Hi all,
I have a small farm with a couple older computers, and my workstation. Recently (last day or two) I’ve noticed my workstation spitting out terrible render times, and noticed that its tasks wouldn’t exceed 20% CPU usage.
In troubleshooting, I stopped running it as a service, made sure all relevant settings seemed right, restarted a few times, and then it was back to normal—uncapped and fast. Unfortunately, one job later, it seems to have reverted to its 20% capped state.
What could be happening?
I’m going to assume you don’t have CPU Affinity set up and possibly causing trouble?
I’d try isolating the render from Deadline to see how CPU usage looks when the render is run outside of Deadline. Depending on the application you’re using there may be a guide on our help centre or on the application’s page in our application plugin list or the generic troubleshooting guide to explain how to run the render outside of the Worker.
Assuming there’s no limitation on CPU threads being set on the job Deadline should just be running the application as you’d do it.
No CPU Affinity. Interestingly, though, a look at task manager shows that the worker is seemingly forced onto the last 4 threads for some reason:
I can confirm that switching from service → user mode solves it for a brief window, but it recurs soon after. I was able to catch this clearly in the log as it happened mid-job. One frame renders in 1m50s, the next in 12m with the error:
Rendering CPU utilization was only 17%. Your render may be bound by a single threaded process or I/O.
Could it have something to do with this being the RCS machine? That and better specs are the only confounding variables I can think of compared to all other machines.
I wouldn’t think the RCS would confound it? Something interesting I found, the i7-12700KF has 4 efficiency cores and 8 performance cores.
Maybe those are the 4 cores are the efficiency cores and Windows is relegating all work there for some reason? I’ve heard word that Windows 11 does a better job of managing these, but I’ve not got any confirmation on that.
There’s a couple tools that claim to resolve this, but I dont have the hardware to test them so I’ll leave that adventure up to you, or if anyone else has some battle tested tools they can recommend.
