#3D Studio and Novell
5 messages in this thread
I'm in the process of installing a novell network. does anyone have any
experience with running 3d studio on a lan. How's the performance? Rendering
station is a 486/50 with 32 meg ram.
Jim:
Network performance really has nothing to do with rendering performance –
since everything happens locally, and the maps are only loaded once, the
only thing you notice any difference in is the time it takes to save a Targa
file – a tiny percentage of the total time, anyway!
We've been running a network for rendering since 3DS R1, and have had no
network related problems – although we run Sun Workstations and PC-NFS for
the networking system… Novell, and even Lantastic have had good reports
here, also.
Greg Pyros
Greg-
Sounds encouraging. Problem is that I'm not the one who uses 3d studio. He
says it would be extremely slow on a network. The machine has 32m ram but
there is a lot of paging to the disk. The answer might be more memory. What
do you think?
Jim
Jim:
>> He says it would be extremely slow on a network. The machine has 32m
>> ram but there is a lot of paging to the disk. The answer might be more
>> memory. What do you think?
I think that if you are paging, you don't heve enough memory. Has nothing
to do with the network! 3DS only uses around 350K of your base 640K memory,
no matter what. Just make sure your paging is going to a local drive, at
the very least!
Then just add memory until the swap file goes down to 0 – just type a '?'
after a render to see the status…
Greg Pyros
re: slow speed over a network. The network should have very little impact on
rendering speed, unless the swap file is on the network drive. The network
volume should only be used to store the final output. All other temp files and
the swap file should be on the local drive. The main bottleneck is the
workstation doing the rendering. If it's slow or doesn't have enough RAM to
hold everything in memory it doesn't make much difference where the output is
going. Your transfer rate over the network is probably a little under 1MB per
second or a little over 1MB if you're using a token ring. A good IDE drive is
about 1MB per second. You can get a lot higher with real good SCSI. High
network traffic (huge simultaneous file transfers) will slow this down. Norton
or Central Point utilities can benchmark your local and network drive
performance if you really care.
DanP