We’ve been having issues with After Effects CS6 having hung tasks. Normally it is one or two tasks and we just dealt with it. But It seems to have gotten worse lately and we are ending up with tasks that hang overnight tying up several machines in the process. So Deadline never throws any errors during these hung tasks. But error windows pop up on the machine. It seems like AE CS6 is crashing but Deadline doesn’t recognize this crash so it just hangs. I’ve3 included some screen grabs and the text from the machine log and the text from the Windows error message.
Hi James,
Some 3rd party AE plugins really don’t work well when Concurrent Task processing is used. I would recommend setting ConcurrentTasks=1 to stabilise your workflow.
In terms of reducing the Windows Error Reports from hanging a Slave, I would consider disabling this functionality on your rendernodes only. Here’s a snippet from our upcoming v7 docs which explains how to achieve this.
Disable WER on Windows
When applications crash on Windows, the system holds the application open in memory and displays a series of helpful boxes asking if you want to submit the error report to Microsoft. While that’s super handy for all sorts of reasons, if there’s no one there to click the dialog (headless render node), Deadline will assume the application is still running and wait indefinitely by default.
The registry fix below will stop that from popping up on render nodes that don’t have baby sitters. Meaning when the application crashes, it actually exits like we know it should. This change is system-wide, but can be configured per-user if you like by changing the registry hive used (HKEY_CURRENT_USER versus HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE). Ensure you restart the machine after changing the registry setting and it is always recommended to take a backup before editing a machine’s registry. Copy the code below into a file: “DisableCrashReporting.reg” and double-click this file as a user with administrator privileges. Alternatively, you can manually add/edit the registry entry via “regedit.exe” or inject the registry silently via the command-line “regedit.exe /s DisableCrashReporting.reg”.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting]
"Disabled"=dword:00000001
For more information about the possible settings, see here: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb513638.aspx/
It’s also possible to just default to sending them if you like, or to store the crash dumps in a safe place if you’re a developer.
Cool thanks Mike!