System is with win 10, all fancy win 10 features disabled, dual Xeon v4, 3ds max 2018.4
Resorted from small NAS and 1Gb network to new Raid 10 Server and 10Gb network.
Tested opening and rendering a scene in three different ways :
1. NAS with 2 WD Red / Raid 1 / 1Gb network
2. Supermicro small server with 4 WD Gold, SSD cache / Raid 10 / 10Gb network
3. Local SSD 860 Pro
All assets have been copied to the corresponding device to test.
Observations - A scene ( 500MB) with several FP and few RC objects takes roughly:
1. 1,55 min being opened on local SSD
2. 2,10 min - New Server and 10Gb network
3. 2,15 min - NAS and 10Gb network
Scene parsing, mostly due to FP:
1. 2,45 min - local SSD
2. 3 min - new server
3. 3,10 min - old NAS
Saving times - regardless of configuration - approximately 15 seconds.
My observations:
So basically things become worse once FP and RC are used within specific scene.
3ds max 2018 with no service packs is faster than 2018.4.
3ds max 2018.4 has huge lag in right menu- switching vertex to edge, to face ( especially when menu is extended so that there are two vertical rows)
3ds max 2018.4 - Forest Pack - huuuuge lag - close to impossible to work.
Mapped drives are better to be used within 3ds max as driver letters than computer name and to be UNC.
Forest pack and Raiclone External paths are by default Ralative. Manually adjusting them to be absolute seems to help a bit.
Adding new user to windows users and working with scenes there allevaites issues, until they are present again.
Reinstalling C++ does not help, at least here.
Switching Viewport to Clay, than using Faces with Textures, does help, especially by opeing this test scene. Opening the very same scene by saving it with Clay viewport active and opening it again, cut the above mentioned times roughly 25 %, except the parsing.
Tried the scene on old, win 7, faster clocked i7 4930 and notices that opening the scene there takes roughly same amount of timetime. Parsing is about 15 seconds lower regardless of the scenario. So obviously higher CPU clock has advantage during parsing/preparing for rendering.
The only thing to try speeding up these basic processes that have not done, is to disable hyperthreading, as they suggest on several forums.
Really interested into someone's else experience using other hardware/3ds max combo.