I am trying to cache a water simulation in the console, because the scene also contains a skinned character that is pretty complex, and requires considerable cooking time, so to save UI overhead i thought of creating an output node that plugs into the dop path for the water sim, which is a simple 300x300 flat tank, and use the render command to run the node in console.

If i cache the water sim from Houdini UI, the cached files are less than 50MB each, but if i try to launch the render command from the console to my dop path, the cached files generated are 450MB each. Any idea what i might be doing wrong?