I am running into some issues with our “Deadline Version: 6.2.0.32 R (2563d5bc8)” install with some renders not starting.
I have had a few 3DS Max tasks that report “Starting Up” but when I remote into the machine 3DS Max is not running. All other tasks complete without issue and when I requeue the task it runs fine. I remember in Deadline 5 this used to happen too. It used to time out after 20 minutes though. (I can’t remember if this was a time I put in somewhere or not)
Ideally I would like this not to happen at all but for now I would like to put in a custom “Starting Up” time out to something like 15/20 minutes. Can I do this in Deadline 6?
On a longer term goal, how can I go about debugging and fixing this issue?
Hi Rob,
Quite a bit of additional debug logging has been developed in v6.1 and v6.2 compared to v5.x (I should I know as I did the work!), so I would recommend ensuring “Slave Verbose Logging” & “Job Log Timestamps” are enabled in the “Configure Repo Options” > “Application Logging” section and then post a few example log reports on machines which have an issue. Typically, if 3dsMax isn’t starting up on one of your nodes within the default timeout of 1000 seconds (16.6 minutes - you can go to customise plugins > 3dsmax [at the bottom to change the settings]) then there is a much deeper issue here, where increasing the 3dsMax startup (load) timeout is just not going to solve and will only add considerable inefficiency to your potential renderfarm throughput. Personally, I’ve never seen a situation where the correct solution was to increase the 3dsMax load timeout.
Anyway, hopefully the log reports will tell us much more. You can always take one of the ‘problematic’ machines, startup 3dsMax in GUI mode and load the Max file manually and see if there are any issues when you render that particular frame locally on this machine. Sometimes this is enough, to figure out what the underlying issue is. (3dsMax can startup in 30 day eval mode - so no license required).
Hope this helps!
Mike
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Thanks Mike!
I have enabled ‘Slave Verbose Logging’. I also checked the 3DS Max pluigin settings ‘Timeout For Loading 3dsmax’ and it is set to 1000.
I had not considered that the problem could be a machine specific thing, I thought it was a general Deadline issue. The problem is that all of the nodes here do render Max scenes without an issue, the same node could have rendered twenty tasks from the same job but then get ‘stuck’ starting up. I will start making notes of specific machines that encounter the problem and save out their logs.
One slightly odd thing is that the last time this happened there was a deadline task who’s status was “Starting Up” for 35 minutes before I requeue the task? I wonder why it did not timeout after 1000 seconds?
Hey Rob,
That’s a very good question and hopefully the extended, verbose logs should help us identify the issue for you. Let’s us know as and when you have a collection of these logs and we can go through them with you.
Regards,
Mike