Question:
We are experiencing Maya renders that go for five or ten hours. These same frames are only taking 15 minutes when rendered locally in Maya and threading across 4 cores. It looks as if frames are getting sent to the cores on a computer rather than one frame per computer. So we get four frames on four cores at once. Is there any way to make sure that when sending out a job that only a single frame goes to all four cores, or threads across all four cores?
Answer:
Yes, running that many renders at the same time per worker can thrash the systems and shoot up render times.
To reduce the number of render processes running simultaneously on a system, you should reduce the number of available "Process or Subjob" slots on the Worker hosts.
To do this, go into the QubeGUI, click on the Host Layout, and then select all the Host/Workers. Right-click and specify "Lock/Unlock..." option. Type in 1 in the dialog field to have each machine only run 1 render process at a time. Click on "Yes" for the next dialog asking about removing existing running jobs.
This will have each Worker run 1 render process at a time, and that render process by default will use all available cores.
