I’m seeing either a bug or some pretty unintuitive behavior with job priorities.
When sending a Maya scene file with multiple render layers to Deadline, with “Submit Render Layers As Separate Jobs” checked, you get an overall job submitted, along with nested separate jobs for each render layer.
Both the overall job and the nested jobs have their own priority number.
I’ve noticed that the overall job priority will continue to stay as high as the highest job priority within the nested jobs, even if that nested job has already completed. I cannot, for example, set the overall job priority to 70, if a previous nested job/render layer has completed with a priority of 80. The overall priority will stay at 80. I’d have to show completed jobs (something I mostly prefer to have hidden), and change the priority on the completed job.
This is pretty unintuitive. Surely the overall job priority should always override the priority on any of the nested jobs anyway, at all times?
In this case, there’s no real parent job - it’s a “batch” in Deadline terminology (a grouping of jobs). Batches don’t have priorities of their own, so the priority you’re seeing is Monitor taking a guess at what you want to see, since the grouped jobs have differing values.
Highest is probably an arbitrarily chosen value to show, but I can’t think of a better one off the top of my head, unless it changed to “–” or something like that?
Fair enough, so to use the correct terminology, it’s displaying the highest priority it can find within the batch of jobs, whether those jobs are queued or completed.
And, although I would have to test this to be sure, it seems to be that this priority number DOES have an effect on the order jobs are processed in?
Given that in most situations, once a render job is completed you no longer care about it or monitor it, it seems a bit unintuitive for Deadline to still take those priorities into account.
