IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR ALL USERS:
Beta 18 contains a breaking change that will affect all jobs submitted with beta 17 or earlier. It also breaks the SMTD submission script for 3ds Max. See the highlighted changes below for more information.
IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR LINUX USERS:
This only applies to Linux users who are running beta 17 or earlier. Beta 18 updates the version PyQt libraries so that they are the same version as the Windows and OSX versions. Because these updated libraries are installed by the Client installer only, the Client installer must be run to properly upgrade. This means that if you have beta 17 or earlier, you must manually reinstall the Clients again, as opposed to using Deadline’s auto-update feature. After you are running a minimum of beta 18, you will be able to use Deadline’s auto-update feature to upgrade from beta 18 to beta 19 and so on.
See the Upgrading documentation in the CHM or PDF Deadline 6 manuals for more information.
IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR MAC OSX USERS:
This only applies to Mac OSX users who are running beta 14 or earlier. Beta 15 included a key fix for auto-updating on Mac OSX. This means that if you have beta 14 or earlier, you must manually reinstall the Clients again, as opposed to using Deadline’s auto-update feature. After you are running a minimum of beta 15, you will be able to use Deadline’s auto-update feature to upgrade from beta 15 to beta 16 and so on.
See the Upgrading documentation in the CHM or PDF Deadline 6 manuals for more information.
Downloads
What’s New In Deadline 6.0.51030 (Beta 18)
This release fixes a bunch of bugs and makes some significant performance improvements. Hiero support has also been included.
Here are the highlighted changes.
Breaking Change Between Beta 17 and Beta 18
In beta 17 and earlier, all tasks for a job were stored as a single “document” in the database. In beta 18, each task will be stored in its own “document”. This is a significant change, and will break all existing jobs that are currently on the farm. Because of this, it is recommended to upgrade to beta 18 during a quiet period. However, as a result of this change (in addition to some other minor performance improvements), we have significantly reduced the load on the MongoDb server.
We ran some tests on the Linux partition of our Deadline server, which is a 4 core machine. Because it’s Linux, the CPU loads can be above 100% because it’s not normalized to the number of cores. For example, if the CPU load was at 200%, that could mean 2 cores @ 100%, or 4 cores @ 50%. If it was at 400%, that would mean all 4 cores are maxed out. Anyways, on to the tests:
Beta 17
- 3000 queued jobs
- 400 slaves
- Average load on the mongodb server: 150-250%, with spikes occasionally over 300%.
Beta 18
- 3000 queued jobs
- 500 slaves
- Average load on the mongodb server: 25-50%, with spikes occasionally over 150%.
So even with 100 more slaves, beta 18 performed far better than beta 17!
Improved RPManager Support and Breaking SMTD Change
Grant Adam was kind enough to write a special RPM dependency system into SMTD that can be used to set up pass dependencies like you can for backburner. We have also completely revamped SMTD so that SMTD and RPM can share the same scripts. In addition, RPM now loads the SMTD scripts from the Repository, instead of requiring them to be on the local machine.
To install the new RPM script, do the following after upgrading to beta 18:
- Create a Deadline6 folder in [maxdir]\scripts\RPManager
- Copy [repo]\submission\3dsmaxRPM\Client\Deadline3dsMaxRPMClient.ms to [maxdir]\scripts\RPManager\Deadline6\Deadline3dsMaxRPMClient.ms
- Choose the Deadline3dsMaxRPMClient.ms script when customizing the Network Manager in RPM
Because we had to revamp SMTD, we had to change the way that the client script launches SMTD. So after upgrading to beta 18, you must upgrade the SMTD client script on your workstations. See the integrated submission script setup in our 3dsmax documentation for steps on how to do this. If you don’t do this after upgrading, SMTD will NOT launch on your workstation.
Note that due to a current limitation, SMTD cannot be launched on its own after it has been launched inside RPManager. 3ds Max must be restarted to launch SMTD on its own in this case.
