I have two g5 dual 2.7 gig machines and I'm trying to use render cow to reduce my render times. It seems that my times actually increase by a fair amount while using render cow. The activity monitor on the machine I'm using the extra processors on are up at or near 100% during rendering, but the main machine I'm using the processors are barely working. What gives?

Have you installed the Cow on the host machine as well? That is necessary of course, otherwise it will ONLY be rendered on the other machine. That is not really faster then. BTW, the name of the host is "localhost" - if you want to add that Cow to the gang. Second maybe is, that Cow speed up only is relevant in big scenes, where administration time is not relevant compared to the total render time. With small scenes render times are not really shorter.

My host name is SN with a series of figures, not localhost, and it's the name of my machine, apparently, when I check the system.

And it shows in the RenderCow list (as idle). If so why bother then. Mine is localhost - i was too lazy to check name etc of the host machine. And localhost worked.

Agree 100%, like they say in America, if it ain't broke, why fix it?

tony - when you are rendering do both machines show up in the rendercow list? Love esther

Tony3d; That definitely sounds as if you either haven't installed a cow on your main system, or haven't added it to the render queue....or something in your configuration is blocking the functioning of the main system cow (an over-zealous firewall or security program can do that quite easily). You -will- notice that your main system render times will be a touch slower than a nearly equivalent remote node; the overhead of running Hypervue and a Cow at the same time (In a recent test of my almost rebuilt garden, the socket 754 Athlon 64 3000 with 1 gig DDR 266 was turning out frames faster than my main system, which is and socket 939 Athlon 64 3200+ with 2 gigs DDR 400; 7min 05sec average compared to 7min 34sec average).

That was it. I didn't realize I had to install the render cow on both machines. Now I save about 35% render time. I noticed it when I checked the activity monitors on both machines. Mine was around 20%, while the othe was at 100%. Thanks for all the input.

Ok, i don't say - look at my first sentence on my first reply here! :-))) The same "mistake" i made as well a while ago. I thought Infinite is rendering with the help of the cows and not that, when i switch to cows, ONLY cows are rendering!

Message edited on: 11/06/2005 07:43