Render Farm - How do nodes Work?

Hello,

My name is Anatoly and I've recently set up a rendering farm connected to an I-Mac as a file-server.

The Problem: Not all nodes come to work together on a project, some arbitrarily choosing to render the assets while others just watching the watch folder idly.

The Computer Setup: There are six headless nodes (all Mac-Minis). The hardware and OS specifications are below.

MAC-MINI Farm:

1. 2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4Gb 1067 Mhz DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA Geforce 320M 256Mb, OSX 10.8
2. 2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4Gb 1067 Mhz DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA Geforce 320M 256Mb, OSX 10.8
3. 2.3Ghz Intel i5, 4Gb 1333Mhz DD3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 3000 384Mb, OSX 10.7.5
4. 2.3Ghz Intel i5, 4Gb 1333Mhz DD3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 3000 384Mb, OSX 10.8.5
5. 2.3Ghz Intel i5, 4Gb 1333Mhz DD3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 3000 384Mb, OSX 10.7.5
6. 2.3Ghz Intel i5, 4Gb 1333Mhz DD3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 3000 384Mb, OSX 10.7.5

I-MAC File Server:

1. 2.5Ghz Intel i5, 4Gb 1333Mhz DD3 RAM, AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512Mb, OSX 10.7.4

The Software Setup:

Each MAC-MINI node has a copy of After Effect CC Render Engine (version 12.0.0.404) running at startup and set to run in Watch Folder mode.

On the machine that is used to manipulate assets for rendering the following procedure is used:

• Open a project
• Add assets to render queue
• Set Render Settings to Multi-Machine Settings
• Check box in settings to “Skip existing files (allows multi-machine rendering)
• Set Output Module to Multi-Machine Sequence
• Select my desired output settings
• Then I click File – Dependencies – Collect Files
• In Collect Files Setup the following is chosen:
• Collect Source Files: All
• Change Render Output to: “custom name” folder
• Enable Watch Folder render
• Reveal collected project in Finder when finished
• Maximum Number of Machines: 10
• I then click Collect and save my project to a Watch Folder

From there-onwards, presumably, the Render Farm is now supposed to render out my project, but not all nodes of my 6-node farm work together. More often than not, a single (or two) node(s) render the projects while the others wait idly, watching the Watch Folder.

Can anyone please advise me of why this happens, and perhaps what step I’m missing if any to get all my nodes to render until the project is done?

Thank you,

-Anatoly