deadline slave scheduling

Deadline
1

hi folks

I’m new to deadline, so forgive me if this is a daft question (I can’t find any answers in the manuals)

Is it possible to restrict the deadline slave by time? ie, only render from 8pm to 8am?

Ideally I would like to do this with the deadline screensaver, so our workstations can be logged out at night and render (but not when someone walks away from the machine to make a cup of tea).

thanks in advance

Denis-Jose Francois
PrimeFocus BVFX

2

Hi Denis-Jose,

One option is to use Windows’s Task Scheduler. This might be the quickest solution for you, since I think it will work without requiring Deadline to be running as a service. You can set a start time and end time. At the end time, the task scheduler will shut down the slave gracefully, so even if it’s in the middle of something, it will get requeued so that another slave can pick it up.

You can also use the Slave Scheduling feature of power management, but in order for the slave to be launched when the system is logged out, Deadline would have to be installed as a service.
thinkboxsoftware.com/deadlin … Scheduling

Hope this helps!

  • Ryan
3

Hi Ryan

Yes that helps a lot. I’ve already tried the windows schedule route… which works OK, but there are some limitations with it. I had not considered the pulse route.

thanks

Denis-Jose Francois
PrimeFocus BVFX

4

I have configured our slaves to start with the launcher service and used Power Management to specify scheduling, however, this is not working as expected. I set up a “workstations” machine group and specified in the Slave Scheduling tab to the workstations are only available between 6pm and 6am M-F. While this seem to work initially, I have been noticing several of those workstations will suddenly switch from “offline” to “idle” and subsequently if a job is in the queue, rendering. I cannot discern why this is happening. Is it possible if the user is restarting their respective workstation, the launcher service starts ignoring the Power Management scheduling? I do see that once the machines go offline, they are no longer connected to Pulse. Am I doing something wrong?

5

I think I found the answer to my own question. When I set up the client machines, I guess I checked “Start Slave with Launcher” and used this deploy for all the machines. I fixed this using the deadline.ini to disable Launch Slave at boot:

LaunchSlaveAtStartup=0

All is good now.