Concurrent Tasks

Deadline
1

Hi

I’m rendering a Vue job that is very expensive computational wise. I have 7 farms rendering 2 of which are macs.

I set the concurrent tasks to 1 as i want each slave to put all of its resources into that 1 frame.

I have 2 issues:

  1. A few of the PC farm machines queue more than 1 frame at a time. I modified the slave settings to override the 0 default with 1 in the concurrent tasks but still the slaves queue more than one frame, thats very frustrating.

In the submission dialogue i Set the concurrent task to 1 and deselected the salve task limit option.

  1. Some slaves stay on Idle and dont start queuing jobs, no errors or anything. They just dont start rendering, while like i mentioned others are queuing more than 1.

Finally i Rechecked the machine list and everything seems in order, all the slaves are included so i expected them all to render and each 1 task (1 frame) at a time.

2
  1. That is very odd. As long as you have Concurrent Tasks set to 1, a slave should never dequeue more than one task, even if you’ve changed the CPU override setting in the slave settings, or disabled the option to limit the number of tasks to the number of cpus.

Is it the same slave machines that do this over and over, or is it random across all your PCs? The next time a machine does this, can you go to it and check the Task Manager to see if there are multiple Vue processes running. If there is still only one process running, it may be that the slave is losing track of its previous task. So in the Monitor it looks like the slave is working on more than one task, when it is actually only rendering one frame.

  1. Which version of Deadline do you have? If it’s version 5, you can use the slave availability filter to see which machines the job is available to render on (it’s in the Slave Toolbar in the Monitor). When the filter is enabled, the slave list will be filtered when you select a job to only show the slaves that can render that job (based on pool, group, etc). You can use this to see if some slaves get filtered out, and if they do, we can move on to figuring out why.

Just out of curiosity, can you render non-Vue jobs on these particular slave?

Cheers,

  • Ryan