In 7.0.2.3, it is possible for two slave processes to both be the same slave if one is launched with the “-name” flag and one without. I don’t know why Deadline is spawning a second process, but I’m starting to see it happen again across various farm machines.
Hey Nathan,
We think we figured out what was still causing this to happen, and the fix will be included in an upcoming beta release of 7.1.
In 7.0 and earlier, the Deadline applications cache the machine’s host name when it starts up, and the slave strips the host name from the beginning of the name passed via the “-name” option. However, when the launcher is running as daemon, it is possible for the launcher to start before host name has been set on the machine (ie: via DNS), and then when it starts the slave, it passes its cached hostname as the prefix for the “-name” option, but when the slave compares it to the current hostname, they differ, and thus another slave instance gets created.
We are addressing this a few ways in 7.1:
- The deadline applications no longer cache the machine’s host name.
- There is a configurable deadline.ini setting that delays the launcher’s startup when running as a daemon. This delay allows for the machine to get its hostname before the other Deadline applications start up.
- When using remote control, only the slave name’s post fix is sent (or ~ in the case of no post fix). This helps avoid this problem if the prefix of the slave name is different than the host name of the remote machine.
Cheers,
Ryan
Thanks for the info Ryan. Glad you were able to isolate the problem.