Recently ran some pretty heavy RealFlow stuff through Maya under Deadline 5.1 using RealFlow Render Kit, and we found that when we used MayaBatch, after a few frames, things bogged down. The render was still progressing as far as all apps were concerned, but if frames 1 and 2 took 10 minutes each, frame 3 might still be crunching after an hour.
We’d see that the render log for that frame would be MUCH larger (like, MBs instead of KBs) than for the others, and was full of “scene cache flushed asynchronously” messages.
Restarting the slave and re-submitting frame 3 would go through in a normal amount of time.
Seems to have been tied to memory… MayaBatch seems to not be releasing RAM between tasks, so after a few tasks, the box essentially ran out of RAM and got into a vicious cache-flushing mess. Qutiting the slave caused Maya to close, freed up the RAM, and the next render would be fine again.
We switched over to using MayaCmd, which quits & gives back the RAM between tasks, and that seemed to resolve things. I saw a similar report here in the forums from a couple of years ago (though it didn’t mention RealFlow specifically)… just thought I’d add my experience here.
Anyone else run into this situation with RFRK or other heavy-lifting plug-ins?