We’ve been randomly experiencing an error with Houdini with certain frames: “Output file locked or path not available for writing”, and that task will error out into infinity. All other frames on the job are fine; but 6-7 out of 300 (or however many) will error out.
In the renders folder we’ll find a .exr.lock file for those bad frames, as if the lock file was created but now can’t be removed.
Notably, we do not find the phrase “Skipping frame” which seems to occur for many other people who experience this error message, and this is also in a Windows only environment, whereas others seem to experience this in a mixed OS environment.
Just a guess, is it possible that the Worker is trying to write the same name output file and failing because another Worker is doing that?
I will need to take a look at the archived job and possibly reproduce the issue if you can provide me an example scene on which the issue is reproducible (with no or minimum assets). The archived job has data which you may not want to share publicly i.e internal links, hostnames/IPs etc.
The issue was not reducible at all; it happened very randomly - and almost all of our jobs have heavy assets.
But FWIW, adjusting the REDSHIFT_DISABLEOUTPUTLOCKFILES variable on all the machines seems to have done the trick for us as I don’t think we’ve had any locked files since.
Having the same issue, suddenly the renders get stuck at the first frame. It only writes a single locked file with a “$.png” at the end of the name and gets stuck there.
Where and how do i edit that “REDSHIFT_DISABLEOUTPUTLOCKFILES” environment variable please?
I really don’t understand why this suddenly happens, was all fine before…
Drag & Drop this json file into your “Documents → Houdini19.5 → packages” folder of all the render nodes. If you don’t have a packages folder, just make one.
