Linksys 8-port Gigabit switch

[BlackSheep]

Originally posted by scottyman
also - if you're net rendering 3dsmax, you may see a tiny speed increase - but it's going to be seconds rather than minutes - I'm running a farm of ten machines in my office on gigabit, and there was only a 5 minute speed increase over the course of the entire job (400 frames) which took a total of 37 hours.

i.e. rendered across 100mbit switch - had to move an errant light, chucked in new gigabit switch and left it alone for the weekend.

Neligible speed increase over all - network was more responsive, but ultimately made little or no difference.

as Nemelia correctly observed, if you are rendering frames you are not really taxing the network so much as the hardware itself (processor/RAM especially) so I wouldn't expect hardly any increase at all as the network isn't the bottleneck in this case.

I very much doubt you were even using 10% of the network bandwidth whilst rendering - as if you had done so after 37 hours you'd be running into nearly a Terrabyte of data across the LAN !

It's interesting to note that the network is more responsive though, that's good news and something which I would expect.

[scottyman]

because we use a bucket renderer, all materials for a field are transferred, and rendered in 64x64 pixel chunks (massively increases bandwidth used)

More efficient for processor time, bit of a killer network bandwidth wise.

Hardware amusingly sustains 93-97% load on the first, then 70% on the second processor on each machine (dual AMD 1900MP's) each with 2gb RAM - each is about 30% faster rendering buckets over the 2.8Ghz Dual Xeons we're using as workstations.

Discreet has *still* not managed to come up with a more efficient method of distributing media to renderers, which is the only time you see a serious increase in network traffic.

If they allowed you to use a fixed startup delay on each unit I would no doubt see a vast decrease in network utilization.

It's one of those things which drives me nuts, and about the only reason that a gigabit switch is even marginally useful (technically - it's not )

[spikegifted]

Huh... I'm not commercial and the work I do here is just a little something on the side that 1) pay for the some of the hardware and 2) for me to learn a little.

I tend to break the animation down to frames and export sequence of them each rig to be rendered and then re-merge them after the job is done. Since the rendered size can be anywhere between several hundred MB to several GB (depending on the size and length) and I'm tired of waiting for the files to move from one rig to another.

In terms of hardware, the only rig that I've less than 1GB of RAM is my dual XP1900+ on MSI K7D Master as I usually assign the lowest load to that rig and I tend to use it more for single large image rather than animations.

[DaBeeeenster]

Originally posted by BlackSheep
spike I'm going to be getting a Netgear GS104 - 4 ports is enough for me (they are all auto-uplink neway if I need more in the future) ... and I am pretty sure there will be a big difference in file transfer - how couldn't there be:

100Mbps = 10MB/sec transfer (in reality - 12MB/sec in theory) - which basically means it takes 500 seconds to copy a 5GB file across the network (which is 8 mins approx.):

5000/10 = 500

1000Mbps = 100MB/sec transfer which my current hard drive would find it hard to match - 15.3K (rpm) U320 Cheetah which bursts at 80MB/sec + and averages at around 50MB/sec + ... I only have one of these atm (but might get another one soon) so the situtation for copying that same 5GB file would be this:

5000/50 = 100 seconds or just under 2 mins (approx.)

This means that gigabit will be 5 times faster for me (best case scenario) ...

Note the other machine is capable of feeding data (reading from it) at the same sort of rate.

I'll have to wait and see, in reality, but for those users like spike with SCSI RAID configurations (I think he has IIRC) there will definitely be a tangible benefit when transferring large files across the network.

Even if it turned only to be twice as fast - a 100% increase in network speed is some upgrade!

I thought disks wrote slower than they read tho? So if you are copying a file across a network, the disk writes are going to be the slowest link in the chain...What can those disks write at?

[BlackSheep]

Originally posted by DaBeeeenster
I thought disks wrote slower than they read tho? So if you are copying a file across a network, the disk writes are going to be the slowest link in the chain...What can those disks write at?

I was waiting for somebody to pick up on that -

yes it's slower, but not by a lot - have a look here:

Seagate Cheetah 15k

[DaBeeeenster]

Mmmm. Sounds like it's not worth it IMHO. Unless you have the fastest SCSI disk in the world!

[BlackSheep]

Originally posted by DaBeeeenster
Mmmm. Sounds like it's not worth it IMHO. Unless you have the fastest SCSI disk in the world!

we shall see - I'm guessing I'd see quite a substantial increase when copying large files, and at the cost of a mere £130 switch.

[Stoo]

£150 for that seems a very decent price, future-proofs a little too

Let us know how you get on

[spikegifted]

Originally posted by Stoo
£150 for that seems a very decent price, future-proofs a little too

That's one of my intention.

[SilentDeath]

didnt bother to read all of this, but ebuyer have an 8 port 10/100 switch that also has 2 1000 ports for £16, this looks like its a pricing error buy some 1 else found it for £20 something in another shop so it might be real. link is somewhere in bargain hunt

[akers]

Check out this link from Extreme Overclocking

http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/r..._EG008W_1.html

It is a review on the switch in question in a home network environment. I understand that this switch is being replaced by a "Linksys-Cisco" model. Should be interesting.