Render way slower on the Mac, network problem?

[mrwolfy]

I have a Mac Pro running OSX 10.5.8 on a network with a four-year-old PC running Windows 7. Both machines are networked together and share a network drive that I render to from After Effects and other programs.

Renderings from After Effects CS4 are taking about five times longer on the Mac despite speed of this machine. Also, I am getting "file not found" errors when previewing, clips on the Mac.

I feel that the Mac is much slower on the network. It takes about five times longer to view files in directories on the network drive ( for example a directory with 4000 files will take about a minute to load from the Mac, and about 10 seconds to load from the PC).

Any ideas?

Thanks for reading!

Wolfy

[joojaa]

Theres a whole lot of problems that it could be, aslo its not surprising, You probably have network configuration problem or then its just the disk system the mac dislikes.

I have a Mac Pro

yes but which one?

four-year-old

what is the 4 year old pc loaded with? Did you ever consider that it might actually be faster atleast in something critical such as bus speed or maybe it has a better gfx card, or more cache? Or maybe its just has a faster network card.**

My 3 year old backup pc beats the crap out of my neighbors mac pro in lots of applications*. Its not a question of age its about the hardware, software combo. See the problem your bundling many items under one umbrella, you need to understand each end every component to say which one is actually speedier.

*because its essentially has better hardware, because i picked up the hardware for special purpose.

** or the windows 7 wins the shouting match on the ip calls so it gets all the bandwidth form the router etc.

[mrwolfy]

Thanks Joojaa.

Did you ever consider that it might actually be faster atleast in something critical such as bus speed or maybe it has a better gfx card, or more cache?

Not really, as the Mac Pro is supposed to be a "state of the art" machine, with the best graphics card available for the Mac (at the time). But I will look into that.

I think this may be a new problem, as I have been using this machine for a year and only lately noticed the problem. I'm pretty sure it's a network problem, given the multitude of symptoms, but then I am pretty much in the dark as to what might be causing it. The symptoms are worse than a you would expect.

The Mac:

  Model Name:    Mac Pro
  Model Identifier:    MacPro4,1
  Processor Name:    Quad-Core Intel Xeon
  Processor Speed:    2.66 GHz
  Number Of Processors:    1
  Total Number Of Cores:    4
  L2 Cache (per core):    256 KB
  L3 Cache:    8 MB
  Memory:    8 GB
  Processor Interconnect Speed:    4.8 GT/s
  Boot ROM Version:    MP41.0081.B07

ATI Radeon HD 4870Graphics card.

The PC:

Dell Precision 490, Xeon 3.2. With a GeForce 9800 GT grfx card.

[joojaa]

Not really, as the Mac Pro is supposed to be a "state of the art" machine, with the best graphics card available for the Mac >> (at the time). But I will look into that.

There are many versions of mac pro and they indeed do have different gfx options and capabilities. Also tya are only state of the art when a new updated model of mac pro appears on the market. They are dumbed down state of the art, you pay for state of the aret and get a random deal if you only apprise things with those terms.

So they are only state of the art if you happen to buy when they roll a new nvesrion out the door. An dthey dont allways tell you when they do what so the statedness of art varies depending on when you buy. However cost does not reflect this.*

Now the specs actually tell a bit.

the dell is actually possibly slightly faster singletheraded, so there are things that the dell will beat your mac on. So it depends on what you do really. Hard to say anything about the bus because no mobo info is included. (AE rendering is a bus speed thing mostly)

The symptoms are worse than a you would expect.

Ok theres a easy way to test. Move the rpoject files local and then test what the speed is!

Anyway having may cores doent help you unless you know how to push the computer, so for simple use a single core fast processor beats a multicore one most days.

*so to buy a mac succesfully you need to know more about computers than pc users why atleast thoretically can easily find out teh stuff.