I'm not sure if this is a coincidence or not. But over the months I've noticed when a project takes a really long time to render, it tends to use extremely low amounts of RAM. Generally between 70-100MB, which seems too low for a 2014 project.

Is this down to features the author has enabled, or rather, not enabled? Are people choosing to disable rendering optimization features that use more RAM?

Basically if there's a trade-off, obviously using more RAM would be preferable to spending hours on rendering.

I have also noticed this and agree. I would rather a WU use 1-2 GB of RAM and take 20 minutes to render than use less than 300 MB of RAM and take 90 minutes or more to render.

The setting from the BOINC client under Disk, Memory usage sets how much memory each client can use for BOINC. Can't it therefore be used to set how much memory each BURP task can use once it starts computing on said client?

So then if your computer has more memory, your tasks get more memory and compute faster.

That is if there actually is a link between RAM used and compute time as there seems to be.

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I have a massive amount of RAM set for BOINC to use.

I believe the issue is with Blender rendering settings, or maybe certain unoptimized features.

I agree. My question was directed more towards Janus or some other admin.

It would be nice if that were the case though.

I have read there is an update in the works for at least the GPU app, maybe more. Possible this feature will be in the update?

Any input on this Janus? Or any other admin?

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It is very hard to say something definitive about memory vs CPU. In some cases it is possible to make a scene render faster by using more RAM (for example by tweaking the BVH cache size, using particular structures to store intermediate results in etc. etc.) but understanding when and how to apply this to an actual scene requires people to be extremely well versed in the inner workings and technical details of the renderer.
It is much more complex than just a slider between CPU and memory use - unfortunately =)

I was a little curious to see if you were right about the scenes being either RAM heavy or time heavy - it seems that there is something about it, here is a scatterplot; time is X and memory is up the Y axis:

Janus,

Thank you for clearing that up for me. I suspected something along those lines.

I didn't actually know as I have never rendered anything myself and don't have any idea what would be involved in doing so.

I also suspect that there is a difference between rendering on your own computer as opposed to submitting something here to be rendered.

Again, Thank you for all your knowledge and for sharing it with us.