Hi Guys,
I’m getting a series of errors that are baffling me. I’ve got a stack of jobs on our render farm and for reasons unknown to me, I can’t get a single one to finish.
I’m sending them off from 3DS Max 2012, product update 12 and rendering with VRay 2.20.03.
I usually get a high percentage (75% +) rendering without a hitch but random frames are sticking at the ‘Starting Up’ phase and not rendering. Sometimes when I re queue the task, it’ll be fine on another slave, other times it goes through the same process again. 
Checking the problem slaves shows them sticking at this point:
0: INFO: Executing script: C:\Users\i7FARM099\AppData\Local\Thinkbox\Deadline\slave\I7farm099\plugins\customize.ms
I’ve attached the slave log and slave error report in the hope that someone with a better brain than I can help.
Thanks for your time and best regards,
Andy
Slave Log.txt (13.1 KB)
Slave error report.txt (11.2 KB)
Does this problem seem to happen on the same group of slaves, or is it random across all slaves?
We’ve had someone else report this during the beta of Deadline 6 (so good to know it’s not specific to Deadline 6), but we’ve never been able to reproduce, or fathom a guess as to why customize.ms would hang. However, in Deadline 6, we introduced the ability to have this script throw a timeout error if it doesn’t finish in 10 minutes. That way, it gets requeued automatically.
Cheers,
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for your time.
The problem is random across all slaves. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why one slave will hang for hours at this stage, whilst others carry on rendering without a problem. I’ve not tried this, as we were so up against it to deliver last week, but I bet I could re-queue a ‘hung’ frame, send it to the same slave that failed and it would render fine second time around 
I’ve run some tests with some scenes of similar size and complexity and they’ve all rendered fine, so I’m guessing the problem is with the scene file, rather than Deadline.
It’s good to know there’s a solution to this issue in Deadline 6. I just need to get some quiet time ( 
) to install it.
Thanks again & all the best,
Andy
That’s interesting that it might be scene related. If you happen to have a simple(ish) test scene you could send us that reproduces the problem, we could try to reproduce it here. At the very least, we would like to try and figure out what line in that script is causing the hang (assuming that’s what’s happening here).
Cheers,