we used to get an average of 60% utilization but now it’s sitting at around 30% !!! another thing is each slave gets to about 97% percent very quickly on a job but then takes almost twice as long to complete the last 3 percent. Is this when the data is being put in the repository?
what should i be checking to see what’s making it so slow?
Thanks
To get full utilization, every machine in the farm must be rendering a job and using every core at 100%. Machines that are offline or idle will take away from this number. Scenes that aren’t CPU intensive (therefore not causing the slave to use 100% CPU) can also take away from this number. The utilization number in the Monitor is more of a rough estimate, so if most of your machines are rendering a job, you can assume that you’re making use of your render farm well. 
The percentage shown during rendering is the rendering percentage that Deadline is getting from the rendering software, so at this point Deadline isn’t moving anything to or from the repository that would cause this. Maybe the scene is saving out the images at this point? Maybe there are some large calculations the render needs to make at the end? Can’t really say for sure without seeing logs or knowing which software (ie: 3dsmax, Maya, …) you’re rendering with.
When you render locally, do you see this same problem near the end of the render? Any additional info you can pass our way would be helpful.
Cheers,