Failing a Job in Different Ways

Deadline
1

Hey guys,

I’ve been wanting to implement a new way of failing tasks from our current method, which is to use the FailRender call. The behaviour we have set up is to error a task 6 times before it fails. This works well most of the time, however if we have a job that runs overnight that is long running and times out 6 times on every frame, we’re essentially losing upwards of 10 hours per task render time which could be better spent elsewhere.

I don’t want to get rid of the timeout function, and I don’t want to turn down/off the task failure either. What I want is a way to call an option that fails a task other than the FailRender call, so I can keep it as a separate function that immediately kills the task rather than letting it re-run. I saw something about a FailJobTask when I was digging around, but I couldn’t work out where that was getting called from, or the functionality.

If anyone could shed some light on a nice way to go about this, that would be really appreciated.

Thanks!
Courtenay

2

Hello Courtenay,

I am guessing by some of the stuff you are saying that you have a fair bit of custom written stuff going on in your farm, am I right? We have task and job based timeouts built into deadline as of at least 6.1, so those should work for you if you choose to. If those won’t work, I can consult with our coders to see if I can get more information on this.

3

Instead of FailRender, you can use the AbortRender function, which takes an AbortLevel value as the second parameter. Just search for the AbortRender function in the Deadline Scripting Reference:
thinkboxsoftware.com/deadlin … mentation/

If you use AbortLevel.Fatal, the task will be set to Failed so that it won’t re-render again.

Cheers,
Ryan