When rendering a Maya job, occasionally some tasks (approx 2%) will make no progress, eventually hitting the task timeout and re-queueing. Checking the Slave Log, the last thing always seems to be “Waiting until Maya is ready to go”. What exactly does this mean? We can’t currently find any common factor to the problem - seems to happen with different renderers, scenes that are both very light/heavy.
Re-queuing the task usually fixes things, and we can try to set a sensible timeout to catch things overnight, but it’s not ideal! Any thoughts very welcome.
Hello,
When you see that message, it’s basically saying that we are waiting for Maya to be ready to begin rendering. Usually there are plugins or other steps that Maya is doing in the background that are taking time. Often running with batch mode off will give you more information.
Hi Dwight,
Something is certainly getting stuck somewhere along the line, as if it doesn’t launch, it can wait for hours before either timing out or we notice and kill it.
When you say it should be run with batch mode off, is this a Deadline thing? Or is it a matter of submitting using the MayaCmd Deadline pluging rather than MayaBatch?
Thanks
Correct, the MayaBatch option in the submitter should be disabled. That option can be found in the advanced options of the monitor submitter, and near the bottom of the integrated submitter.
Sorry, just saw this. We were getting the same freeze, and managed to resolve it (with help from the Deadline team). The problem in our case was with the output buffer filling up. This ticket has more info on how to resolve it:
forums.thinkboxsoftware.com/vie … 11&t=13380
Hope this helps!
DL 7.2.0.13R
linux centos
maya 2015 Ext1 sp6
vray 3.1
submitting w/ mayabatch option on (will try again with it off)
using modified version of submitMayaToDeadline.mel (don’t think less of me for not writing our own)
We’re having the same issue on our cloud VMs, but only on the VMs. We don’t have this issue on the local farm. The differences are the local farm is running on Win 7 x64.
The slave instances run fine for a few tasks, then we get the ‘Waiting until maya is ready to go’. I’m wondering if this might have to do with our post task script that converts the output of the task to 1/2 rez jpgs (using imagemagick). I don’t see anything unhappy in the previous task’s report though.
post_task_script.zip (1.8 KB)
I’ve also submitted this to support (case #968010).
-ctj
I’ve taken the support case, so we’ll play around there.
The ‘WAITING UNTIL MAYA IS READY TO GO’ is us waiting for Maya to give the all clear from standard output, so it would make sense that the output being locked up would affect this. We’ll update everyone after the scripting stuff is figured out.