Speed up Premiere Pro renders out of VM?


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Good afternoon:

I run unRAID on an HP ProLiant DL360e G8...specs: 

 

Dual E5-2440 CPUs @2.4GHz

64GB RAM

3x8TB 3.5" HDD

1x3TB 3.5" HDD

1x240GB NVMe SSD as cache drive  

 

On it, I have a W10 VM with Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder installed and I'm trying to figure out why it renders video so slowly.  The VM isn't running anything but these apps. 

 

I have assigned the VM 12 CPU cores and 16GB of RAM and I can render videos on my laptop (with its massive dual core/hyperthreaded i7-7500U...) twice as fast as I can on the server...I'm trying to figure out why.

 

I'm pretty sure the storage speed isn't the problem because I render files from the server on my laptop over Wi-Fi, no problem.  That leaves...

 

The CPUs:  The best CPUs I can run on this motherboard are a couple Intel Xeon E5-2470v2 and I'm thinking about upgrading as they're not that expensive...I just don't know how much it will help.

 

Or the lack of GPU acceleration:  The server is a 1U so there's not much room for a GPU, but I MIGHT be able to shoehorn in a 1050ti.  I'm pretty sure this will help most.

 

Can anyone shed any light on this?  Anyone have any experience doing this kind of thing?

 

Thanks!

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I wonder if you’re hitting a single thread issue when “sewing” the final video back together. I ran a setup with 4 transcoding servers for a short bit using apple compressor. It would tear through the files but the final file creation was slow because it would have to essentially “recompile” all the parts into one.

 

(just thinking out loud here)

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5 minutes ago, 1812 said:

I wonder if you’re hitting a single thread issue when “sewing” the final video back together. I ran a setup with 4 transcoding servers for a short bit using apple compressor. It would tear through the files but the final file creation was slow because it would have to essentially “recompile” all the parts into one.

 

(just thinking out loud here)

Nope. I can see in the preview that it's only chewing through frames at 1-3 per second...sometimes a frame takes longer than a second, even.

 

 

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2 hours ago, bastl said:

@rmp5s Are you using cores from both CPUs in this VM?

Yup. But they're pinned correctly. 

 

I don't think this would make a ton of difference, though. 

 

I'm thinking it's just the CPU is weak and, with no GPU acceleration, it's just slow as balls. That's the only explanation I have.

 

Anyone ever shove a GPU into a 1U server? lol

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@rmp5s Doesn't matter how you pin your CPUs. In a virtual environment the guest OS isn't aware of the real topology of your host CPUs by default. OS optimizations for multi-socket CPUs won't work. For example if you give the VM 2 cores from both CPUs it will see it as 1 CPU with 4 cores. Try to only use cores from one CPU inside the VM and test if this improves your performance. Or tweak your xml to make the guest aware of the hosts topology

 

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/virtualization_tuning_and_optimization_guide/index

Edited by bastl
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Just now, bastl said:

@rmp5s Doesn't matter how you pin your CPUs. In a virtual environment the guest OS isn't aware of the real topology of your host CPUs by default. OS optimizations for multi-socket CPUs won't work. Try to only use cores from one CPU inside the VM and test if this improves your performance. Or tweak your xml to make the guest aware of the hosts topology

 

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/virtualization_tuning_and_optimization_guide/index

I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

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