Query Local Slave Status

Deadline
1

Is there any way to get the information directly from the slave process?

I want to know what the deadlineslave process thinks its doing without using deadlinecommand and querying the repository.

Basically I’m writing a Windows service in C++ that does various things depending on the status of various software running on the machine, including the deadline slave. But using deadlinecommand appears to create extra load on the repository and has the overhead of spawning a new process as well.

2

Hello,

Can you verify what kind of information you are looking for from the slave? It’s possible some of it might be available from the REST or python APIs we have.

3

I’m looking first to see if and what the slave is currently rendering. Basically slave status and job name would do me good to start.

From my understanding of the Python and REST APIs requires connecting to the pulse service, which in the past we’ve tried and it caused issues when our 2000+ render nodes are hitting it at the frequency we require (in the order of seconds).

4

Hey Viet,

Unfortunately, we don’t have anything in place to directly query the slave process for stuff like this. The only IPC we currently do internally with the Slave is for sending shutdown commands, and log streaming.

The only way I can think of doing this in current code without adding extra load to the DB, or starting another process would be to create an Event Plugin that uses the new Slave-centric triggers (assuming you’re working on stuff for 7). Of particular note would be the OnSlaveIdle, OnSlaveRendering and OnSlaveStartingJob triggers, which could potentially notify an external service that the Slave state has changed. This is obviously a ‘push’ of data rather than a ‘pull’ like you were asking about, but it’s the only way I can think of getting this info without hitting the DB, with the way the Slave currently is (short of doing screen scraping on the Slave GUI, anyways).

Cheers,
Jon

5

Hi Jon,

Thanks for the pointer. I think that might work out for what I’m doing. I’ll have a look and give it a shot.

-Viet.