would there be a script or way to have the machine limit change when there’s not much on the farm?
at the moment it’s great with lots of jobs on, but theres been a few times when jobs finish and a lot of slaves are sitting idle.
Hi Jay,
There isn’t any built-in functionality to handle this situation. You could probably write a script that uses deadlinecommand.exe to query the active jobs and the idle slaves, make some calculations, and then change the machine limit(s) as necessary. Then you could run this script as a scheduled task on one of you machines so that it’s handled automatically.
It’s unlikely that we’ll add this as a standard feature anytime soon. One problem I can think of is say there is only one job left which takes hours to render individual frames. The system eases the limit on the job and it takes over the entire farm. Then an hour later later, 20 high priority jobs are submitted to the farm. Now they have to wait for this job to finish up it’s current frame on each of the machines before it’s limit is reduced again. Of course, one could manually take care of this to free up machines immediately, but manual intervention would have also solved the original problem in the first place.
We tend to avoid “smart” features like this because while they’re handy in some cases, they can end up being a pain in others. But as I mentioned earlier, I’m sure you could use deadlinecommand.exe to help you do what you want here, and if you have any questions, let us know.
Cheers,
- Ryan
thanks Ryan, I see what your saying those smart features can be more annoying than helpful.
I’ll work it manually for now