Is there a way to prioritize render machines? I.E from slowest to fastest?
So if a job comes in that can only use one machine (Exporting out an MOV for example) it will grab the fastest machine rather than a slower one.
More detail: I have 9 render machines 5 of which are nice Mac Trash Cans that users use on a day to day basis (idle detection set up). Those are all specked the same and 4 dedicated older mac pro towers of various specs (Some are pretty old/slow).
What i would like is, if a job comes in that that can only use one machine it will grab the fastest available machine.
That’s a pretty common request, but because the render logic is distributed there isn’t a good way to tell someone “don’t look for work until these guys have some”.
I’ve chatted with the dev team over the years and it would be a tricky thing to implement. I’m hoping once we open up the dequeuing logic to outside scripting there can be some experimentation done to see if there could be a way to support this, but for now the only recommendation would be to create a “fast” group, assign the quick Macs to it, and submit to that when the farm is idle. It’s a bit too manual for my taste, but it should help.
Could Groups be made more intelligent? I’m thinking of something along the lines that you could make ordered list of slaves inside the group and the inner logic would assign slaves based on that order?
The Slaves can’t talk to each other which makes it tricky. Like, if you and some friends were told to open packages in a warehouse but couldn’t see each other, who would know which is the fastest? Should you sit out since your friend can open 30 packages per minute where you could only open 10?
One of the ideas we had was to have a limit group of “fast” machines and slower ones wouldn’t be allowed to take work until the fast limit was fully saturated, but in talking with the development team, we weren’t sure if it would be smart to starve out the slow machines when the farm was genuinely busy (what if two machines were marked disabled, no slow machines would ever pick up). We’d really need to sit down and think hard about this one… Feel free to throw some ideas over and I’ll see if I can massage or steer things towards something we could implement.
We (ab)use Pools for that. We have two pools, fast and slow. Fast is selected as the primary pool and slow as the secondary pool. Works good enough for us since we don’t need pools in any other way.