Feature Request - recognize a crash

Deadline
1

This weekend I had Deadline set up to render a large project. Apparently during the render, XSIBatch crashed, but Deadline does not recognize when XSIBatch has crashed, so it simply sat and waited for a frame that was never going to be rendered.



I would love it if Deadline would recognize something is wrong and would either alert me or simply take that RenderSlave down and restart it or just take it offline.



Deadline sat for 8 hours trying to render 10 frames on a machine that XSIBatch had crashed on while another machine sat idle.



Thanks



Paul

2

Hi Paul,



Is XSI crashing and exiting, or is it hanging (ie: xsibatch is still in

the process list in the task manager)? Deadline monitors the rendering

process, so if it crashes and exits, Deadline should be reporting this

as an error. If it is just hanging, then this sounds like a known issue

where xsibatch hangs during rendering, and doesn’t report any info that

it is doing so. Because it’s not exiting, and because it’s not printing

out any error messages, there isn’t a way for Deadline to know that

something has gone wrong.



We’ll be introducing a new auto-timeout feature in the maintenance

release of Deadline 2.7 coming out soon. If the feature is enabled, jobs

will automatically timeout if the rendering time has reached 3x the

average frame time, provided that 10% of the tasks have completed. The

values mentioned are just the defaults, and can be customized to suit

your needs.



We decided to add this feature because Fusion runs into the same problem

(hanging with no notification), and it appears that XSI would benefit

from such a feature as well.



Cheers,

3

Excellent!



That’s exactly what I was experiencing. XSIBatch would simply hang - using 25% of the CPU but never reporting an error and never finishing the frame.



Paul