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Slow Content Transfer with 6x 4K displays


ectoplasmosis

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I’m running a 6.4.1 display machine with 6x 4K outputs. When going online and transferring content, the network transfer speed is very slow, sometimes ~200Mbit/s. 

When transferring files to/from the display and production machines via Windows network sharing or benchmarking via iperf, the 10Gb network speed is maxed-out. 

Any reason for this slow speed within Watchout? Is this likely to be a bug?

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Hi Ectoplasmosis,

What type of files & how many are you transferring via WATCHOUT transfer mechnism? 
The reason I ask is because WATCHOUT does more than simply transfer files, it also does analysis etc. This is not something that Windows network sharing does and could be the cause of the differences you're seeing.

Best,
Joakim

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6x 4K60 HAPq files per display server. 

I’ve had to copy them manually to the Watchout ‘Shows’ folder which worked at the full 10Gbit line speed. 

When going online and letting Watchout push the files from production to display, the speed is ~300MBit/s, which for 150GB if content is not sustainable. 

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Hi Ectoplasmosis,

Ok, for the files you are describing you should definately see transfer speeds higher than 300MBit/s.
Have you seen similar behaviour in earlier versions of WATCHOUT or is 6.4.1 the only one you've tried?
I will attempt to reproduce the problem here at Dataton.

Best,
Joakim

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Hi Ectoplasmosis, Resolutions,

We have conducted further testing and concluded that the transfer speed of media files in WATCHOUT has indeed become worse in 6.4.1 than it was in 6.3.1. 

The issue seems to be related to both how many displays are connected to a display computer and to the resolution of these displays. It does not seem to make a difference wether the connected displays are used in the show or not. We are of course working on a solution but until a solution is found and deployed I can only advise you to use fever displays while transferring media. 

Best,

Joakim

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  • Dataton Partner

If the number of displays in your project and the resolution is a problem in 6.4.1, a hint for a workaround could be this:

You can select all the displays in your show except one and copy/paste them into a text file (unformatted text format of a simple editor, not RTF, DOCX,...). Then you can delete those from your show. Once the transfer is done, mark all the text in your text file and copy/paste it back into the stage window.

This would reduce the number of displays temporarily and might help to speed things up.

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This wouldn't work as the bug is induced by the amount of actual displays connected to (or emulated by) the display server, regardless of how many displays are part of a project.

I will be manually transferring content via SMB networking in the mean time. This consistently hits the full 10Gb/s speed that the hardware is capable of.

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We can use a workaround and transfer the larger files directly on the show folder, but we have to setup the display machines to be discoverable on the network. Not so easy for many reasons, but it can work.

Or we just can take a nap during the file transfer and wait to be fired, while the client blame us to be the slow part of workflow and call a Catalyst/D3 operator because those guys are "faster" and more reactive.

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