What can we do to improve the stability and responsiveness of Deadline Monitor? There are times when I will try to browse through a list of jobs, or access the properties/logs of a job, and Deadline Monitor will seem to hang for minutes at a time. Usually it comes around, but sometimes Windows reports that it has stopped responding and invites me to close it. Is this typically a network performance issue?
Yeah, that’s usually due to network performance or a misconfigured Pulse.
The quick fix if you’re not using it already is to run Pulse from the Repository machine. This caches the state information of the Repository so Monitor actions are usually lightening fast (we only send what changed for the job, etc).
Now, I should mention that the behaviour you’re seeing can come up if Pulse was configured, but is no longer running. That’s due to how we handle TCP connection errors. The Monitor waits until there’s a TCP timeout, and reverts back to the classic mode of scanning the Repository. That pause can happen at each operation.
So! First step is to go to “Tools -> Configure Repository Options -> Pulse Settings” and make sure the “Hostname or IP address” is blank. If it’s not, clear it out (and know that that’s likely why the Monitor was slow).
Then, go to either the Repository host (if it’s a regular host) or another machine with a really good connection to the Repository and run Pulse. It’ll ask if you want to use a host name or IP address. Choose whichever makes sense for you (I prefer host name, but we have DNS set up here). This is the information clients will use to connect to Pulse, so they’ll need to be able to resolve that host name or IP address to the machine Pulse is running on.
The next step is to set up Pulse to start at reboot. If you want to go the supported route, you’ll need to edit deadline.ini in Deadline’s global data folder (Win: “c:\programdata\thinkbox\deadline”, OSX: “/Applications/Deadline/Resources”) and add a line “LaunchPulseAtStartup=True” there so the Launcher starts Pulse automatically.
After that whole rigmarole, if there is still performance problems, let me know and we’ll work from there.
More info here!
thinkboxsoftware.com/deadline-5-pulse