Render resource usage

anon5658894 · February 11, 2015, 3:47pm

Hi,

We tend to use wrapper scripts to run our applications when we render on the farm. It seems when Deadline reports RAM & CPU usage it’s giving us the stats for the wrapper rather than for the actual Nuke process (or Maya or whatever) - it ends up looking like we’ve used KB’s of RAM for our renders. Is there any way around this?

Cheers
Andrew

rrussell · February 11, 2015, 4:02pm

Deadline should be grabbing stats for all child processes of the main process that it launches for rendering. Do you know if the Nuke or Maya processes are children of the wrapper script process, or are they in their own process tree? If it’s the latter, that would explain the problem.

Cheers,
Ryan

Hugh_Macdonald · February 11, 2015, 6:29pm

Hi Ryan,

Here’s a snippet of our process list when a Nuke render is running showing the parents of each one - the processes are linked.

deadlinelauncher.exe
deadlineslave.exe
wrappers/nuke
Nuke8.0

It may just be mis-reporting, but I was just watching a render go through where ‘top’ reported that the render was, at max, using 3% of the RAM in the machine, but Deadline, for that task, only lists the peak RAM usage to be 1%.

Re-running an older job, even for a fully CG character, it’s still only reporting 1% peak RAM usage - around 2Mb for a Maya render using VRay. Watching it in top shows 10%, and htop tells me about 7Gb, or similarly 10% (on a 64Gb machine). Shared memory is in the region of 186Mb, but still far more than the 1.834Mb that Deadline is reporting.

CPU does seem like it’s possibly giving the right thing - on the same CG render, it was averaging 40%ish, and peaking up in the 90s.

Thanks

rrussell · February 11, 2015, 6:49pm

Thanks for checking that. On Linux, we’re just looking at /proc to figure out the process tree, and then get the memory usage for each process in that tree. So my guess is that either we’re not getting the process tree properly (which I don’t think is the case, since the CPU reporting seems to be accurate), or we’re pulling the memory usage incorrectly.

A couple additional questions:

Which flavor and version of Linux are you guys running?
Have you modified or written your own Deadline plugins for rendering? Or are you just using the render plugins as they came out of the box? Just asking because a plugin doesn’t use process trees by default.

Thanks!
Ryan

Hugh_Macdonald · February 11, 2015, 7:07pm

We’re on Ubuntu 12.04 here, and while yes, we’re written some of our own plugins, for Nuke and Maya we’re using the ones that came bundled with Deadline.

(just checked - it looks like they may have been slightly tweaked, but only, I’m thinking, to update the RenderExecutables)

rrussell · February 11, 2015, 8:38pm

Thanks! We’ve logged it as an issue, and we’ll try to reproduce this.

Cheers,
Ryan