[Linux] Arnold (mtoa) hanging on loading plugins

Deadline
1

Hello,

I just finished adding and configuring Maya 2018 to my central install share (that was a crazy two day process that seems so simple now). When it comes to deadline, however, it seems to have had a negative impact on Arnold. Previously a small example scene that would take 5 seconds per frame to render now takes about 1:30 to complete (just using kick). If I ssh into the render node and perform the exact same command as deadline, the render goes back down to about 5 seconds. In the deadline log (after maxing the verbosity) there seems to be a huge hang when mtoa loads plugins.

2018-04-07 20:34:28:  0: STDOUT: 00:00:04    47MB         | loading plugins from /mnt/software/mtoa/2018/shaders ...
2018-04-07 20:34:28:  0: STDOUT: 00:00:04    47MB         | loaded 118 plugins from 6 lib(s) in 0:04.41
2018-04-07 20:34:28:  0: STDOUT: 00:00:04    47MB         | [kick] command: /mnt/software/mtoa/2018/bin/kick -nstdin -dw -dp -i /home/cgrender/Thinkbox/Deadline10/slave/cg-render-a1/jobsData/5ac96385b4359113f1357570/thread0_tempgXyBG0/arn2_demo.0000.ass -o /mnt/cgcfarm/DeadlineRepository10/jobs/mroche/demo/images/demo.0000.png -v 1 -set options.abort_on_license_fail true
2018-04-07 20:34:28:  0: STDOUT: 00:00:04    47MB         | loading plugins from . ...
2018-04-07 20:35:50:  0: STDOUT: 00:01:26   181MB         | no plugins loaded
2018-04-07 20:35:50:  0: STDOUT: 00:01:26   182MB         | [ass] loading /home/cgrender/Thinkbox/Deadline10/slave/cg-render-a1/jobsData/5ac96385b4359113f1357570/thread0_tempgXyBG0/arn2_demo.0000.ass ...
2018-04-07 20:35:50:  0: STDOUT: 00:01:26   182MB         | [ass] read 43751 bytes, 10 nodes in 0:00.09
2018-04-07 20:35:50:  0: STDOUT: 00:01:26   182MB         | [kick] applying 1 attr value override

This time jump seems to be coming out of nowhere and wasn’t happening yesterday before I added Maya itself (those renders take about 2:30 to start while maya launches, but only for the first frame). The ASS file itself is only about 40KB, so network bottlenecking shouldn’t be an issue. Is there anything that sticks out? If not, what other information should I provide because I’m at a complete loss here.

Edit: Using Deadline 10.0.12.1

Cheers,
Mike

2

After further research it seems to be due to do adding the necessary paths RenderMan needs for XGen. On Linux this gets tacked onto the LD_LIBRARY_PATH so I guess Arnold was trying to load this as well. Commenting out this environment setting and reloading the blades seems to have brought things back down to where they should be (not getting the 5 seconds anymore, but smaller scenes are rarely good test cases). I retested a scene that was taking about 3:30 per frame before the updated environment and it’s hitting the same numbers again after reverting.

If anyone knows the best way of managing this, I’m all ears. Going to reach out to the Pixar guys while I’m at it.

Cheers,
Mike