Great lag with render

[thinkinmonkey]

Hi all,

I'm using XP SP2 32bit with Houdini Apprentice and I have about 20 seconds of lag from when I press the Render button to Mantra/MPlay starts rendering the scene.

I know what you are thinking about, but finish to read, please.

The scene is very simple, just camera, spot and one object of some hundreds of polygons.

All the possible SideFX applications have permissions in the firewall setting (PCTools Firewall Plus free).

But the strange fact, and what I want You focus on, is this:

if I disconnect the wifi, so my computer has no access to Internet, well, Mantra cooks the scene with less of two second!!!

I'm using licensing in local mode as it seems to me because License Administrator->File->Change License Server is grayed, but when connection is on, there's this big lag when rendering.

I cannot explain why!

I've read a lot about firewall problems, I open the ports as written in the SideFX faq, I give the running programs every possible privilige (HKey, GFont, VCC, MPlay, Mantra, HMaster, Hserver), but it's not enough.

My problem is how to have my computer connected to internet and having Mantra rendering normally as my computer was disconnected.

I suppose some Houdini application goes online even if I'm local mode and that gives me this lag, because I cannot explain that.

If you have some suggestion, please tell me: changing firewall? using only the windows firewall? Because I prefer some protection with XP, but tell me what you think.

Thanks in advance.

[edward]

Here's a voodoo networking trick that some others have tried and seemed to work for them. First load up the License Administrator and go to View > Diagnostics. Note the license server name and IP address that it finds. Now go edit your hosts file and add a line to it where it uses the IP address and host name that the diagnostics info said. Reboot just to make sure.

[Stalkerx777]

Hi all,

I'm using XP SP2 32bit with Houdini Apprentice and I have about 20 seconds of lag from when I press the Render button to Mantra/MPlay starts rendering the scene.

I know what you are thinking about, but finish to read, please.

The scene is very simple, just camera, spot and one object of some hundreds of polygons.

All the possible SideFX applications have permissions in the firewall setting (PCTools Firewall Plus free).

But the strange fact, and what I want You focus on, is this:

if I disconnect the wifi, so my computer has no access to Internet, well, Mantra cooks the scene with less of two second!!!

I'm using licensing in local mode as it seems to me because License Administrator->File->Change License Server is grayed, but when connection is on, there's this big lag when rendering.

I cannot explain why!

I've read a lot about firewall problems, I open the ports as written in the SideFX faq, I give the running programs every possible privilige (HKey, GFont, VCC, MPlay, Mantra, HMaster, Hserver), but it's not enough.

My problem is how to have my computer connected to internet and having Mantra rendering normally as my computer was disconnected.

I suppose some Houdini application goes online even if I'm local mode and that gives me this lag, because I cannot explain that.

If you have some suggestion, please tell me: changing firewall? using only the windows firewall? Because I prefer some protection with XP, but tell me what you think.

Thanks in advance.

Just make sure that in your Network Connection, you haven't obtain DNS automatically (from DHCP). You should manually type your DNS addresses, and everything will be fine, Good luck

[thinkinmonkey]

Edward: THANKS A LOOOOOOT!!!!!! I've edited the host Windows file as you suggested and now Mantra runs like a Lamborghini!

Your suggestion should be put somewhere in order to help other users with same issue.

Again, really thanks!

Stalkerx777: thanks for your answer, I have DNS set in my network configurations, I've changed them but with no success. Actually the Edward solution works, but I took note of your suggestion too, you'll never know!

[edward]

Note that you need to remember that you have changed your hosts file. If your IP address ever changes, then it will also need to be correspondingly modified or else you will have lots of problems on your machine.

[edward]

I did some googling about slow gethostname() and it seems that it might be badly configured Windows machines that then fallback to using NetBIOS. So instead of the hosts file change, you might want to try disabling NetBIOS on your network connections.

[thinkinmonkey]

Edward, actually computer running Houdini has a static IP address, so I suppose to not edit the host file for a while.

Anyway, if there's no need of NetBIOS for applications and such, I'll disable it.

Thanks for your precious suggestion and the internet search.