Schedule and Powermanagement info needed

Deadline
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Can someone please provide me with some info on what scheduling and powermanagement do behind the screen ?

I have a couple of issues:

  • I have workstations scheduled to start at 18:00 (6pm)and stop at 7:00 (7am)
    Problem here is that we shut down machines using Power Management. So in the morning, people start up their machines, the worker autoloads (configured like this because of powermanagement and the machine starts rendering instantly if there are jobs. Which is undesirable. It shouldn’t start rendering, because it’s not on schedule.

  • I have powermanagement configured for shutting down idle workstations (or starting them) based on rendering needs.
    The problem with this one is that since Covid, we have a lot of staff working from home, using remote desktop. Which doesn’t count against Idle detection. So I have to override that between 7 & 19 with a 720m idle time, which kinda works, but feels weird. and also, when their machine is turned on for rendering on their day of, it doesn’t shut down when there’s no need till 19:00 (7pm) (eventhough it might’ve stopped rendering at 11:00 (11am))

So, how does scheduling work, is it only at the start / stop time that it checks if it needs to be on ? Or does it check with each pulse cycle ? or does it check when worker launches ?

Also, is powermanagement AT ALL aware of scheduling ? Because I have a feeling it isn’t. I would really love it to NOT perform powerdown / powerup if a machine is not scheduled to join the renderforce. That way I could basically by-pass idle detection override during off-scheduled hours.

Before Deadline, we used Renderpal (which had it’s own flaws) But what I really loved was it’s scheduling. I could just configure each rendernode’s and workstation’s schedule using a table where I’d just drag across cells to enable / disable. if it wasn’t scheduled, it wouldn’t render, no matter if the client was running or not.

If Deadline would have that AND have scheduling checked not only on start/stoptime but on workerlaunch and cycles AND have powermanagement be aware of the schedule I could just configure peoples working hours. The worker would only launch OUTSIDE of that schedule and powermanagement would also only run outside of those hours.

Example below is someone’s workstation schedule who’s working Monday’s till 14:00 , and Tuesday till Friday from 8:00* till 17:30 (*stopping the client (worker) an hour early to make sure it’s not still rendering). That was a supernice way to setup scheduling (instead of changing a WHOLE LOT of spinners to set start/stop times for each day for multiple schedules)

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The worker would start when the machine is rebooted and Deadline Launcher application is started, if you have set the below flag in deadline.ini

So you would need to mark these two setting on the worker nodes as ‘False’.

Pulse application should check in for the idle shutdown and runs the power management functionality. If you are seeing any issues with the Power Management execution, I would like to check the pulse logs from the application log folder of Deadline and the screenshot of the Power Management settings from the monitor.
Feel free to share the logs and screenshot here, or you can also open a ticket with Thinkbox Support Team

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Hi Karpeet,

it’s not so much that things aren’t working properly, it’s just that I’m not quite sure HOW they’re programmed to work.

I was trying to find out if scheduling is a single time trigger (only checks at start / stop times) or an actual schedule where it never renders between stop / start even if the worker is running.

As far as powermanagement is concerned, Idle detection for powerdown is useless when working from home through remote desktop (which most of the 40+ company now does at least half of the time). Since there is no actual input from the physical keyboard or mouse, the computer is considered idle the entire time (even though someone is working on it remotely)

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I just want to make it known (for anyone else trying to figure stuff out) that I had an issue where machines would render while not on schedule. This was being caused with Powermanagement ignoring Worker Scheduling.

There’s a checkbox here: Menu > Tools > Configure Power Management > Group > Machine Startup tab that says Send Remote Command To Start Worker After Waking Up Machines.

This checkbox was throwing a wrench. It looks like that if a worker isn’t running, Power management deems the machine powered down, sends the wake-up/ start-up command, followed by a command to start the Worker, completely by-passing Worker Scheduling.

In all fairness, the tooltip does say to turn it of if worker is started through other means, like scheduling

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