I have xeon 5620 * 2 on my workstation.
but , when i creat a mantra rendernode and start my render.
mantra alway only use about half cpu in rendering progress.
I allready select to use max cpu.and tryed 2 custom the value to 16.
but mantra still use half cpu.
and it's nothing wrong with anyother program.like 3dsmax maya etc.
ram useage is not full ,about 4g ram free now.

why case that? and how to fix that?

thanks for your help~

There are bottlenecks in the rendering process.

The most scalable way to render is to use raytrace, it'll almost always use all cores 100%. That's very fortunate when you render volumes as they raytrace very fast.

If you are using micropolygon then I find that setting the render tile size makes a big difference.

Are all of these physical cores? All Soothsayer said is correct, but what is suspicious to me, is that cores are occupied exactly by half, which looks like hyper-thread issue… doesn't it? I haven't heard about such things under Windows though, old Linux kernels used to had this problem.

Soothsayer
There are bottlenecks in the rendering process.

The most scalable way to render is to use raytrace, it'll almost always use all cores 100%. That's very fortunate when you render volumes as they raytrace very fast.

If you are using micropolygon then I find that setting the render tile size makes a big difference.

thanks for your reply

I've try to set the tile size up to 64.Its still use half.
anyother way to use micropolygon with full cpu useage?

SYmek
Are all of these physical cores? All Soothsayer said is correct, but what is suspicious to me, is that cores are occupied exactly by half, which looks like hyper-thread issue… doesn't it? I haven't heard about such things under Windows though, old Linux kernels used to had this problem.

not all the cores is physical.
but mantra only use one cpu.
for example:
CPU1 is core 0~7 CPU2 is core 8~15
mantra always use core 0~7 and core 8~15 is not used.
or mantra will use core 8~15

i have a mac pro .i will try mac houdini to test this issue.

thanks reply.

Try this micropoly scene. That should run all threads on 100%. Does it?

kisoyo, which OS are you running?

I haven't tried Soothsayer's scene, but FWIW I also frequently notice (only apparently 1 core being used) CPU utilisation around 50% when rendering. Windows 7 64 bit. Core 2 duo CPU.

uniqueloginname
I haven't tried Soothsayer's scene, but FWIW I also frequently notice (only apparently 1 core being used) CPU utilisation around 50% when rendering. Windows 7 64 bit. Core 2 duo CPU.

You should try Soothsayer's scene. Rendering is not a single step operation. Depending on your scene and shaders, it is expected that parts of the rendering will use less cores than available, or be single threaded.

So for kisoyo's example, it might be expected that his scene can only use up to 8 cores. On the other hand, it is a bit suspicious that exactly half of his 16 cores are being used and it corresponds to a full physical CPU. So it might be that his set up has some problems where mantra only thinks it has 8 cores available as opposed to 16. However, without an example scene and OS details to reproduce, it's very hard to know whether the behaviour he sees is expected or not.

edward
kisoyo, which OS are you running?

windows 7 7.7600 x64 chn

I have similar problem, i set up hqueue and it is working very nicely and rarely needs restarting but clients are only using fraction of cpu resources (system monitor reports values ranging from 0% - 35%). At the moment i only have two clients (both i7, one 4 and another 6 core). I have one master license and loads of mantras. I tried -n option but doesn't make any difference. And it only consumes single mantra license per client.

Server/client is i7 990 (6 cores) 24gb and other machine is i7 920 (4 cores) with 6gb ram, both are running ubuntu 10.10