#Net Rendering farm
6 messages in this thread
We just got a new farm setup with 5 P5/66s and they really seem to render at a
blazing speed (about 20% faster than our P5/60s). The problem, however, is
this:
Whenever we set the whole farm up to render a single animation, there are
usually no more than 2 machines that actually load the project file and get
going on the render, the other three (sometimes four) machines timeout because
they've been waiting to load the project file too long.
This is on a Lantastic network, and all the required maps are correctly stored
in a central location on the server and set to read-only, and they are
definitely not the problem. When we set up a net render queue for <ANY>
machine, and add machines to the slave farm incrementally, it works just as
advertized.
Is there a way to make the farm machines wait longer for the project file
and/or disregard the "file in use" flag? The best solution that I can think of
now is to set up an external program on all master machines that will make the
project file read only, but the person setting up the net render will have to
race the network and try to get the file marked read only before the farm
machines get a chance to lock it.
There's gotta be a better solution(?).
-MF
I think there is a net-timeout parameter in the 3dsnet.set file, and if you set
it for a long period of time, then your machines shouldn't time out (famous
last words… <g>).
John Tissavary (LUNA cie)
(It's me, Matthew Fleischman, different machine)
I tried setting the net-timeout to the maximum, they still do it. Apparently,
there is something really special (especially bad, that is…) about our
network setup. Even if the maps are in the farm's map path and set to
read-only, there are still 3 or 4 machines out of 5 that will crap out, unable
to find a certain map (these are all identical machines with identical setups),
and they don't even crap out on the same maps.
When maps are local, everything runs fine, but only at the cost of an extreme
pain in the ass.
This is to say nothing, of course, about the machines timing out on the initial
project file load. Is there such a thing as an IPAS add-on that will
automatically save the net-render project file and mark it as read only?
(yeah, right)
-MF
Man, sounds like you guys have the network from hell over there. I don't envy
debugging it! <g>. Fortunately my little render garden is chugging along with
no problems (knock on wood!!!!) for a change.
John Tissavary (LUNA cie)
Yeah, I'd pay good money to find out what makes our network different from the
rest of the world's.
-MF
<<, there are still 3 or 4 machines out of 5 that will crap out, unable to find
a certain map (these are all identical machines with identical setups), and
they don't even crap out on the same maps…When maps are local, everything
runs fine, but only at the cost of an extreme pain in the ass.>>
Mathew,
Especially if you are making heavy use of maps, in a peer to peer network setup
having all machines access a single maps directory can quickly bring a network
to its knees.
However, there are several people on the forum who are using peer to peer
setups, and can tell you their experiences as to when a network starts to bog
down due to traffic. Hopefully they will chime in.
-Brian