Right now there isn’t a way to disable the collection of assets for cloud rendering (output as AWSAssetFile% entries), even when the Pre-Caching is disabled. Sounds like I should add an option to not include assets with the job file to speed things up for users who don’t use cloud rendering.
Sorry about that, I will add it to the ToDo list.
In the mean time, you can look for the remark
-- WRITE ASSETS FOR CLOUD SYNC HERE
in the SubmitMaxToDeadline_Functions.ms in your Repository, and remark the very next line which sets the AssetsResolved to the collected list from Asset Tracker.
I suspect that both the collecting (how long does it take to update the Asset tab in the UI?), and the outputting of hundreds of thousands of lines to the job file are causing the delay.
For your info:
SMTDSettings.AssetsAutoUpdateList
Controls whether to refresh the assets list in the UI automatically on changes.
When off, the user can refresh manually if the update takes too long.
But it has no effect on the submission process.
SMTDSettings.AssetsPreCacheFiles
Controls whether to call DeadlineCommand with the JobID to try to push files to AWS.
The Job contains all these AWSAssetFile entries, and DeadlineCommand reads them from the job info and tries to pre-cache them in a background process using the AWS Portal Asset Sync service.
When it is off, the job on AWS will make pull requests for these assets regardless.
Including the AWSAssetFile entries would also let us add custom scripts to re-sync data after the job has been submitted…
SMTDSettings.AssetSyncAllFiles
Controls whether to collect all files in a sequence, or just the ones needed for the current frame range.
For example, if you have saved 101 frames in an XMesh sequence, but the render dialog is set to render only frames 1 to 10, only the 10 frames needed will be collected. This respects all timing controls like Offset, Playback Graph, Custom Range limits etc.