Miguel Medalha wrote:
Filipe, it is possible it is taking so long to do a "sort" because when doing it, it caches it on the client side of Distiller also + does it on the Samba Server to. IE; Sorts on Both Sides.
I tried it, several times, on a standalone Windows workstation and the same happens. I am not saying that the sorting takes too much time; the whole process takes too much time.
And please note that it also happens with the runfilex.ps code provided by Adobe, which does not sort but instead presents Distiller with a list of files to process, instead of letting it rely on the dir order. Sorting is not the problem here.
Sounds like a bug in the program. Maybe it runs a separate instance for each page in that mode and doesn't release any memory until it is all finished. On something smaller or less complex it might not make much difference, but if the memory use pushes into swap it will take much longer.
By the way, yet another really-contorted workaround would be to run VMware server or virtualbox (both free) on the centos box with a windows guest to get a reliable NTFS network drive. If you have resources to spare on this server you could even run distiller there so you could shut down the workstations as soon as the final run starts. It isn't the most efficient way to do things, but I've had some running that way for years with no unexpected problems. The only inconvenience is that at least in the VMware server case on centos 5, whenever you update the kernel and reboot, you have to run a script that recompiles the vmware module before the guest will run.