General Improvements
- Refactored how tasks are stored in the database to improve performance. This is a breaking change which will break all jobs submitted with beta 17 and earlier.
- The Deadline applications no longer crash on KDE Linux systems.
- Fixed a race condition that could cause a job in the database to become corrupt.
- Fixed some window ordering issues that could occur when launching integrated submission scripts that just called our Monitor submission scripts under the hood. The submitter it affects are for Blender, Composite, Houdini, Messiah, modo, RealFlow, and Rhino.
- The Slave statistics now properly calculates the amount of time the Slave spent in the Disabled state.
- If a job in the database somehow ends up with an empty frame list, it will no longer prevent jobs from being viewed in the Monitor.
- Added an item to the Help menu in the Monitor, Slave, and Pulse to get the database statistics.
- Job notification emails now included the job ID.
Installer Improvements
- The Linux Client installer now ships with the correct version of the PyQt libraries. This means that the Client needs to be installed on Linux systems.
- When the Repository installer installs MongoDB, it now installs it next to the DeadlineRepository directory.
- The Repository uninstaller will now uninstall MongoDB as part of the uninstallation steps.
- Fixed some bugs with how the Linux Client installer sets up the Launcher daemon.
Monitor Improvements
- Fixed a memory leak.
- Fixed the order in which the Monitor process inserts, updates, and deletes in the lists.
- In the Job Details panel, the plugin-specific properties are now sorted in a case-insensitive order.
- When the status of a slave is unknown, it will appear as Unknown in the slave list, instead of New.
- When the status of pulse is unknown, it will appear as Unknown in the pulse list, instead of New.
- The corrupted job counts are now shown with the other counts in the job list.
- The disabled and unknown slave counts are now shown with the other counts in the slave list.
- The unknown pulse counts are now shown with the other counts in the pulse list.
- If a job is dependent on jobs that are no longer in the queue, you will still be able to see those dependencies in the Job Properties window, and remove them if necessary.
- The monitor UI is now locked by default.
- Added an indicator to the status bar to show that the monitor UI is locked.
- The Pool drop down in the job properties now shows pools instead of groups.
- The Pool and Group drop downs in the job properties no longer duplicate the ‘none’ pool/group.
- Fixed shortcut ordering issues in the Pinned Layout menu.
- A job right-click script is now shipped that copies the selected job’s ID to the clipboard.
- Improved the speed of job deletions in the job list.
- The main toolbar is now named “Main Toolbar” instead of just “toolBar”.
Slave Improvements
- The slave now flushes its cache after dequeuing a job to keep its memory usage lower.
- The slave now checks to see if its current task has been dequeued when it is updating its state in the database, rather than during a separate interval.
- Removed some unnecessary database writes that occurred while a slave was dequeuing a task.
- The slave now waits the appropriate time between job searches while it is idle. Before, it was waiting the amount of time set for task searches while it is rendering. This will reduce the number of times it hits the database while its idle.
- When writing error reports, the slave version is now included.
- The slave now double-checks the timeout setting for a job before throwing an error due to a timeout.
3ds Max Improvements
- Refactored SMTD so that RPM can use the same scripts directly from the Repository. This is a breaking change, so the integrated submission script must be installed on the workstations again.
- Refactored the Deadline RPM scripts so that they use the existing SMTD scripts, instead of special modified ones.
- The Deadline RPM submitter now includes a pass dependency feature that works like backburner (thanks Grant Adam!).
- Removed the Fusion QT submission options from SMTD since the Fusion QT plugin is obsolete.
- The option to save the output file is no available in the Job Properties window in the Monitor after submitting the job.
- The missing 3ds Max 2014 lightning.dlx file is now included.
Hiero Improvements
- Added support for Hiero that allows you to submit Nuke jobs from Hiero to Deadline.
Maya Improvements
- Reduced the verbosity of the warning messages when Deadline is ignoring an error.
modo Improvements
- Fixed an error when unloading the modo plugin that would occur if modo hasn’t been launched yet.