Hi,

I was wondering how to set a render to use less threads / CPUs from within Deadline 10. I want to be able to do this from the Slave Configuration. Previous versions of Deadline would allow this to happen but I can’t get it to work in Deadline 10.

You might wonder why would anybody want to render with less than 100% CPU? It is because I run a school renderfarm and I have so many different users, scenes and render jobs to handle that I have no choice but to run renders in the background while people are using the computers (and they are rendering as well).

I see that I can set the Slave to CPU Affinity… but the spawned mayabatch job takes all the cores and goes to 100% CPU.

I cannot have the students set Arnold to use only a certain amount of threads, it has to be done on the admin side of things.

If it’s on a Windows or Linux machine, then we’re going to have to check that out. Older versions of Arnold would reset our CPU affinity to wide open, but I think we either introduced a flag to stop that or Solid Angle / Autodesk changed that behavior. What versions of Arnold and Deadline are you using?

If it’s on a Mac, the Darwin kernel of OS X actually doesn’t have CPU affinity at all so we’re kind of stuck there.

Thinking it might be mayabatch not respecting the Affinity, I’m trying other types of jobs. I’ve tried Mayabatch, Arnold Kick and Mantra - all take up 100% CPU. When you check the affinity for the process that’s doing the rendering, it is set to use All CPUs, even though the Slave itself is on the correct Affinity setting.

Is this a Windows 10 thing, perhaps? I’m running the latest Windows 10 Education version.

Using Windows 10.0.15063 (whoops - not the latest)
Deadline 10.0.5.1

Maya 2017 U4 and / or Maya 2018.1 (both are installed)
Arnold 5.0.1.4 / MtoA 2.0.2.4 on both versions of Maya
Houdini 16.0.633 (since I also tested Mantra)

I will post results soon from other software I have access to test with

So far all the software I’m trying does the same thing with the render process going to 100% CPU / full affinity. Additional software I’ve tried are Nuke, Modo and Lightwave.

I’ll next try on a machine with windows 8 and see if it does the same thing.

edit - Yup, does the same thing in Windows 8.1 Pro (6.3.9600)

I opened up a support ticket for this to formalize the request.

Yeah, if it happens for other apps we might have a regression. As far as I know we haven’t made changes over there recently.