This is probably an easy fix (hopefully), and I think its to do with network bandwidth, but I didn't have enough time to troubleshoot before I left the office. Basically I have 26 nodes rendering a 5k image; each did the required 5 or 6 passes in about 8min, but it took nearly an hour for all the data to get to the master machine and finish the render.
Should I reduce the max number of pixels transported or increase the time between sends? Or both?