Cinerender sending loads of data to the internet

[Anonymous]

My network activity monitor in OSX reports CineRender is sending loads of data while it's rendering. Why is this? My problem is that I'm on a limited data usage connection, and don't want to blow this. Why would CineRender need to seed at all?

I am the only computer on my local wifi with ArchiCad/CineRender, so no network-rendering should be ongoing..

Rendering will work fine if I disable wifi, so I don't get why.
Thanks for any hints, have not found any similar issues on the forum.

[mikas]

It's the same here. It is a little bit of a strange thing. I've been rendering a lot, the hole weekend actually, and just over a terabyte has been transfered somewhere by cinerender from my Mac. Per second rate is 106 Mbytes just now.

Maybe there is en explanation for this, or maybe we are misreading the stats and the numbers?

I am using dropbox for my projects nowadays, because I do my work in two different locations. I don't think it (dropbox) should aggregate this kind of network usage. I think all the caching and swapping and working should happen within my Mac Pro and inside my RAM and SSD, not on network. Ofcourse the project and the .bpn reside in the cloud, but thats only some tens of megabytes per piece.

When I'm on Cinema 4D team-render, the local network usage ramps up, but now I'm doing renders with single instances of ArchiCADs, three separate licenses each doing it's own render and in a different computer. A couple of libraries are on dropbox too. I think I am not running out memory either (14GB used out of 48GB on this machine).

[Karl Ottenstein]

Just a guess - but my bet is that CineRender exchanges data with ArchiCAD via a network protocol, as an easy way of having two independent processes 'talk' to one another ('interprocess communication') without deep coding. I would guess that this 'network activity' doesn't leave your machine and touch the rest of your local network, much less the internet.

The screenshot that Mikas posted supports my guess: The number of bytes read by CineRender equals those written by ArchiCAD and vice versa.

Since you're both on Macs, you could verify my guess (if nobody from Graphisoft posts), by running Little Snitch (or similar) which lets you see what is actually happening on your network vs just seeing bytes read/written. Says there is a free trial:
https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

Of course, you can also test by disconnecting from the internet - turn of your wifi or unplug your ethernet cable - and see if the render still works properly.

[mikas]

Thank You Karl, it must be something like that. My wired network is behind a 100 Mbit/s switch at the moment, so it could not even theoretically put through 100 Mbytes/s (byte=8xbits). But theres something more I don't get, because after rendering whole last night, that number has decreased to 897 GB (Gt is GB, Mt=MB and kt=kB in finnish terminology). Process ID is the same though, 2410.

[runxel]

Karl is right.
You don't need to worry about your data plan 🙂

Using network sockets you can implement fast and reliable Inter-process communiation, which is done here.