We were wondering if there was a way to control priority for slaves, so that when specific jobs are submitted they pick up on the faster slaves if available (idle), otherwise begin picking up on slower slaves. We were investigating the ability to do something similar to this using groups or pools, but were unsure of the outcome. We were also curious if modifying a slave’s “Normalized Render Time Multiplier” or “Normalized Task Timeout Multiplier” in the “Modify Slave Settings” option would give us what we need.
Thanks!
-Brett Bronson
I was just wondering the exact same thing. Our farm is uniform, but when we throw in the workstations and everything else we have it gets pretty random.
Any ideas?
Cheers!
Dennis
There isn’t a system built in to Deadline to target faster machines automatically. However, if you’re pushing lots of render jobs through the queue, the faster machines will work on more tasks, simply due to the fact that they finish them faster. If you’re wanting to occasionally push a job through quickly on the faster machines, then you could create a “fast_machine” group, and just add the fast machines to that group. Then, if you want to spread out the load, just change the job’s group to something that includes all slaves.
These are just meant to show a normalized render time based on the machine’s performance. It doesn’t affect the priority in which slaves dequeue a job.
Cheers,