Deadline not always moving on to next task when frame done with XSI

Deadline
1

I am having an intermittent problem with frames hanging every once in a while and I am trying to figure out if it’s a Deadline or XSI Batch problem. It doesn’t seem to happen to specific scenes or frames. I have been rendering the same sequence as a test over and over and sometimes it goes through the frames normally and other times it seems as though it hangs on a frame and take 2-5 times longer to finish it like it’s stuck. It’s rendering on about 15 machines and no particular machine is causing the problem either. I am not sure if it’s a Deadline problem. Is anyone else experiencing this kind of rendering wierdness with XSI 6.5 Batch licenses and Deadline? All the frames render fine on any of the machines locally so I am certain it’s not my scene.

2

Hey Supapower,



This seems to be a known issue with xsibatch. Check out these two

threads for more details:

http://support.franticfilms.com/wb/default.asp?action=9&fid=7&read=602&FirstTopic=100&LastTopic=119

http://support.franticfilms.com/WB/?boardID=Frantic&action=9&read=782&fid=7



Cheers,

3

Thanks Ryan,



I have a response from Softimage saying this is not a known problem with XSIBatch.



I am having another issue with Deadline not showing the correct Render Time during the render of each node. It is showing the same render time on each node which seems to be the total time the job has been rendering instead of each tasks current render time. It does show the right render time per node once the frame is complete. I am wondering if I am just missing a setting somewhere. Also it does not show the render Progress properly. It is either 0 or 100.



I am running the latest ver of Deadline and updated with the plugin patch.



Thanks

4

I have a response from Softimage saying this is not a known problem

with XSIBatch.



I googled the xsi hanging issue and found some reported cases:

Softimage 2015 Final Release Announcement

Softimage 2015 Final Release Announcement



These were from an older version of XSI, and apparently the problem was

fixed in XSI 5.11, but I can say that I personally ran into the problem

once when adding support for XSI 6.02. The hang occurred when I was

testing XSI 6.02 from a command prompt outside of Deadline. I haven’t

personally seen the problem since though. I have been told though that

running XSIBatch at below normal process priority (which Deadline does)

isn’t recommended, so maybe that has something to do with it, but the

fact that I ran into the problem from a command prompt leads me to

believe that the problem still exists. In any case, the next version of

Deadline will allow you to change the priority at which the XSIBatch

process runs at, so that might help with this problem.





I am having another issue with Deadline not showing the correct

Render Time during the render of each node.

It is showing the same render time on each node which seems to be

the total time the job has been rendering

instead of each tasks current render time. It does show the right

render time per node once the frame is complete.

I am wondering if I am just missing a setting somewhere.



I’m a little confused by what you mean here. Are you referring to the

render time being shown in the Slave UI on the render nodes, or the

render time being shown for each task in the Monitor? If you could

clarify, that would be great!





Also it does not show the render Progress properly. It is either 0

or 100.



We thought we had fixed the progress issue for XSI 6.5 in the plugin

patch, but it looks like that may not be the case. We’ll have to look

into this. This doesn’t affect the actual rendering though.





Cheers,

5

Perhaps this problem may be related to a server overload? overloading the harddrive?