We’re rendering a job at the moment that’s quite memory intensive (3DS Max + Ornatrix Hair) and has long load times, it’s causing a lot of our render blades to stall but there also doesn’t seem to be any specific cause for it that we can see. Sometimes it renders on the old blades, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes the newer blades will fail, etc. The render logs don’t offer much explanation either.
Are there any settings in deadline that we could use to help ease the situation?
A total guess, would restarting max between tasks help at all?
Restarting Max might help, but it depends on whether the problem is due to a memory leak. You can check the memory usage both at the bottom of the job reports as well as in the Slave list if you scroll far enough to the right (lots of cool stats over there).
If the blades’ Slaves are actually being marked as “stalled” in the Monitor, that’s especially high memory pressure. There’s a feature to have the Launcher restart the Slave if it detects a crash, but ideally you wouldn’t need it.
If Max is just locking up, you could set the “Task Timeout” on the job so you don’t need to babysit it.
