After effects - SMB - Extremely slow read and write.

[roykristoffersen]

We are using a server which use the SMB protocol.

We have Macs and PCs connected to it.

We get read write times of 800MB on the LUmaforge Tower using Black Magic Speed disk both on the mac and on the pc.

So there is nothing wrong with the connection.

When we use after Effects on the PC we get render times of 8 minues for a 30 second project which is 3D renderes EXR and some color adjustments.

This is fine and is what we expect.

When we use the MAC we get rendertimes of 36 minutes.

We then have incredebly slow read and write times.

So what is happening here?

It works perfectly fine on the PC but the Mac is so slow that one cannont work directly on the server anymore. Which is a huge problem for us.

Its just the way that After Effects handles the SMB protocol on the MAC.

So my question is.

Are you aware of this problem and when will you fix it?

Thanks

Roy

[Szalam]

roykristoffersen  wrote

So my question is.

Are you aware of this problem and when will you fix it?

This is a user-to-user forum and not an official way to contact Adobe. The vast majority of folks you'll see here are users like you and me.

If you want help directly from Adobe, you'll need to contact Adobe support directly. (I'd recommend asking for the video queue, if you're on the phone.)

You might also file a bug report. Those go directly to the AE team. It's not likely to get a response from them unless they need more information to fix the problem. And, again, it might be something support can solve, so you might not even need to file a bug.

That being said, I seem to recall some folks mentioning something about SMB issues, but I can't remember if they had any workarounds or fixes, so you might try searching these forums to see if you can find any previous threads about this.

[roykristoffersen]

I thought that this was an offical Adobe Forum?

A forum which one just dont ask hard questions?

Either way this is an issue for many user of servers that provide SMB.

I will take the matter in hand with Adobe directly.

Thanks!

[Szalam]

roykristoffersen  wrote

I thought that this was an offical Adobe Forum?

It is. It's Adobe's official user-to-user forum. We do get Adobe employees in here occasionally (more here in the After Effects forum than in some of the other communities), but it's mostly just users helping each other out.

roykristoffersen  wrote

A forum which one just dont ask hard questions?

Hard questions are fine; they're often the most fun to answer! I just don't have experience with SMB so I can't offer much help.

roykristoffersen  wrote

Either way this is an issue for many user of servers that provide SMB.

I will take the matter in hand with Adobe directly.

It does appear as if this is a somewhat widespread issue. Here is one thread with several people sharing what they had to do to get things working. Hopefully it helps. Or, if not, at least helps you narrow things down with Adobe.

[fnordware · Accepted solution]

If you look in the ProEXR manual, it mentions a preference you can change by editing AE's preferences file. It's the Memory Map option under OpenEXR. This will cause an EXR file to be read with one big read, as opposed to the many small reads you typically have. This feature was added to address issues with SMB, I believe.