Ok, I know the new beta is iterating quite rapidly so perhaps most things are already taken care of.
I have noticed a bunch of things the last weeks that confused me and made me wonder why.
I haven’t had time to upgrade to the latest beta myself and after this project will have a bit of a break and probably forget to test everything so figured to just write it down 
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My mini-farm is 11 machines in size (incl. workstations) and I’ve found that running multiple slaves can be very effective especially with AE / Python submission. So as a result i’m running 3 slave instances at the moment.
However I had some odd behavior such as:
- not all slave 3 instances start all the time after a machine reboot.
- when I try to start 1 or 2 of the non-started slave-instances they often don’t start (until I kill the one(s) that did start properly)
- when I try to start 1 or 2 of the non-started slave-instances they often kill a slave-instance that is running
- sometimes a slave-instance goes offline when idle too long (I do have power settings applied to all instances otherwise the computer never shuts down)
- sometimes I do have 3 slave instances in my Task Manager process tab running, but not all 3 three show their UI .
In general I have the feeling that the instances are still depending on each other in some mixed up way.
I have no logs to provide atm. and in general they work good as long as they start all at the same time.
If not, the most effective solution is to use Teamviewer and kill the running ones manually, check if there’s some stuck in the processes, kill those and launch them all 3 at the same time from the deadline launcher
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Just wondering about the following situation whether it’s by design or not.
When i’ve started a job and for whatever reason suspend it to resume it later on the “Running Time” value keeps on counting. In principle this isn’t a real issue. But for estimation purposes it gives “false” information about the actual running time of the job.
As in the end it’s impossible to figure out how long the job was actually active on the farm which sometimes is practical to know.
There is the Total Task Time, but this is an accumulation of all individual rendertimes. So the only thing left to do is make a estimate based on the Total Task Time divided by amount of frames.
It also seem that if a job was suspended for a few hours (or days) and resumed again it’s takes a while before you get a real sense of the “Estimated Time Remaining” value as this seems to be influenced by the total running time which can take a bit before this value is normalized again.
–Just noticed that when I eg. add a post script or re-queue one task for example 5 hours later that those 5 hours in between are also added to the clock running time.
Just wondering what others thoughts were on this and if this is something that might change in the future?
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I’m not sure, but I have the feeling that since the latest version the GUI is more rigid.
In general I have the jobs window on top, the tasks underneath and below that the slave overview.
I usually scale the jobs/tasks window allot to use more of the screen real-estate but have noticed I that it’s not possible to make the window smaller then 10 vertical lines of information. Which is kinda annoying to my opinion.
Can this be set somewhere?
Besides this I noticed it’s possible to detach a panel via the upper right button even when the Panels are locked.
Which is good, but when I want to put it back I first need to unlock the Panels before I can try and drag it back into possition.
It would be awesome if the GUI somehow remembered that that windows was there in Locked-panel mode and can pop right back in
Maybe an extra button in the top right with a layout icon or something ?
As then you can easily take a panel out, put it full screen and with 1 click pop it back into the main interface.
Alternatively it would be cool to set a shortcut to open a New Jobs/Task panel (maybe that’s possible… but couldn’t find a way…)
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I’m enjoying the batch feature allot as it’s a great tool to help organize the spawning of Python Scripts
I had a few suggestions about the Script spawning here btw > https://forums.thinkboxsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=13392#p61437
Would it be possible to make a Batch-in-a-Batch ? 
Or basically group different jobs and batches together to represent a phase of a project and keep the jobs list a bit more condensed.
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What’s the deal with the mobile little helper?
I think to have read a while ago that it doesn’t really have priority or a future where it will be developed to be more then it is today.
Personally… I believe a mobile (minimalistic) version that gives some basic control should be there.
It would have saved me a big load of mobile data and finger pains using teamviewer to control deadline
Doesn’t have to be a fancy app, could just be a web-interface (instantly platform independent).
If there is no time/man power to develop something internally I’d be happy to design it and build something for it as I have many ideas about such an interface. Heck maybe we can even crowd-source it here.
so I’d love to know the thoughts about the mobile side of things for the nearby future
So yeah… those were basically my thoughts the last few weeks while crunching out a sizable project in a short time (10 minutes of total content on 19x4k) and figured to put them here… maybe some is useful, maybe some are more related to my way of using interfaces / organizing stuff.
Do with it as you wish
