Job Render Time Question

Deadline
1

What I want to know is very basic… how long did a job take to render. From the moment the first task was started rendering til the last task completed rendering.

Which statistic is the correct one to be looking at and where should I find it?

In looking at the task statistics, I would have guessed that it would be Total Task Render Time but this value is no where near correct. I have a job that rendered in less than 30 minutes and the value shown is 2h 45m 40s. I’m guessing that this incorrect time is the time from the moment the job was submitted until the completion. I want to know the start to end time… not how long it sat in the queue.

Thanks!

2

I can’t really help answer this, but I want to interject because I think we should work on our nomenclature and corresponding documentation.

I think what you are looking for is what I call ‘wall clock-time’ e.g. the amount of time it takes to render by the wall clock. Not sure how to derive that [Ryan?] but it’s something that should be more clear imho, and should be front and center. Ditto with how long to completion - that should be based on wall clock…makes more intuitive sense to me.

I believe what you are seeing now is the total time it took the tasks for that job to render across all machines. e.g. if you had 10 machines that took 20 minutes to complete the job, then the total task time would be 200 minutes [20 mins * 10 machines]

Wall clock time would be 20 minutes in the above example.

cb

3

Hi Mike,

In the Job View of the Monitor, there are columns for Start Date/Time and Finish Date/Time, as well as Clock Running Time. If you look at those (right-click the columns to enable hidden ones), you will see that the Clock Running Time is exactly the difference between the moment the first Slave picked a task until the last Slave finished the last task. This time includes everything including the loading of Max, loading of the scene, rendering etc. If the job was paused, or machines were not available, this time can be very long.

Then there is the Total Task Time. This is the time of all tasks together and also includes the startup times, scene loading time, rendering times etc. of ALL Slaves. So this is approx. the time it would have taken a single machine to process all tasks sequentially.

Then you have the Total Task Startup Time. This shows how much time was wasted by ALL slaves to load Max and the scene (it will be longer if Restart Max Between Tasks is requested). Again, with 10 machines it will be likely 10 times longer than the time a single machine needed to start up.

The Total Task Render Time is the time spent by all machines in rendering. This shows you how long it would have taken a single machine to render if you didn’t have a whole farm to run in parallel. The Average Task Render Time would be how long it took on the average for each task to be rendered by one machine. But the real times can only be seen in the Tasks tab - some machines are faster, some are slower, some tasks require textures to be pre-loaded as part of the rendering process while others have them already cached from the previous task and so on.

If you sum the Total Task Render Time and the Total Task Startup Time, you should get the value of Total Task Time.

All the above total times have indeed average times. But on a large farm it is never easy to tell exactly how long it took for the job to “render” because there is often a big delay between the Submission and the Start Date/Time, and then there can be a long time between Start Date/Time and Finish Date/Time depending on the number of jobs, their priorities, the number of machines available, other jobs being submitted with higher priority that might steal machines from an already running job etc.

So the Total Clock Running Time will tell you how much time passed between the moments the job actually started and finished, but the actual rendering time could be much shorter.

Finally, be sure to have your render machines’ clocks synchronized in order to produce correct Statistics. You can also enable Statistics Gathering in the Tools (Super User Mode) > Configure Repository Options . Statistics Gathering. This will collect data from all jobs, even those that are deleted later. This way, you can run queries years later to see how your farm was used historically.

1 Like
4

Sorry it’s taken awhile to get back to this. Thanks very much for all the info!

I realize that different pipelines require different time measurement capabilities, but for my simple pipeline, there are basically two times I care about. Job render time and frame render time. And by render I mean the whole process… getting ready to render as well as rendering itself. (With the added dimension of ‘Task’, where task can contain more than one frame… that would make three times I care about).

Clock Running Time is exactly what I was looking for… but I would have called it ‘Job Running Time’ or ‘Job Execution Time’ or simply ‘Job Time’.

The Task Time is great and I really like the visual graph of how long tasks take. Ideally, I would like to have a Frame Time too. So for example, if the job was set to do 4 frames per task and those frames took 10 sec each… the resulting Task Time might be 60 sec and the Frame Time 10 sec. (Obviously, if a task is only set to 1 frame, then the Task Time acts as the Frame Time).

One question… earlier I thought I ran across a setting to modify the display of time? I can’t find it again. Basically, I want to drop the ‘Day’ off the time display to make it easier to read the time at a glance.

Thanks again!

5

I don’t think you can.
Deadline comes from a production pipeline where 24+ hours per frame were not the exception, so not having a day part of the time would not cut it. Also jobs were typically submitted in the evening and rendered overnight, so knowing what day the time refers to was always useful.
You can switch the time format to h m s (which was the original time formatting of Deadline 1.0), but I don’t think you can remove the day part.
I could be wrong though.

6

Bobo,

Thanks for the info. Obviously I was mistaken. Where do I look to change to h m s?

Thanks again.

7

Monitor menu > Tools > Options > Monitor Options > Use Time Format “00h 00m 00s”.
When True, it will show that. When False, will show 00:00:00.

If you are using VNC or similar, be sure to also switch “Task Double-Click Action” to Automatic.
This way, while a task is active/rendering, double-clicking it will open VNC so you can see what is going on.
But if the Task has finished rendering, double-clicking will open the image viewer instead. It is much more intuitive…

8

Thanks very much Bobo!