Encode Server Farm Optimization
Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 9:26 pm
OK, warning: I've only been using DCP-o-matic for out 8 months. I do content production for a Film Festival and we switched last year from BluRay to DCP.
Last year I had a 12 Core Mac Pro Cheese Grater and 120 films to process. Because of scheduling other stuff it got tight at times. I decided this year I'd add some horsepower to give me some breathing room.
So I finally found some Dell R820 servers. These things can support 4 Xeon processors and have a lot of memory and expansion space. The ones I could afford were 4 - Xeon 8 core 2.6 GHz processors with 128 GB RAM. I got them with the optional 10 GbeFX NIC card and installed a 512 GB SATA3 SSD as a boot drive. I bought a pair of these so I should in theory have 128 cores to do encode on. That's all these Dells have to do is encode frames. The Mac Pro 12 Core I've made the user interface that only runs DCP-o-matic and Batch Converter. (See the attached drawing)
I'm trying to figure out how to benchmark this and how to compare it to existing benchmarks. I ran a 1080p MP4 of a theatrical film through it and got something like 55 FPS. I saw that people were using Sintel to benchmark and aside from the ambiguity that there are 6 different resolutions and formats for that one film, I gave it a try. I got about 16 FPS on the DCP-o-matic screen on the Mac Pro. Not sure what was happening since the Encode Server screens were showing at times that they were cranking out 24 FPS each encoding the 2K MP4 of Sintel but DCP-o-matic never showed higher than 15 or 16 FPS.
These Dell servers have speed controlled fans, so the clue about how effectively you've loaded them is how loud their fans are. Doing the theatrical film that showed 55 FPS on DCP-o-matic, the fans idled all the way through. When I ran Sintel through the fans kicked up to about half speed intermittently, so I'm thinking they were working harder but not maxed out.
It looks like a lot of people are running Windows for their Encode Server arrays and I'm not sure if that's been optimized better than the Linux versions.
What I'm looking for is someone who has spent some time optimizing Encode Server arrays and can give me some pointers on optimization. I want the fans in these things to sound like 747 at takeoff thrust continuously, not a Super Cub.
Thanks, Bill
Last year I had a 12 Core Mac Pro Cheese Grater and 120 films to process. Because of scheduling other stuff it got tight at times. I decided this year I'd add some horsepower to give me some breathing room.
So I finally found some Dell R820 servers. These things can support 4 Xeon processors and have a lot of memory and expansion space. The ones I could afford were 4 - Xeon 8 core 2.6 GHz processors with 128 GB RAM. I got them with the optional 10 GbeFX NIC card and installed a 512 GB SATA3 SSD as a boot drive. I bought a pair of these so I should in theory have 128 cores to do encode on. That's all these Dells have to do is encode frames. The Mac Pro 12 Core I've made the user interface that only runs DCP-o-matic and Batch Converter. (See the attached drawing)
I'm trying to figure out how to benchmark this and how to compare it to existing benchmarks. I ran a 1080p MP4 of a theatrical film through it and got something like 55 FPS. I saw that people were using Sintel to benchmark and aside from the ambiguity that there are 6 different resolutions and formats for that one film, I gave it a try. I got about 16 FPS on the DCP-o-matic screen on the Mac Pro. Not sure what was happening since the Encode Server screens were showing at times that they were cranking out 24 FPS each encoding the 2K MP4 of Sintel but DCP-o-matic never showed higher than 15 or 16 FPS.
These Dell servers have speed controlled fans, so the clue about how effectively you've loaded them is how loud their fans are. Doing the theatrical film that showed 55 FPS on DCP-o-matic, the fans idled all the way through. When I ran Sintel through the fans kicked up to about half speed intermittently, so I'm thinking they were working harder but not maxed out.
It looks like a lot of people are running Windows for their Encode Server arrays and I'm not sure if that's been optimized better than the Linux versions.
What I'm looking for is someone who has spent some time optimizing Encode Server arrays and can give me some pointers on optimization. I want the fans in these things to sound like 747 at takeoff thrust continuously, not a Super Cub.
Thanks, Bill