Looking at that image and reading what James said, I think this must be an issue of the specific files being rendered. I'm not sure CrowdRender knows what pieces of your render are more complicated. this could maybe be done at some level with a fast low quality render and some data points beforehand?, but that's a pain. I just rendered a test animation that doesn't have much of anything going on for like the first 50 frames in the left half. It's pretty much a solid colored plane. What happened over 8 computers rendering this was 5 would render really face, the other 3 take twice as long. Then the load balancer I believe would calculate and swap out the slow ones for the next frame, rinse repeat. Once the whole scene had as much going on everything balanced very nicely.

@James and @mark, thanks for the replies. I was able to fix the problem (yes somewhat painfully using relative paths), but not bad. My 'fleet' is old headless linux servers already set up with ssh. I realized after that I could have probably just located the folder path up a directory and in one instead finding the correct hash.

I've run into this issue animating with video. James, so I can't scp or rsync across all my servers to a location and make paths relative? looks like some renaming and such going on in the cr folder.