I need some help in finding out why a animation job fails for us in our farm.
First, a quick presentation and tech spec
My name is Rickard, i work for a big Swedish company ( ) where one of my daily duties are to maintain our render farm.
We currently run below software.
3dsmax 2014
Deadline 5,2
VRAY 3,10
The problem we have had is with a animations scene, where the rendering going well for alot of hours, but two times now it have failed with the below error ( same in both cases)
: An exception occurred: Exception during render: An error occurred in RenderTasks(): RenderFrame: Exception caught in 3ds max: simple_socket::receive: Invalid packet size (given 1131770482)
at Deadline.Plugins.ScriptPlugin.RenderTasks(String taskId, Int32 startFrame, Int32 endFrame, String& outMessage) (Deadline.Plugins.RenderPluginException)
The scenes is 1301 frames in total, first one failed on frame 796, the second time in frame 987. We have a farm with 6 ques, and the job did not fail on the same que machine. So it seams not to be related to that. I am currently running it on the farm now, and this far ( 5 hours of rendering time on 4 ques ) it all look good.
Ah! I fought with that problem in 6.x for a month trying to figure it out.
The problem was caused by the way we designed the protocol that Deadline uses to communicate with our Max plugin (named Lightening). Specifically, if a message was exactly the right length, Lightening could get confused because the message was not as long as Deadline said it would be. Because Lightening is a compiled C++ application, you cannot make those changes yourself unfortunately.
You have licenses for 8.0 from the looks of things from the sales system. Is upgrading to Deadline 8.0 feasible for you? It’s going to be a HUGE improvement over what you’re using today. Like, world shatteringly good.
FYI. If you have ANY custom scripts in Deadline 5.x, I recommend you read these docs pages before upgrading as there were a number of breaking changes between 5 -> 6. This is a one-time deal and the updated code will be fine in 7 & 8, with only a minor change in Deadline 8.0 (removal of *.dlinit files -> *.param) See last URL for info on that.
) where one of my daily duties are to maintain our render farm.
We are in the middle of planning the upgrade to Deadline 8 now, so in a couple of weeks we should be there 
