Are there any additional settings i need to change other than just enable the screensaver. I’m evaluating deadline for one of my clients who have a large number of artist machines but only limited dedicated render nodes so this feature is crucial. it’s a mixed environment and the screensaver seems to work just fine under Windows.
Am i missing something blatently obvious? There’s is no additional info in the documentation about this and i didn’t see any patches for version 5 to fix this if it’s a bug under Snow Leopard. We’re using 10.6.4 up to 10.6.7 and it’s the same across all machines.
Thanks!
We were able to reproduce this here. We’re working on it right now, and will try to get a patch uploaded today.
Cheers,
forgot to add, the screensaver actually starts and is showing the deadline logo but fails to start slave app.
Great, thanks Ryan! in the meantime, found a little app called AppStartSaver which is able to do the same thing and can also send a quit command when the screensaver stops.
Attached is an updated screen saver that should work properly. To install, right-click on Finder in the Dock and select Go To Folder. Then enter in this path:
/Library/Screen Savers
Back up the original Deadline.saver here, and then unzip the attached file to the same folder. If you go to test the screen saver through the System Preferences, it should run the Slave.
Let us know if works!
Thanks Ryan, works as expected now!
btw, i think it would be great to add an option to automatically quit Slave after the current task when the screensaver stops, but i guess that isn’t as easy as it seems. 
We can add that as a feature request. I know Windows screen savers can give additional options, and I would expect the same for OSX.
Glad to hear that it’s working as expected now!
Cheers,
That would be great!
I’ve just realized there is another issue with the screensaver though…since it only monitors user input but not cpu activity it would also launch Slave if someone sets of a local AE render before going to lunch for example, which is very likely in our environment. It would probably be best to submit everything to Deadline and avoid local renders but i can’t see that happening.
In an ideal scenario the screensaver would also check cpu state and only launch Slave if idle. Are there any workarounds?
Thanks!
CPU load isn’t always the most reliable thing to check. We tend to prefer to check if existing processes are running, but I guess in the case of a local render, checking for the AE process won’t be able to tell the difference between an idle AE application or a rendering one.
There aren’t any workarounds for our screen saver. I’m not sure if this is possible, but maybe you could script something up that watches idle time and cpu load to launch the Slave in ideal conditions.
Cheers,
Thanks Ryan, i think i can launch a script with the screen saver that checks average cpu load over a few seconds.
In the meantime quick sanity check, is it just me or does your osx screen saver start two instances of the slave??
Thanks!
It shouldn’t be. We didn’t see this behavior with the recent testing we did before we posted the fixed screen saver here. Are you seeing two slave UIs, or two slave processes in the Activity Monitor?
two slave UI’s. i’m not sure but could it have anything to do with recent 10.6.8 update?
The update shouldn’t be an issue.
By any chance do you have a multiscreen display? I wonder if that has something to do with it, as I think that actually triggers one screen saver per screen. Deadline has some checks to ensure that only one slave is running at a time, but if both slaves are launched simultaneously, there is a good chance that they won’t see each other running when they perform those checks.
Cheers,
thanks Ryan, yes, two displays. will try tomorrow with a single display connected to double check.
Cheers, Seb.
Here’s an updated screen saver that should (hopefully) only launch the Deadline slave on the first screen. Give it a try and let us know if you still see more than one slave startup. You can install it the same way you did the other one.
Note that we only have single display Mac Minis here, so we can’t actually test multiple displays ourselves. 
Cheers,
Hi Ryan, just to let you know this now works as expected.
Thanks,
Seb