A torrent of bits

Posted on May 30, 2015 in Blog News

Hot on the heals of our additional bandwidth announcement comes the release of a new and improved agent that can REALLY make use of it.

It’s been a bit of an experiment over the past couple months to develop our multi-session data transfer mechanism. We’ve tried a number of ways to determine how many sessions to use dynamically, but none of our attempts worked well in every scenario. Lab tests, it seemed, didn’t always align with everything we saw when agents were released in the wild. Our clients have a very diverse array of Internet connection types, speeds, and latencies. Add to that some “fun” caused by client-side firewalls, and you have a difficult obstacle to overcome.

Dn, Dn, Dn Daa! Enter Superdev.

After watching data transfer sessions until his eyes bled, Superdev (we need a copyright on that name) deftly navigated the iceberg-riddled sea known as TCP to find the promised land…a nivrana of throughput. He incorporated the coding changes to agent versions 1.94 and above, for both Windows and Mac. That agent was released a couple days ago, and the results are impressive.

Although only a handful of our clients have the updated agent, those that do have been moving a LOT of data around with it. We’ve seen sustained throughputs to Brazil at 35Mbps and peak throughputs to Sweden at 60Mbps. From an Internet distance perspective, those countries are both pretty far away from us (200+ms of latency). It’s great to see people much more routinely hitting the cap of their Internet connection, whether it’s during the uploading of a render job or the downloading of rendered frames. Data transfer performance matters when using a render farm service, and that’s why we continue to focus on it as an important part of our service offering. We hope you will enjoy the benefits of our labor.

Render Endlessly

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