Thank you for such a detailed reply! I made a handful of changes to my setup based on your response. • Swapped out for slightly faster SSDs I had lying around on the two 3700x nodes (I've ordered nvme M.2 SSDs to install later) • Checked XMP was enabled on all my machine's RAM (I actually missed one so lucky I checked) • Moved all of my models, textures, plugins onto a NAS so each node is referencing assets from the same location. I'm still setting up each Node to save the CR files locally. Would it make sense to have them share the same Network location? • Installed the latest CR version I also ran plenty of animation frames to get the load balance adjusted and the last render saw some pretty remarkable gains. (Last Render on Local @ 03:43 compared to 01:11 with CR). I'm still getting the CRMAIN.handle_disc_req error when I close my remote nodes but only seem to be getting sync failure on my first attempts. I'll save any logs if the previous problems comes back up. {"time_logged": 1609240090, "time_stamp": "Tue Dec 29 11:08:10 2020", "message": "Info: node status updated: connected:", "level": 6} {"time_logged": 1609240090, "time_stamp": "Tue Dec 29 11:08:10 2020", "message": "Info: node status updated: connected:", "level": 6} {"time_logged": 1609240091, "time_stamp": "Tue Dec 29 11:08:11 2020", "message": "Info: node status updated: sync failed", "level": 6} {"time_logged": 1609240091, "time_stamp": "Tue Dec 29 11:08:11 2020", "message": "Info: node status updated: repairing...", "level": 6} {"time_logged": 1609240092, "time_stamp": "Tue Dec 29 11:08:12 2020", "message": "Info: node status updated: sync failed", "level": 6} Thanks again!

I did some tests with and without CPU and it was faster with it selected on all my nodes. I've have had success speeding things up by deleting app data on my nodes and reinstalling the plugin, but syncing is temperamental, with it frequently failing. I'm getting this error when I close Blender on each of the nodes: WARNING ; CRmain.handle_disc_req: ; got a response that wasn't in the correct format :connect_error I'm still convinced that I'm not getting the most out of the farm. Currently I'm shaving 12 seconds off a 60 second render by balancing around 80, 10, 10. Admittedly, my local machine has an RTX 3090 and more cores, but I'd expect something closer to 60, 20,20, at the very least. Are there any other potential bottleneck's I could look into?