Building a farm: Where to cheap out?

Deadline
1

Ok So I love Deadline now. When building a setup can the repository be on a machine that completely sucks, while the slaves are on decent machines? Where can I cheap out without effecting performance?

2

The load on the repository machine is basically related to the size of

your render farm. More machines = more hits to the repository machine’s

file system = more load. If you have a smaller render farm (which seems

to be the case based on your previous post), you can get away with

hosting the repository on a less than stellar machine. We did so for

years when we had 150 nodes/workstations connecting to it, but once we

grew above 200, we had to move to a better machine. One of our other

offices, which has about 40-50 nodes/workstations is running the

repository on an AMD Athlon MP 1900, dual core, with 1.5GB RAM.



As an alternative, you could host the repository on the same machine as

one of your slaves, although I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re running

more than 10-15 render nodes (you don’t want the load of the repository

affecting render performance).



Hope this helps!



Cheers,