C4D Commandline

Deadline
1

We recently had a render farm installed in our studio, it is a server rack with 8x GTX 1080’s in it. We are using the early bird build of Vray 3.34 RT.

The farm works, everything talks to one another and I can submit and render jobs. We use the C4D commandline with license to submit multiple jobs to through Deadline to be used on the farm.

For example:

I have submitted one scene, 100 frames, split into 4 tasks rendering 4 concurrently.

The task manager in the farm shows 4x commandline executables open (each fluctuating between 4gb and 8gb, the scenes are huge).
Deadline shows each of the 4 tasks rendering and the farms msi afterburer shows the cards working
The task finishes
It starts to process the next job
It hangs indefinitely saying starting up job.

Upon looking at the task manager on the farm it shows 8 x commandline licenses open
4 x with a huge amount of memory in them (upto 8gb) and 4 x with nothing in them (several kbs at most)

When I stop deadline or pause the task and even delete the jobs the commandlines don’t shut down. They don’t depreciate or drop there memory.

Cannot force quit the commandlines, cannot restart the machine without it crashing and forcing a hard restart.

Has anyone had this issue? I’m very new to this render farm business and in some cases I can get 3 jobs out before it activates extra commandlines and just ultimately fails. It’s like babysitting a toddler.

Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Current Vray Beta build is incredibly unstable and poorly optimised for GPU’s it throws errors all over the place, should of got Octane.

Will post log of errors when I can

2

Charles is helping over on the support ticket side, but I haven’t seen this yet.

In general, Deadline should be properly tracking the lifetime of the render commands here, and if it’s not it may be that the process hierarchy is being lost. I haven’t seen that on Windows though. It would be good if you could grab process explorer and see the process heirarchy as well as the GPU usage from there.

I think we’ll bring the ticket conversation over here since it’s public. Can you respond to Charles’ questions.

You’re doing things we haven’t had the opportunity to test 8x GPUs (or a motherboard with that kind of physical real-estate :smiley:), or V-Ray RT in C4D. We might try and test this internally, but could we maybe have a call? My number’s in my signature here.