How to speed up render to h.264 in CS6? Adobe QT32 Server.exe causes long delay

Question

(Before you say "Don't use AE to render to h.264; use AME!" – I'd love to, but AME isn't controllable from the command line / batch files the way aerender.exe is)
When I try to render a brain dead simple composition (30 seconds, black background with the word "DUMMY" centered), aerender takes nearly four minutes to complete. This is a Windows Server 2012 box with 32 CPUs (16 cores+16 HT), about ~60GB of memory and I believe it's on 10Gb ethernet. Turning multi-processing off doesn't have effect on the pause.
If I view the task in task viewer, NO CPU is being used and Adobe QT32 Server.exe is running. Analyzing the wait chain for aerender.exe says that a thread is waiting for network i/o to complete (I assume this is Adobe QT32 Server.exe, which uses TCP to talk to Quicktime). After about three minutes, the render continues (and goes blazingly quick, as expected).
WTF?
How can I get around this long, useless pause? Is there an alternative h.264 output module that doesn't use Quicktime?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The flaw is here:
This is a Windows Server 2012 box
Adobe desktop programs are generally not officially supported on server operating systems. Whatever issues you have are probably due to things like local users vs. network users, disk quota, specific group policies or plain and simple another process occupying or blocking the same port that the QT server is using. In any case, this is nothing we can figure out for you. You have to sit down and work your way through the server's administration tools, turn off stuff, change user permissions. Check the event logs for conflicting processes or use tools like Sysinternals' Process Monitor or Wireshark to track down port collisions and otehr problems.
Mylenium