Resource Monitoring and Analysis

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renderfarmer

Member
Feb 22, 2013
249
1
18
New Jersey
Hi everyone.

I'm trying to get a more precise picture of what my render nodes are doing during a complete render cycle and am soliciting advice for how to best accomplish this.

Ideally I would like to run an app that will monitor and graph CPU usage + RAM usage + HDD throughput + Network throughput.

I could open Resource Monitor and visually guage what's going on but its graph windows extend only 60s and I'd like to test this with several production level rendering jobs that will take about 30-60min each to render. I then woudl like to be able to compare and contrast the data from different scenarios and have a baseline for whatever changes I make.

My goal is to determine where to best alocated resources towards removing bottlenecks that might speed up renderings.

Any and all suggestions are welcome.
 

renderfarmer

Member
Feb 22, 2013
249
1
18
New Jersey
Not really - most are linux based.
Thanks, Nitro. Windows Resource Monitor has literarry everything I need but it won't log anything or display a graph for longer than 60s... Surely I can't be the only person interested in having an hour or day long snapshot of computer resource monitoring in windows...
 

Andreas

Member
Aug 21, 2012
127
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Last edited:

renderfarmer

Member
Feb 22, 2013
249
1
18
New Jersey
I assume you are looking for something like Microsoft's WPT (Windows Performance Toolkit). If you are running Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012, it is PerfMon "on steroids". :)
Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit

Some scenarios: WPR Scenarios

Basically you have 2 components, a performance recorder (WPR) and a performance analyzer (WPA).
Quickstart:
WPR Quick Start

Windows Performance Analysis Developer Center

rgds,
Andy
Yes, thanks! I'll test these out when I have a little time and report back. A friend also suggested Mrtg. He says it will map anything but I can only find references to network traffic but we'll see.
 

Mike

Member
May 29, 2012
482
16
18
EU
For this purpose I would recommend collectd. It's probably the most scalable and easiest piece of software when it comes to monitoring. It can be extended with some nice frontends and other alerting and trending back-ends. It's low on resources, you will find that most monitoring solutions use a chitload of cycles to do "nothing more than plot a few graphs".
 

renderfarmer

Member
Feb 22, 2013
249
1
18
New Jersey
I finally had a little time to take a crack at this.


  1. SSC Serv: Free version only includes CPU monitoring (no memory, network, disk). That costs 325euro for a 5 pack. Ouch...
  2. Windows Performance Toolkit is amazing but the Windows Perf Analyzer doesn't graph Network I/O! Arrrghh.. So close.

Next up, PRTG.

Thanks again to everyone for their suggestions.
 

badatSAS

Member
Nov 7, 2012
103
0
16
Boston, MA
I'm a ProactiveNet guy myself, but that may be a little too hardcore for your environment - and expensive. But it's also going to be the only one to send you an email telling you your disk throughput is off from typical before the disk even has time to throw a SMART warning ;)
 

renderfarmer

Member
Feb 22, 2013
249
1
18
New Jersey
I'm a ProactiveNet guy myself, but that may be a little too hardcore for your environment - and expensive. But it's also going to be the only one to send you an email telling you your disk throughput is off from typical before the disk even has time to throw a SMART warning ;)
Thanks for the tip. That sounds great for long term monitoring but like you said, overkill for my setup. I'm interested in benchmarking my systems but with my own specific work load which means monitoring what they do while a rendering is launched.

I installed PRTG and polked around. It's a really impressive package. It looks like it will do what I need. I'll post when I actually run it as I intended.