"could not read dictionary file" errors

[miradastudios]

We are currently on 6.1 RC1. On the past few builds we’ve been experiencing these errors with various job types (Maxwell, Maya)

Error in StartJob: PluginConfig: Could not open plugin configuration “/tyto/users/render/Thinkbox/Deadline6/slave/pinkie006/plugins/52e6f495aed313018f866d99/Maxwell.dlinit” because could not read dictionary file

Unfortunately by the time the job fails the directory is empty, so we can’t see the state of the file. Resuming the failed job, it no longer errors. We tend to get a burst of these errors for individual job then it stops. Not much rhyme or reason, we can’t tell anything else to report. We are redirecting /tyto/users/render/Thinkbox to /tmp/ so this should’t be IO related issue. We have also tried enabling Slave Throttling in the Respository > Pulse settings to Maximum Number of Slaves that can copy job files at the same time = 15.

Any ideas or anything else useful we can report? We’ll be upgrading Deadline build again sometime this week and will report back.

[rrussell]

Hi Brian,

We’ve seem this error come up before, but we’re not sure exactly what causes it. When Deadline starts a job, it copies the dlinit file for the plugin from the repository to the local slave, and then opens it to read in its contents. This error should only come up in the following situations:

1. The dlinit file failed to copy over at all.
2. The dlinit file’s permissions were set so that they’re unreadable by the slaves.

I don’t think it’s (2), since jobs will start working again.

Are you aware of any issues with the server that you have the repository installed on? We do a directory sync between the plugin’s folder in the repo and the local folder, so if a hiccup on the server causes the slave to see an empty folder on the repo, that could explain this problem.

Cheers,
Ryan