[DVD-o-matic] benchmarks/machines

On a german projectionists forum someone posted first results for a dual xeon 2687W machine - total 16 cores 32 threads at 3.1GHz (very expensive, each CPU costs around 1.500€), running under WIN64 The results are a bit disappointing, Sintel runs through in around 32min - which is so far the fastest machine - but still a lot less than to be expected from such an expensive machine. The user confirmed that total CPU load during the encoding is only between 30% and 55%, no matter how many threads he configured. That computes into something like 11fps. The fastest so far I think was a 6-core i7-3930K at around 5.5fps. From extrapolating earlier results, 16 cores should result in something like 20-22fps, so, more or less half of that machines theoretical performance is not utilized by DVD-o.matic. I assume that, roughly put, dvd-o-matic is split into something like preprocessor (input, FFMPEG, Filters, etc.), J2k encoding, postprocessor (audio, wrapping, XML, filewrites, etc). And that probably only the j2k encoding can actually use multithreading, one thread per frame? Or is there a fixed limit on the number of encoding threads used, even if set higher? So it may be that the 'pre- and postprocessor' running singlethreaded may be the bottleneck on 'multi-multicore' machines, and performance can only be increased moderately with higher clock rates. Said machine has three fast SSDs for system, swap and workspace, and 64GBytes of RAM. I think Asus Z9 P -D8 mainboard. From this, to me it looks as if a single Intel CPU six to eight core HT machine at the highest available clock rate is the most economical sweetspot currently for DVD-o-matic. More CPUs/cores are wasted as price increases. A six core CPU sells around 500€. To give a more practical number, a typical 2hr full feature, using this 'sweetspot' machine will be converted to DCP in around 4-5 hours at 10-12fps average (all referenced to SINTEL encoding speeds - as we know, J2k encoding speed is highly content dependent). Of course, the mentioned user did not build this machine only for DVD-o-matic, he uses other video editing and rendering software on it as well so it will still payout for him. Meanwhile if have checked other DCP software performance figures and, as most of them are using OpenJPEG, their results are more or less the same. Some of them allowing only image series input with only preconformed image and audio data and thus a more simple preprocessor may use more than 6-8 cores more efficiently than DVD-o-matic. But then the preconforming from common video/media formats will need additional time ahead of the encoding as well. - Carsten